THE SECRET 'DOOMSDAY BOOK' THAT ENABLES TRUMP'S ABUSES OF POWERPresidential Emergency Action Documents have a long history, but Trump's invocation of them on immigration betrays their original purpose
This is an account of the authorities, many of them top secret and higher, that permit President Donald Trump and his more knowledgeable senior aides to carry on their violent and vicious attacks on minorities and those who disagree with them and their policies with legislative and even legal impunity. The answer lies in most cases with what are known as Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs), which have enabled Trump today and his predecessors before him to suspend fundamental constitutional rights, detain civilians, seize property, impose martial law, and censor communications. These extraordinary powers have been put to widespread use by Trump and his aides, such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought. They have acted with no congressional authority, no judicial review, and no statutory mechanism for Congress to terminate their powers, once activated, as they have been since Trump took office. These little known and rarely discussed authorities have been developed across more than a dozen administrations, since Dwight Eisenhower was in office, by presidents of both political parties, and their secrecy and authority have yet to be successfully challenged in Congress or by a federal court. One of the most detailed accounts of PEADs, last updated in 2024, has been prepared by the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy group sponsored by NYU School of Law. It warns of the political danger of PEADSs as extraordinary secret presidential documents that have never been declassified or leaked: “It appears they are not even subject to congressional oversight. Although the law requires the executive branch to report even the most sensitive covert military and intelligence operations to at least some members of Congress, there is no such disclosure requirement for PEADs, and no evidence that the documents have ever been shared with relevant congressional committees.” I am summarizing here the initial paragraphs from what is perhaps the most detailed and up-to-date private study of PEADs written by Joel McCleary, a former aide to President Jimmy Carter and an expert on biological weapons. McCleary has steeped himself for decades in the study of secret presidential authorities. He is a low-profile Harvard graduate who served as treasurer of the Democratic National Committee during the Carter administration and later led projects for the Defense Department and Homeland Security regarding pandemic and biological defense issues. I wrote a book on chemical and biological warfare and worked with members of Congress in the months before President Richard Nixon agreed in 1969 to enact a US ban on such weapons. A friendship was inevitable when McCleary and I first met decades ago, but we grew closer after Trump took office for a second time in 2025 and began a massive attack on the federal government workforce and authorized Stephen Miller, who by any standard is a sadistic extremist, to carry out the mass deportation of Hispanics and others, both undocumented individuals and persons in the country legally, often separating parents and young children. McCleary began to tutor me then about the vast legal authorities Trump had under PEADs. These powers had accumulated in earlier presidencies as the Congress continued to disagree on legislation to deal with immigration policy. Trump, Miller and ICE, relying on secret PEADs, have increasingly divided America with their overly aggressive tactics. “That this danger was not theoretical,” McCleary writes in the recent private memorandum, “was confirmed” in October 2024 when Time revealed that Mark Harvey, a former special assistant to Trump in his first term as President who personally oversaw the classified binder of PEADs known to some inside the White House as the “Doomsday Book,” publicly warned that the institutional safeguards he once worked within during Trump’s first term no longer existed. During Trump’s first term, Harvey explained, the senior national security staff “deliberately shielded the president from learning the full extent of the emergency authorities, fearing he would invoke them in situations far short of the catastrophic crises for which they were designed.” Harvey’s published warning was prescient. Trump is “going to be surrounded by a set of people who are going to say, ‘You have the power to do this.’ Frankly, Harvey said, “if he says ‘yes’ and there are people that go do it, what’s to stop him.” McCleary makes clear why these powers were created: “In a genuine existential crisis such as a nuclear attack, a catastrophic cyber attack on national infrastructure, or a pandemic of civilian-threatening severity may well provide powers that a President legitimately needs to preserve the continuity of the nation,” he writes. “The problem is not that these powers exist. “The problem is that they exist without any of the Constitutional guardrails that the Framers considered essential to republican government. There is no congressional review, no judicial oversight, no statutory definition of what constitutes a qualifying emergency, and no mechanism to prevent a President—any President, of any party, in any future administration—from invoking these powers in circumstances far short of an existential crisis. The risk is inherent in the structure, not in any individual.” McCleary writes that framing mass immigration as a national security crisis “has been normalized in political discourse across multiple administrations. Detention infrastructure is being expanded on an unprecedented scale. The events of January 6, 2021—in which the Vice President exercised de facto emergency command authority” in response to the riot at the Capitol “without formal legal authorization while the President declined to act—demonstrated that the emergency command structure can be invoked in response to domestic political crises, not only the foreign military attacks for which it was originally designed, and that the legal framework governing who holds that authority is dangerously undefined. The public cannot guard against what it does not know exists. The Constitution cannot constrain powers it has never been asked to review. This memorandum is written so that both can.” Next week I will report on past occasions when PEADs have been invoked, when presidents have seen fit to avoid congressional oversight, including the Iran-Contra affair. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Seymour Hersh, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. |