Gen. Mark Milley’s Wrongful Jan. 6 Overclassification
The Jan. 6 committee exposed norm-breaking in surprising places. Take the conduct of Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, who abused the classified information system to hide information about how the Pentagon reacted to the Capitol riot. In my latest piece for Lawfare, I argue that Gen. Milley’s conduct overclassified information in violation of the relevant executive order. Worse, it may have prejudiced some of the Jan.6 defendants and denied FOIA access to the most important DOD documents about that day. The press and Congress bitterly criticized a similar handling of the Trump-Zelensky phone transcript, but it’s been silent about Gen. Milley. Excerpts from Lawfare below.
Here’s Gen. Milley’s candid statement about what he did:
The document—I classified the document at the beginning of this process by telling my staff to gather up all the documents, freeze-frame everything, notes, everything and, you know, classify it. And we actually classified it at a pretty high level, and we put it on JWICS, the top secret stuff. It’s not that the substance is classified. It was[.] I wanted to make sure that this stuff was only going to go [to] people who appropriately needed to see it, like yourselves. We’ll take care of that. We can get this stuff properly processed and unclassified so that you can have it … for whatever you need to do.
In short, Milley overclassified those records to keep them from leaking—to make sure that the Pentagon and those investigating Jan. 6 would control the story.
By now, this story should sound eerily familiar. In 2019, President Trump held a phone call with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine. The call was immediately controversial inside the administration, and White House staff quickly restrict
Article from Reason.com
