The Five Scandals Within the "Air Force One" Scandal

I sometimes believe that the Trump administration’s parade of horribles has left me unable to be surprised any more, but I gasped Monday evening at news that President Trump had been secretly snuck out of the NATO summit in Turkey last month due to an Iranian threat.

That departure in early July had generated a lot of speculation and coverage at the time because something weird was clearly going on — President Trump had, with much fanfare, arrived in Turkey aboard his newly painted presidential jet, gifted by Qatar, and then, with much less explanation, departed Turkey aboard one of the older blue-and-white 747s that have long served as Air Force One. There had been vague mentions of a possible threat, and how the new Qatari-gifted plane lacked some of the defensive measures of the longstanding presidential plane, which in turn led to a Justice Department leak investigation of the five New York Times reporters who broke that story.

Now, though, the Washington Post has added some fascinating and disturbing new wrinkles: He wasn’t aboard the blue-and-white plane at all when it departed Ankara.

I’ve written extensively about presidential travel, security, and continuity of government over the years — I wrote the literal book on continuity of government, in fact — and in the 24 hours or so since the Washington Post broke the story, have given interviews to outlets as varied as the Post, the Associated Press, and the BBC.

I want to try to break down why, specifically, this decoy Air Force One is so troubling. To me, the secret flight out of Turkey represents a Russian nesting doll of scandal, one that exposes at least five levels of scandal, ranging from foreign influence to corruption to national security compromises to inappropriate geopolitical gambles.

• If you want to just read about the problems of the secret flight, skip on down to Scandal #4.

Let’s dive in:

1. The Qatari Jet:

First, it’s worth starting by unpacking the mess of corruption and grifting that led to the president being in Turkey at the NATO summit and scrambling for air travel in the first place: The Qatari gift.

Last year, Trump accepted the wildly inappropriate “gift” of a $500-million luxuriously outfitted 747 plane from the Qatari royal family. I called it in a column at the time “Corruption and a Security Catastrophe in Plane Sight.” It was almost surely a constitutional violation to accept a foreign gift such as that, plus an obvious security concern to have the President of the United States flying on a plane long controlled by a foreign power — a plane that likely itself was a target for foreign intelligence services long before it ended up in US hands. There was no way that it could be prepared for presidential service on Trump’s aggressive timetable in a way that didn’t compromise security.

The gift was all the more corrupt because it appeared that Trump would take the Qatari plane with him when he left office — perhaps to use as part of his presidential library.

The “quo” in the “quid pro quo” seemed clear quickly. The jet arrived, and by October last year, Donald Trump — who had in his first term called Qatar a “sponsor of terrorism” —signed a presidential decree granting Qatar a “security guarantee,” a NATO-style promise that we would defend Qatar as if it was our own. And Pete Hegseth was making weird announcements about training Qatari fighter pilots in Idaho.

The gift from Qatar was just one of a whole mess of corrupt actions, foreign influence, and self-dealing with Middle Eastern and Gulf states in the president’s first year — any one of which is worthy of its own Watergate-sized scandal. There’s the UAE sheikh who evidently bought a half-billion-dollar-stake to control 49 percent of the Trump family crypto business just four days before Trump was inaugurated; or the massive $2 billion investment in Jared Kushner’s private equity fund by the Saudi government, which recently got a giant 30-year nuclear deal from the United States to help it enrich its own uranium. As Popular Information wrote, “The agreement lacks safeguards that previous administrations, and many independent foreign policy analysts, viewed as essential to prevent nuclear proliferation,” and yet “Nearly all major media coverage of the US-Saudi nuclear agreement ignored Kushner’s financial conflicts — including articles by the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, AP, and CNN.”

2. Corner-Cutting on Presidential Security

As it turns out, the initial concerns about the security compromises of the new presidential plane were spot on. There’s a much longer saga about the long-delayed attempts to upgrade the presidential planes, which has itself been a long-running obsession of Trump’s. I’m not going to go into all of it again here, but read this if you want more backstory.

By January of this year, reports made clear that the plane was to be ready by the Fourth of July, newly painted in the gaudy red-white-and-blue style that Trump has long wanted to repaint the presidential fleet — a color scheme that just so happens to mimic his own personal Trump plane fleet.

It was an impossible timeline, given that the Air Force One planes currently under construction would take years longer to ready — there was no way that a plane as complex as a traditional Air Force One could be made functional and secure in a matter of months, let alone one that had to be retrofitted, stripped out, and searched for counterintelligence and security purposes.

One way the military met Trump’s impossible timeline was by, well, not stripping it down — the plane kept most of the luxurious interior that the Qataris had used. By June, the plane was undergoing flight testing, and the Air Force statement included a weird line: “No risk was taken in security, safety or mission communications, but the collective team made trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets that Boeing must deliver to support the next 40 years.”

Trump and his team bragged left, right, and center about their new toy — and in the first stage, the press did a terrible job pointing out how inappropriate the plane was. There were instead breezy reports about what a fancy new plane it was that elided the reality it represented what Zeteo called, correctly, at the time the “World’s Largest Metaphor for Corruption.”

As it turned out, there were other corners cut too: Indeed the very first outing — Trump’s trip to the NATO summit in Turkey — exposed that the plane lacked the defensive capabilities of the older Air Force Ones.

By the time the president was set to leave the summit, the Qatari plane was out of the picture and Trump seemed set to leave Turkey aboard one of the old blue-and-white 747s. There was a weird and confusing cover story about how the Qatari plane was going to be flown to an air force base in the UK so that US servicemembers could be inspired by seeing the plane in person — a story that made little sense then.

Soon the real reason emerged: A five-byline New York Times story broke news the Secret Service urged the swap because of a threat from Iran and that the “trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets” apparently included not outfitting the plane with some of the classified air defense capabilities and security systems the long-standing presidential planes have. It’s not entirely clear how real or serious the Iranian threat was — a Wall Street Journal story reported it was “deemed not to be entirely credible,” but clearly it was serious enough to risk the embarrassment to Trump of switching out his new toy.

Which is to say that the US government knowingly flew the President of the United States to a country that bordered a country that the US was actively engaged in a war against in a plane that lacked the advanced security systems that presidents have routinely flown with for years.

3. A Desperate Cover-up and Attack on Freedom of the Press

Trump was indeed quite embarrassed over the switch and furious about the leaks over his new plane — and the New York Times reporters involved were quickly hit with subpoenas as part of a wide-ranging leak investigation that forced FBI director Kash Patel to forgo a curtail a weekend junket to Chicago to setup a “war room” at the White House with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. The all-but-unprecedented subpoenas — which involved FBI agents showing up at reporters’ homes and even targeting family members — were quickly quashed amid an embarrassing and shambolic court battle where the government was forced to admit it had not followed standard procedures or pursued other investigative avenues prior to the “nuclear option” of subpoenaing the journalists. (There’s been some thread of this story playing out in recent days, where former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall had his security clearance suspended for allegedly sharing information about Air Force One’s classified capabilities — keep an eye on that! He is quoted in this Wall Street Journal story about the presidential planes, but it doesn’t appear there’s any classified material disclosed.)

Trump has been grandstanding since too about how awesome the Qatari plane remains and has said it will be now taken out of service to get “maxxed out,” which begs the question of why it was put into service in the first place if it wasn’t ready to provide the president with the necessary security and communications capabilities.

But all of that background only gets us to the main news of the week — President Trump’s secret flight out of Ankara.

4. The Secret Flight — A Decoy and a Cover-up

Here, finally — three scandals in! — is where we get to the latest chapter in the very-much-evolving Air Force One scandal.

The basics of the new blockbuster Washington Post reporting this week, which was quickly confirmed too by the New York Times, is that President Trump went aboard the traditional 747 presidential plane, then exited out the other side using a catering truck, which then took him over to another plane, a C-32 aircraft, on the tarmac that also carried Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and left the White House press pool aboard the old “Air Force One” as a decoy plane departing Ankara. (Apparently other US officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant, were left behind on the “decoy” plane; and Rubio apparently had knowledge of the threat and deception operation.)

Start-to-finish, it’s a weird story, but it’s worth unpacking precisely why this story is unprecedented in the annals of presidential security and travel: We have never seen an instance where the entire press corps was kept in the dark about the president’s whereabouts during international travel — let alone where the press corps itself was used as a decoy in a high-risk threat environment.

Now presidents have used decoy or unmarked planes before to travel in and out of war zones — that’s not in and of itself strange. There have been trips to places like Iraq and Afghanistan where presidents have flown on unmarked cargo planes for security purposes, and President Clinton used an unmarked jet to fly into Pakistan in 2000. But some accompanying White House reporters — who are used to navigating and respecting security restrictions around the president — have always known and understood those decoys and security feints at the time. In a thoughtful and long Facebook post, Clinton’s White House press secretary Joe Lockhart last night explained how the Pakistan trip unfolded and how reporters understood exactly what was happening in real time. As he wrote, “I should note that senior members of the press were briefed in advance of this operation, by me, and although they didn't know all the details it was made clear we would make clear the President was not going to travel on the plane they were on. There was no attempt to hide anything, much less lie about it later.” 

There have also been times when parts of the press corps have been misled about the president’s whereabouts — when President Biden traveled to Ukraine, the “regular” 13-member White House press pool remained behind in Washington, none the wiser, but the White House specially arranged for two reporters to accompany him to Ukraine under the cloak of secrecy. (The two reporters were given details in an email entitled “Arrival instructions for the golf tourney.”)

But here we have an instance where (a) the White House press pool were actively misled about the president’s whereabouts; (b) used as human decoys to fly aboard a plane that the Secret Service and military deemed too dangerous for the president himself to travel on; and (c) the ruse continued and both of those facts were kept secret for an extended period of time thereafter, long after the initial security window of vulnerability was over.

The White House’s subterfuge is so shocking because it belies a complete misunderstanding about the importance and role of the press pool that follows the president everywhere: They’re there, in part, for the security of the United States itself — to provide, if necessary, an independent and transparent proof of life and proof of presence in the event of a crisis or uncertainty about the president’s status.

The whereabouts and status of the U.S. president is an incredibly important national security and geopolitical issue — one with immense implications for financial markets, military command and control, foreign adversaries and allies alike — and here, for the first known time in US and world history, you had the president of the United States on a plane that no one outside of the US government knew about, traveling internationally over foreign territory, amid what the US military and Secret Service apparently believed was one of the most serious threats to presidential security since 9/11 itself.

That this incident lays bare the fundamental lack of trust and disrespect between the White House and the press corps — one, of course, that in many ways has been on full display throughout the Trump presidency — much of the coverage since misses how this incident (and any subsequent repeat of it) has the potential to inject real, troubling national security risks and geopolitical instability.

You can imagine all of the different ways that this could have gone wrong — if something had happened to the old 747 plane that the White House press corps, staff, and the world beyond believed that the president was on or, similarly, you can imagine how this could have gone wrong if something had happened to the plane that the president actually was on during a time period where the press and the rest of the world thought everything was okay.

In either instance — and a bunch of other related scenarios — you would have had immense confusion and no member of the press able to independently corroborate the safety, status, and whereabouts of the US president, which could have easily — almost surely would have — created fundamental confusion about who was in charge of the US government and even who was acting as commander-in-chief and president of the United States.

The closest analog we have is September 11th, itself, but the actions that day of President Bush, his team, and the White House press corps make clear just how different all of them viewed the central role of the press: President Bush, of course, began the day in Sarasota, Florida, at Emma Booker Elementary School, and then was evacuated and Air Force One was rushed into the sky. (It relied throughout the day on some of the classified defensive mechanisms that the planes are evidently equipped with.) It landed first, later in the morning, at Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, Louisiana, and left on the tarmac there a significant chunk of the press pool and staff to fend for themselves. As aide Gordon Johndroe recalled to me a decade ago: “It was difficult telling half the press pool that they weren’t coming with us. It was half ‘We’re missing the story of our lifetimes,’ and then their personal reaction: ‘You’re leaving us in Louisiana and the airspace was shut down.’”

But even then, a team of five reporters were kept on board to travel with the president — the president’s destination and whereabouts were unknown for security reasons, but there were still reporters present, if needed. The White House understood how important it was for members of the press to be with the president — particularly in a high-risk, high-threat environment like 9/11, as they provided a conduit to the public beyond that was incredibly important at a time of great geopolitical uncertainty.

To draw these three contrasts explicitly:

• When President Clinton traveled to Pakistan, he traveled in an unmarked, unknown plane, but the press was fully aware of the ruse at the time, in real-time.
  

• When President Bush was evacuated to Air Force One and subsequent undisclosed locations on 9/11, his whereabouts were not known to the nation and world beyond, but he was still always accompanied by reporters.
  

• When President Biden traveled to Ukraine, some of the press pool were misled and in the dark, but there was always a team of reporters who knew where Biden was and what he was doing.

None of that happened with President Trump and Turkey — which demonstrates that it didn’t need to happen here. In none of the scenarios, either, did the White House or military choose to put other Americans — whether presidential staff or reporters — deliberately in harm’s way as a human decoy and potential target, as Trump’s team evidently did in Turkey. (In fact, Joe Lockhart makes clear in his post how the White House altered the original plan in Pakistan precisely to avoid creating risk to the press pool.)

I’m not in any way downplaying the threat in Turkey nor minimizing or misunderstanding the necessity of presidential security, a subject I’ve reported on deeply and carefully for years. Yes, there is of course always an element of risk when you’re traveling with the president, as staff, Secret Service, military, or as part of the press corps. That’s not what happened here. Staff, reporters, and other personnel were deliberately put at risk, largely unwittingly, to fake out a potential assassination attempt.

We should be focused on how Trump’s decisions, feint, and deception operation actually should be seen as compromising presidential security and global stability. It created a huge problem for democracy and world stability, allowing a fully foreseeable situation where there could have been real confusion about the status, security, and whereabouts of the President of the United States — particularly if Iran had actually attempted an attack on either the decoy plane or the plane Trump actually was traveling on.

Moreover, in acting like this — and then attempting to keep it secret for weeks thereafter — the White House has now undermined all future trust about President Trump’s whereabouts and status, injecting uncertainty and instability into any future crises as well. It’s not hard to see why all previous modern presidents have worked hard to ensure the public can trust the White House press corps’ independent reporting about the status, security, and whereabouts of the US president. It’s deeply reckless for this administration to trash that trust.

Sure, you think you know where the President of the United States is — but do you?

All of which brings us to what, to me, is the fifth level of the scandal.

5. The Still-Real Nuclear Risk and Failure of the War with Iran:

It’s easy in this nesting doll of lies and corruption to glide past the final circle of lies and corruption that this episode highlights: The extent to which we are locked in a serious conflict with Iran that the president led us into illegally and that continues to undermine global security and stability despite months of Trump administration rhetoric that the war has been “won,” the adversary’s military capabilities “destroyed,” and “peace at hand.”

Here, just weeks ago, the US president faced intelligence about an assassination attempt serious enough that it led the Secret Service, military, and White House to take security precautions that no previous president has ever taken and to deploy a presidential 747, with staff, senior Cabinet officials, and an unknowing and unwitting press corps aboard, as a decoy plane and potential target for an Iranian assassination attempt — presumably a missile attack — while the president tried to depart from territory of a NATO ally.

That’s a deeply chilling scenario — and in hindsight casts in a new light the comments that Trump made just one day after departing Turkey about how he has left a standing order that if he’s killed Iran is to be obliterated by US nuclear missiles. Presumably, to whatever extent there’s meaning in his strange comments, that was a conversation or set of presidential orders left in place during his escape from the NATO summit. It also casts in a different light the decision of Trump to exit Turkey on the same plane as the defense secretary — thereby placing two of the nation’s top nuclear-decision makers simultaneously in danger.

This isn’t a laughable operation to sneak away from the press in a catering truck — this was a high-stakes presidential gamble with global stability and nuclear war hanging in the balance that indicates, anew, how much Trump’s ego and corruption undermines our security at home and abroad.

GMG