Noah Feldman, Columnist

Trump's Classified Disclosure Is Shocking But Legal

Why federal laws that criminalize the revealing of secrets don’t apply to the president.

May 16, 2017 at 1:31 AM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

He decides what's classified.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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Oh for the days when Donald Trump wasn’t taking the presidential daily brief -- and didn’t know highly classified information that he could give to the Russians. But a bit bizarrely, Trump’s reported disclosure of Islamic State plans to two Russian officials during an Oval Office visit last week wasn’t illegal.

If anyone else in the government, except possibly the vice president, had revealed such classified information that person would be going to prison. The president, however, has inherent constitutional authority to declassify information at will. And that means the federal laws that criminalize the disclosure of classified secrets don’t apply to him.