It’s not uncommon for legal opinions from the Justice Department’s
Office of Legal Counsel to be classified; whenever the President wants
to do something nefarious – like authorizing the CIA’s program of
torture – he’ll get a memo out of the OLC, and then classify the whole
thing: the action and its justification.
But Trump’s memo justifying his decision to bomb Syria is classified, while the bombing, obviously, isn’t.
What’s more, the level of secrecy slapped on the OLC memo explaining how
the President could order an act of war when the Constitution
explicitly says that Congress alone can authorize this is so secret that
even Congress isn’t allowed to see it.
That’s right: the President got a secret memo drafted that explains why
he can go to war without Congressional approval, and Congress isn’t
allowed to read that memo.
When GW Bush kept his torture-authorizing memos a secret, it was because
he wanted to keep the torture a secret, too. But Trump isn’t even
keeping up with that pretense of internal consistency. Instead, the
justification for taking an action that the President personally
announced on his Twitter feed is, “I don’t want you to know.”
