Locked away in a classified safe on the White House grounds is a stack of papers crafted over decades with the hope that no one would ever use them. It lists the extraordinary powers a President may be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack or other massive catastrophe. Among the select few who have been granted access to the nation’s most closely held secrets, the pages are known as the Presidential Emergency Action Documents, or PEADs. Some simply call it the “Doomsday Book.”
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00:00Hi, it's Brian Bennett. I'm the senior White House correspondent for Time.
00:03Let me tell you about the Doomsday Book, what it is, and why former Trump administration officials are concerned
00:10about Trump getting a hold of it in the second term. First,
00:13what's the Doomsday Book? The Doomsday Book is a set of powers that the president has in
00:19extreme circumstances. Think nuclear attack or Congress gets completely wiped out. And they're designed to help the president
00:25continue the functions of government until the country can get back on its feet.
00:29Now, these powers include suspending habeas corpus,
00:33deploying the military in certain parts of the U.S., restricting telecommunications, and other things. And they've been worked out by White House lawyers over decades, and
00:42they've drafted draft executive orders with blanks in them that can be filled out in extreme circumstances.
00:47And they are backed up by
00:50legal reasoning about
00:52the president's constitutional authority and what's in existing law. Why are former Trump administration officials concerned about this?
00:59I've talked to more than a dozen people who worked in the National Security Council over the decades and
01:04five of whom worked in National Security for President Trump.
01:08They actively tried to keep away information about the extent of these powers from the president when Trump was president.
01:14Why? Because they were concerned that he might exaggerate a situation or use them when they weren't appropriate.
01:20Another thing to know about this is that there are very few checks on them. If they're used, an American can go to a court
01:26and sue and say the president is overstepped, but that takes time.
01:30These are things that are designed to be used quickly and in extreme circumstances.
01:35And the other thing that I learned about this talking to former Trump administration
01:39officials is the number of times that Trump already showed in his first term that he wanted to stretch the limits of presidential power.
01:46He did things like move money from the military to build the border wall.
01:51He also used the presidency to try to pressure Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden
01:57by withholding funds from Ukraine. And he also pressured the Department of Justice to
02:04investigate Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, people he considered political enemies.
02:10The concern that these former Trump administration officials had was that when Trump comes back in the second term,
02:17he will be willing to push even farther and might turn to some of these extraordinary powers that are contained inside the presidency,
02:27but are designed to be used only when the country is in times of extreme crisis.