A former aide to President Jimmy Carter is sounding the alarm over who in the Trump administration wields a handful of lesser-known "extraordinary secret powers" that "essentially" allow the administration to "upend the Constitution," veteran journalist Seymour Hersh reported.
That aide is Joel McCleary, who served as Carter’s deputy assistant, and the Trump administration official is White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who, despite being an “unconfirmed White House aide,” is arguably the “de facto head” of the “machinery” that allows the administration to enact its “secret powers,” McCleary told Hersh.
The powers McCleary warned about are established as part of the Continuity of Government Readiness Condition, or COGCON, a system that “establishes executive branch readiness levels based on possible threats.”
“This is the layer the public has never been told to worry about. Note who works the switch,” McCleary warned. “Formally, the secretary of homeland security is the president’s lead agent for continuity. In practice, the homeland security apparatus now runs through Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff for policy in the White House who now sits atop an elevated office far above its old standing.”
Amid President Donald Trump's ongoing threats that some critics say amount to a pledge to interfere in the 2026 midterm elections, McCleary feared that COGCON's power could be used at Miller's whim to take advantage of what he called a "structural deficiency that endangers the republic."
“The problem is that no legal framework distinguishes between a nuclear attack and a border dispute, between a civilization-ending pandemic and a political protest, between a genuine cyberattack on national infrastructure and a manufactured pretext for invoking extraordinary authority. The president alone defines the emergency,” McCleary said.
“And no institution — not Congress, not the courts, not the military chain of command — has been given the legal tools to determine, in real time, whether the emergency is genuine and whether the response is proportionate.”