Because there not only is secrecy around these powers, there is mystery around the secrecy." And it was the no-response-at-all from people I knew that began to worry me. I started contacting friends of mine, of both parties, who had been in senior positions, and I got two responses, or one response which is, 'I've never heard of these powers' (and these are people in senior cabinet positions), or, I got no response at all. "Every administration, including Democratic administrations, has revised and updated these powers. Hart said, "The reason these documents are secret is, for 11 administrations, people in power did not want to frighten the American people, or to demonstrate what might happen to their constitutional rights and liberties. "This is a drastic program set up under the assumption that drastic steps will be necessary to protect the national security of this country so that efforts can be made to remove from circulation individuals determined to be potentially dangerous to the national defense and public safety of the United States by engaging in espionage, sabotage and/or subversion in the event an attack is launched against this country," Sullivan wrote.
"Congress is not aware of these documents, and from public sources we know that at least in the past these documents have purported to do things that are not permitted by the Constitution – things like martial law and the suspension of habeas corpus and the roundup and detention of people not suspected of any crime." A 1967 memo from William Cornelius Sullivan of the FBI alludes to a PEAD which authorizes the suspension of habeas corpus. "You're saying they are not consulting with Congress?" Koppel asked. Not even Congress has access to them, which is really pretty extraordinary when you consider that even the most highly-classified covert military and intelligence operations have to be reported to at least eight Members of Congress, the 'Gang of Eight.'" No presidential emergency action document has even been released, or even leaked. "But since then, they've expanded to address other types of emergencies as well. "They originated in the Eisenhower administration as part of an effort to try to plan for a potential Soviet nuclear attack," Goitein said. Goitein says what little we do know about PEADs comes from references to them in other documents, some of which are now declassified. "And what's alarming about that is that no one really knows what the limits of those claimed authorities might be, because they are often developed and kept in secret."
Koppel asked, "Several times during his administration, President Trump has made allusions to secret powers that he has that we don't know about. The alarming scope of the president's emergency powers ("The Atlantic)."These are essentially presidential orders that are drafted in anticipation of a range of hypothetical, worst-case scenarios," Goitein said.
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