Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of Washington Secrets. Today, we take a look at the Situation Room. Is it possible that someone could record and then leak sensitive discussions? And how do White House background briefings work?
The Situation Room is meant to be the most secure place in the White House, where classified raids to kill terrorists are planned and monitored. It is where the most sensitive information is handled.
Which is why it was used by top officials last year to discuss how to best handle awkward revelations from the Epstein files.
So could two New York Times reporters really have obtained audio recordings of those discussions for their forthcoming book?
“I used to run the SitRoom,” posted Larry Pfeiffer, executive director of the Hayden Center at George Mason University. “Could meetings there really be recorded? Short answer: yes.”
In a thread, Pfeiffer explained that it famously happened during President Donald Trump’s first term, when former Celebrity Apprentice contestant Omarosa Manigault Newman covertly recorded then-chief of staff John Kelly firing her in the high-security Situation Room using a recorder pen.
“Easy to hide, hard to detect,” he posted.
The issue exploded into the limelight after Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan released an excerpt from their forthcoming book, “Regime Change.”
The White House has not challenged any of the lengthy quotes they published from the crisis meetings, including claims that Vice President JD Vance suggested Tucker Carlson should interview Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
Chief of staff Susie Wiles, White House counsel David Warrington, and the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, were all reportedly present. Kash Patel, FBI director, and Pam Bondi, attorney general, dialed in remotely.
White House officials are reportedly worried that an audio recording of discussions was somehow obtained by the journalists.
Pfeiffer, who spent 32 years working in the U.S. intelligence community, said a lot of the precautions were based on senior officials following the rules and leaving phones in small lockers at the door. No one is patting down or searching people as they enter the Secure Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF.
And electronic detection could miss simple devices that don’t emit a signal.
“What about an iPhone? It’s possible, especially if in Airplane mode with all connections turned off,” he said. “It would then be less likely to be detected by monitoring devices used to catch any phones, tablets, watches, or fitness devices inadvertently carried in.”
The Situation Room has its own recording system. But downloading and leaking those would leave an IT trail, said Pfeiffer.
In any case, recordings are not made of the most sensitive discussions.
On the other hand, anyone dialing from a remote location would be under less scrutiny.
“If there were and they were calling in from a SCIF in their residence or some temporary set up at a hotel, it would be easier to circumvent the kinds of checks in place at the White House,” he told Secrets. “Either way someone would have to be consciously recording the meeting. That would be a no-no in a SCIF.”
The problem for Trump and his administration is not just the audacity of someone leaking from the Situation Room — it is that someone is leaking at all.
Trump and Wiles have kept this administration from breaking down into the factional fighting that characterized his first term. Do they face an uphill battle to keep the leaks from spreading?
Background chatter
Background briefings are a standard way of doing business in Washington. Administration officials get to fill in reporters on policy decisions and outline their thinking without having to see their names appear in print. The idea is that they can speak more freely with the comfort blanket of anonymity.
Oftentimes, the result is dissatisfactory for reporters, who wonder why the officials get extra protection when more often than not they are delivering nothing more than official talking points anyway.
Well, one reason was on clear display Monday.
A senior U.S. official on a call with reporters to discuss the memorandum of understanding with Iran promised full transparency on the text and details of the agreement. “They will be put out in the next 24 to 48 hours,” they said.
Minutes later, their boss was answering questions ahead of the G7 summit in France. “I want it to be released probably pretty soon,” said the president when asked about the document. “I would say after… sometime after Friday.”
So there’s another reason for the cloak of anonymity: To spare officials’ blushes!
There used to be an anonymous X/Twitter account that would gleefully reveal the identities of background briefers. Anyone want to start it up again?
Quote of the day
Signs are that Emmanuel Macron’s charm offensive is working. In particular, Trump sounds as if he is looking forward to their intimate dinner at Versailles, the glittering residence of the Sun King Louis XIV. This is what he said about delaying his return to take it all in:
“I’m a fan of beautiful places. And I was leaving in the afternoon and then the French president, who happens to be a very nice man, invited me to dinner at Versailles. And Versailles is not gold leaf! Versailles is the real deal. And I said, I’d like to do it.”
Lunchtime reading
Ghost of Alexis de Tocqueville returns. What America can learn from him: Our Salena Zito gets into the World Cup spirit, with a lesson from the soccer fans eating up American culture and hospitality.
The untold story of Jeffrey Epstein’s death: The New York Times takes a deep dive into the Epstein files to piece together what really happened to the pedophile in his final days. The result is the best account yet of the screw-ups that allowed him to take his own life and the institutional failings that kept conspiracies flowing.
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