President Donald Trump may be laying the groundwork to deploy secret presidential directives that no court has ever reviewed, no Congress has ever examined, and that any sitting president can rewrite at will to interfere in the midterm elections, a State Department insider warned on Wednesday.
Known as Presidential Emergency Action Documents, or PEADs, the directives were designed to bypass traditional Congressional authorization during national emergencies. They were initially contemplated as a way to ensure continuity of government during a crisis, and documents authorized actions like seizing private property or arresting citizens that would face legal challenge only after they had already been carried out.
Jonathan Winer, a former U.S. special envoy during the Obama administration who reviewed declassified materials at the National Archives, warned during an interview on the podcast “The Court of History” that Trump may try to use them to stifle the upcoming elections.
“The key thing about PEADs is they’ve never been reviewed by Congress or anyone outside administration,” Winer said. “They can be rewritten based on any administration’s point of view as to what’s necessary in an emergency. And they would be tested legally and constitutionally only after they’re used.”
Winer pointed to The White House’s newly released counterterrorism strategy, which identifies Antifa alongside foreign terrorist groups as a primary domestic threat. When combined with other Trump executive orders, Winer said the framework closely resembles the legal architecture the J. Edgar Hoover FBI used to justify mass surveillance and detention planning six decades ago.
What makes the current moment uniquely dangerous, host Sidney Blumenthal said, is that the officials who would be ordered to implement any such directives — such as Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel — have already demonstrated they will comply.
“That history echoes,” Winer said, “and those echoes are pretty loud right now.”
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