President Trump is seeking to protect his administration from criminal leaks to the press that have occurred since he first became President. The Office of Personal Management (OPM) is proposing a rule from the Trump administration that would create a blanket NDA for all 2 million Federal workers.
The rule is intended to make it easier to prosecute leakers, but conservatives are questioning whether they’d like this rule to be in effect when progressives are in power. The move is expected to receive significant legal challenges over the broadness of the proposed rule, and not just from progressives.
White House Seeks Gag Order For All Federal Workers – Mother Jones– www.motherjones.com
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EXCERPT:
In an attempt to stop federal workers from sharing information with journalists, the Trump administration may soon ask them—all two million of them—to sign non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs.
A draft document shared Tuesday by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) outlined a set of civil and criminal penalties the federal government could pursue against any employee who breaks their NDAs and shares “non-public, confidential, or proprietary information” about their job.
It’s not unheard of for federal employees to sign legally binding NDAs—covert operatives, for example, have signed them for decades. But for practical, ethical, and legal reasons, NDAs are a relative rarity in the public sector; they’re better known for their starring role in the broad universe of private-sector litigation. There, they are weapons celebrities and public figures wield against each other—essentially reputation management tools. Donald Trump himself has historically been fond of NDAs, paying adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to sign one in 2016, and asking all White House staff to sign them in 2018. White House Counsel Don McGahn initially “refused to draft or distribute” those agreements “because he did not think they were enforceable.”
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