Ex-CIA officials say Trump’s travel ban has “no national security purpose”

Cyrus Farivar

National Security Advisor Susan Rice, seen here in March 2016, was one of the former Obama Administration officials who have opposed the Trump executive order.

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Three former secretaries of state, along with ex-CIA officials and Obama administration intelligence officials, claim President Donald Trump's travel ban on people from seven Muslim-majority nations serves "no national security purpose."

That was the message in a court filing from former Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, former CIA Director Leon Panetta, and others. In their friend-of-the-court brief, they argue Trump's executive order would "endanger US troops in the field," and "disrupt key counterterrorism, foreign policy, and national security partnerships."

The legal filing came a day after nearly 100 tech companies weighed in on the same case, telling the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals that "American workers and the economy will suffer as a result" of Trump’s order. Trump signed the order a week ago to prevent "radical Islamic terrorists" from entering the US.

The Trump order was blocked by a Seattle federal judge late last week, and the federal appeals court over the weekend declined the Trump administration’s emergency request to reinstate the executive order.

The former officials told the appeals court that Trump's order would "have a devastating humanitarian impact."

They added:

The Order is of unprecedented scope. We know of no case where a President has invoked his statutory authority to suspend admission for such a broad class of people. Even after 9/11, the U.S. Government did not invoke the provisions of law cited by the Administration to  broadly bar entrants based on nationality, national origin, or religious affiliation. In past cases, suspensions were limited to particular individuals or subclasses of nationals who posed a specific, articulable threat based on their known actions and affiliations. In adopting this Order, the Administration alleges no specific derogatory factual information about any particular recipient of a visa or green card or any vetting step omitted by current procedures.

A few former officials from President George W. Bush’s administration have also publicly spoken out against the order as well, although none have participated in formal court filings.

John Yoo, the former member of the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003 who is well-known in legal circles for his expansionary view of executive power and the so-called Torture Memos, wrote a Monday oped in The New York Times, saying Trump's order gave him "grave concerns."

One of Yoo’s colleagues—Jack Goldsmith, an assistant attorney general in the OLC from 2003 to 2004 who now teaches at Harvard Law School—wrote on Lawfare that he was "starting to believe that either Donald Trump wants courts to strike down the Immigration Executive order or that his White House Counsel is incompetent or ineffectual."