President Trump asked senior White House staff members to sign confidentiality agreements, much like he did as a private citizen, according to a reported column in The Washington Post.Post columnist Ruth Marcus wrote she obtained a draft of the non-disclosure agreement, calling it a "doozy." If found violating the NDA, staffers would be penalized $10 million, to be paid to the government. She wrote that the $10 million figured likely was watered down in any final version because the people she spoke to about the agreement didn't remember that "jaw-dropping sum."The NDAs, a person who signed the document told the Post, “were meant to be very similar to the ones that some of us signed during the campaign and during the transition. I remember the president saying, ‘Has everybody signed a confidentiality agreement like they did during the campaign or we had at Trump Tower?’”According to the Post, staffers balked at first but, pressed by then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and the White House Counsel’s Office, they ultimately signed because they figured the agreement wouldn't be enforceable, particularly since the NDA was to also cover time past the Trump administration, the Post reported.As a candidate, Donald Trump suggested he'd like to see high-level employees of the federal government sign NDAs so staffers couldn’t write about goings-on in a Trump White House.“When people are chosen by a man to go into government at high levels and then they leave government and they write a book about a man and say a lot of things that were really guarded and personal, I don’t like that,” Trump told the Post in 2016.Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush, told Politico shortly before the 2016 election that Trump could not enforce a non-disclosure agreement as president like he could as a private businessman, and the agreements could not violate existing laws like the Freedom of Information Act. Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in an email Sunday night, “Public employees can’t be gagged by private agreements. These so-called NDAs are unconstitutional and unenforceable.”Since president Trump has prior experiences with the NDA's where do you think he's trying to go with it. I think that he's just trying hide something that he doesn't want the American people to find out about. Is he using the fear of money to make a point of not talking to the public about his presidency? The main question that we should ask our self's is what is he hiding since NDA are non constitution.
I do think trump is using money to put fear into his staff because not everyone has 10 million dollars laying around, in other words trump is using his power to keep his staff in check. This is bad for the government because it shows that the president can be doing something that he is not suppose to which is very disappointing. My question is that should congress sue the president for doing something like this? Is this constitutional for a president to give his staff for a non disclosure agreement ?
ReplyDeleteI agree with the use of NDA’s it seems like president Trump is trying to hide something. And with his history with them he may be trying to hide something from his past. He knows how they work and what don’t work and it can’t be enforced so it works for him. These need to be removed due to how unconstitutional they are and what people may hide with them. They should also be looked into to find out what are the reasons they were started and signed. How many of these NDA’s has president Trump signed or either had people sign?
ReplyDeleteI agree with both of you that if he's using the NDA to protect him self and the people that work for him. He's painting this picture of him not being the bad guy ,but he does this and all of that goes out the window. Now the NDA's goes against the constitution. So technically the NDA's are invalid.
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