BREAKING: TRUMP ADMIN FINDS LEAKER -ESCORTED OUT BY POLICE
Pentagon Stripped Biden’s Air Force Secretary of His Clearance Over an Air Force One Leak Claim—Now He Says He’ll Sue
For years, security clearances have existed primarily as a way of answering a national-security question.
Can the government trust this person with classified information?
Under President Donald Trump, they have also become part of a much larger political and legal fight.
That fight has now reached Frank Kendall.
Kendall, who served as secretary of the Air Force under President Joe Biden, says he plans to sue the Trump administration after the Pentagon abruptly revoked his eligibility to access classified information and barred him from holding sensitive positions.
The Pentagon says Kendall improperly disclosed classified information about the capabilities of the Qatari-donated aircraft now being used as Air Force One.
Kendall says he did nothing of the kind.
And there is one major problem with evaluating those competing claims:
The government has not publicly identified what classified information it says Kendall actually revealed.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell announced the action on August 7.
“Effective immediately,” he said, the department had revoked Kendall’s eligibility for access to classified information and his ability to hold any sensitive position.
Parnell said the decision followed Kendall’s “unauthorized disclosure of classified information regarding Air Force One’s capabilities to a media outlet.”
He added that safeguarding classified material was a non-negotiable responsibility and that anyone who violated that trust forfeited the privilege of access.
That is an unusually serious allegation.
Unauthorized disclosure of classified national-defense information can lead to far more than loss of a clearance.
Depending on the facts, such conduct can potentially result in criminal investigation and prosecution.
But the Pentagon’s public statement stopped well short of that.
It did not identify the allegedly classified information.
It did not say which publication Kendall supposedly gave it to.
It did not explain whether investigators had interviewed Kendall.
And Pentagon officials did not announce that his case had been referred to prosecutors.
Kendall says he learned about the decision much the same way everyone else did.
Through the public announcement.
Speaking to CNN on August 10, Kendall said he had been attending a cooking class with his wife when he turned his phone back on and discovered the Pentagon statement.
His initial reaction, he said, was confusion.
He told CNN that he had always been careful not to disclose classified information and could not identify anything he had publicly said that he believed crossed that line.
Kendall has now chosen to fight.
“I’m going to sue them,” he told CNN.
He accused the administration of using security clearances arbitrarily and politically and said he wanted the decision overturned.
“As my mother taught me years ago, you stand up to bullies,” Kendall said.
He has retained Mark Zaid, a Washington attorney whose practice centers heavily on national-security law and security-clearance disputes.
Zaid confirmed that Kendall had hired him and indicated that further legal action was coming.
That choice of lawyer is particularly significant.
Zaid does not merely represent people fighting security-clearance decisions.
He recently fought one himself.
Trump’s March 2025 memorandum named Zaid among a group of individuals whose active security clearances were to be revoked because the president determined continued access was no longer in the national interest.
That list also included Joe Biden, members of Biden’s family, former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Hillary Clinton, former Vice President Kamala Harris and others.
Zaid sued.
And in December 2025, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali granted him a preliminary injunction.
The judge concluded that the administration could not use the summary revocation mechanism at issue simply to punish a lawyer for representing people whose interests were adverse to the government.
Importantly, however, the judge did not hold that Zaid could never lose his clearance.
The ruling specifically left the government free to pursue suspension or revocation through ordinary procedures for legitimate reasons independent of Trump’s memorandum.
That distinction could become central in Kendall’s case.
Kendall appears poised to argue that his clearance was removed because he publicly criticized Trump’s administration and questioned whether the rapidly modified Qatari aircraft possessed the same security capabilities as traditional presidential aircraft.
The Pentagon will presumably argue something very different:
That this was not political retaliation at all.
It was a national-security response to an unauthorized disclosure of classified information.
Which explanation survives will depend heavily on evidence that has not yet been made public.
The controversy begins with the aircraft itself.
Last year, Qatar transferred a Boeing 747-8 to the United States for presidential use.
The aircraft was subsequently modified at enormous expense and entered service as an interim presidential aircraft while the government continues waiting for Boeing’s next generation of purpose-built presidential planes.
The retrofit cost approximately $400 million.
But the modification schedule was dramatically shorter than the process normally associated with building and securing presidential aircraft.
That prompted questions about what capabilities could realistically have been installed in the available time.
Kendall was one of the former officials quoted publicly discussing that issue.
In a July 9 New York Times story, he said the accelerated timetable did not permit all of the normal Air Force One modifications.
His point was that some combination of security, communications and support capabilities therefore had to be absent.
He also expressed surprise that the aircraft was being used outside the United States amid heightened tensions involving Iran.
Those remarks are now politically explosive.
But there is an important limit to what they establish.
Kendall did not, in the quotation publicly attributed to him, identify a particular classified defensive system.
He did not describe how a missile-defense system works.
He did not reveal technical specifications.
And according to Air & Space Forces Magazine, Kendall specifically said he was not one of the unnamed officials who told reporters that the aircraft lacked particular defensive countermeasures.
That does not prove he revealed nothing classified elsewhere.
It simply explains why Kendall says he is mystified.
The public statement that appears most closely connected to the revocation is largely an inference based on the unusually fast conversion schedule:
If there was not enough time for every normal modification, then some capabilities must have been omitted.
The Pentagon apparently believes Kendall crossed a classified-information line.
Kendall says he did not.
Without knowing what specific disclosure the government is relying on, outsiders cannot resolve that dispute yet.
The Air Force’s own public statements complicate the picture.
Officials have insisted that the accelerated conversion was accomplished without accepting unacceptable risks involving security, safety or secure communications.
But the Air Force has also publicly acknowledged that the Qatari aircraft does not contain every modification planned for the purpose-built replacement Air Force One aircraft.
It said several highly complex engineering modifications were intentionally left out.
That creates a difficult line between classified information and public inference.
The fact that two aircraft do not have identical capabilities can be publicly acknowledged.
The details of particular defensive systems may remain highly classified.
Kendall’s lawsuit could therefore turn on where exactly the government says he crossed from one category into the other.
The timing also matters.
Kendall left government in January 2025.
The Qatari aircraft was acquired and modified after he had left office.
He told CNN that he did not have classified knowledge of the aircraft’s current configuration and denied being the source of the specific leaked defensive information that triggered the broader controversy.
That is one of his strongest factual arguments.
If Kendall was no longer receiving classified briefings about that aircraft, what classified information did he possess that he could have disclosed?
The government may have an answer.
It has not publicly provided one.
The controversy became substantially more serious after the aircraft was reportedly treated differently during a high-threat overseas trip.
During Trump’s travel connected to a NATO summit in Turkey, the president switched away from the Qatari-donated aircraft and used another military aircraft amid threats connected to Iran.
Subsequent reporting said security concerns and the Qatari plane’s more limited defensive capabilities played a role in the decision.
Trump disputed suggestions that the switch demonstrated the new plane was unsafe.
The White House has maintained that the aircraft is protected by high-level security protocols and safe for presidential travel.
The administration has also said additional upgrades are planned.
That could have remained a dispute over presidential transportation.
Instead, it turned into a leak investigation.
The Justice Department subpoenaed New York Times journalists who reported on the aircraft’s security limitations and attempted to require them to testify before a federal grand jury about their confidential sources.
The government characterized the disclosures as a substantial national-security concern involving potentially classified national-defense information.
The subpoenas immediately created a second controversy.
The Times argued that the government was improperly attempting to force journalists to identify confidential sources and accused the administration of retaliating against constitutionally protected reporting.
Additional subpoenas sought phone records connected not only to journalists but, according to reporting, some relatives and spouses.
Then the government's effort stumbled in court.
At a July 23 hearing, federal prosecutors withdrew the subpoenas after the judge questioned whether the Justice Department had complied with legal requirements and after government lawyers acknowledged procedural errors.
The investigation itself was not necessarily terminated.
Prosecutors left open the possibility that legally compliant subpoenas could be issued again.
Trump made clear the administration had not abandoned the underlying goal.
A day after the subpoenas were withdrawn, he said the government was not pursuing journalists for being journalists.
It was pursuing leakers.
And, he argued, journalists could be a route to identifying those sources.
That sequence is important to Kendall’s legal argument.
From his perspective, the administration was already aggressively searching for whoever provided damaging information about the Qatari aircraft.
Then, after he had publicly criticized the plane’s shortened modification process, the Pentagon stripped his clearance while accusing him of an unauthorized classified disclosure.
Kendall says that looks like retaliation.
The government says it looks like accountability.
Those are very different stories.
And neither has yet been tested in court.
There is another distinction that matters.
Former government officials do not possess a permanent constitutional right to keep security clearances simply because they once held high office.
Clearances exist because the government determines that an individual has a continuing need and is eligible to receive classified information.
Former senior officials sometimes maintain eligibility so they can advise successors, participate in government panels or work for defense contractors and companies handling classified programs.
Losing that eligibility can therefore have professional and financial consequences even after government service ends.
Kendall is not arguing that a former Air Force secretary can never lose a clearance.
His expected argument is narrower.
He says the government removed his clearance arbitrarily, without identifying what he supposedly disclosed and without giving him an opportunity to answer the accusation.
On CNN, Kendall said he was confident there was no legitimate basis for the revocation and equally confident that he had received no due process.
That is where Mark Zaid’s earlier case becomes relevant.
Zaid successfully persuaded a federal judge that even though the president has extremely broad authority over classified information, security-clearance authority cannot necessarily be used as an unchecked punishment mechanism for constitutionally protected activity.
The Trump administration appealed that ruling, arguing that courts have very limited authority to second-guess presidential decisions involving national security and classified access.
During D.C. Circuit arguments in May, a Justice Department lawyer took a strikingly broad position.
He argued that clearance decisions invoking national security could remain outside judicial review even if a challenger alleged improper motives.
Lawyers opposing the administration warned that such a rule could permit presidents to strip clearances from entire categories of political opponents.
Kendall’s dispute could become another test of that boundary.
But his case is not identical to Zaid’s.
That distinction could favor the government.
Trump’s memorandum against Zaid explicitly named him among individuals the president no longer wanted accessing classified information, and the lower court concluded that the action appeared tied to his work representing clients adverse to Trump.
Kendall’s revocation, by contrast, comes with an express national-security allegation:
The Pentagon says he made an unauthorized classified disclosure.
If the government can substantiate that claim, Kendall’s challenge becomes significantly harder.
If it cannot identify the disclosure—or if the alleged “classified” information turns out to have been public, speculative or based on information Kendall independently inferred after leaving government—his retaliation argument becomes stronger.
That is why the missing detail matters so much.
The Pentagon’s statement sounds definitive.
“Those who violate that trust forfeit the privilege,” Parnell said.
But the public has not seen the evidence establishing that Kendall violated the trust.
And Kendall has not admitted doing so.
At this point, describing him as having “leaked classified information” without qualification would turn the government’s allegation into a proven fact.
It is not one yet.
There is also a broader political context.
Trump has repeatedly used security-clearance authority against former officials and critics.
His March 2025 memorandum revoked active clearances from a list that included Biden, members of Biden’s family, former senior Democratic officials, prosecutors and attorneys who had clashed with Trump.
In August 2025, the administration revoked clearances held by 37 additional current and former national-security officials.
Some had been involved in intelligence matters that Trump had criticized for years, including assessments concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The administration said those actions reflected concerns about politicization and misuse of intelligence.
Critics called them political retaliation.
Kendall now places himself in the second interpretation.
He has been a vocal critic of Trump since leaving office.
He argues that the clearance decision should be understood as one more example of an administration punishing dissenters.
The Pentagon rejects that framing through the very nature of its allegation.
According to Parnell, Kendall is not losing access because he criticized Trump.
He is losing it because he disclosed classified information.
A court may eventually have to decide whether that explanation is enough—or whether the government must disclose substantially more.
The Air Force One controversy makes that question especially sensitive.
Presidential aircraft are among the most security-sensitive platforms in the U.S. government.
Details concerning defenses, communications, countermeasures and contingency procedures can have obvious national-security implications.
There is a legitimate government interest in preventing classified capabilities and vulnerabilities from becoming public.
At the same time, there is also a legitimate public interest in knowing whether the president is being transported aboard an aircraft that lacks major protections normally associated with Air Force One.
That tension is exactly why the New York Times subpoenas became such a significant First Amendment fight.
The government viewed leaked information as a security threat.
The newspaper viewed it as reporting about whether the government had endangered the president by rushing a controversial aircraft into service.
Kendall now sits between those two arguments.
As a former Air Force secretary, he possesses decades of expertise that allow him to recognize what normally goes into presidential-aircraft programs.
As a former clearance holder, he remains legally obligated not to disclose classified information he learned while in government.
The critical question is whether his comments came from classified knowledge or professional judgment based on publicly observable facts.
Kendall says the latter.
The Pentagon says the former.
That is the fight.
It is also why a statement Kendall made to The Wall Street Journal deserves careful framing.
Kendall reportedly said fully equipping a Boeing 747 with the normal defensive systems and modifications expected for presidential use would ordinarily require roughly three to four years.
That statement by itself is not equivalent to revealing which classified systems are present on a specific aircraft.
It is an assessment about the complexity and timeline of modifying an aircraft for presidential service.
The government may possess additional evidence beyond those public comments.
If so, it has not released it.
Kendall says no official contacted him before the revocation to confront him with a specific disclosure or allow him to respond.
He learned of the action after it had already been announced publicly.
That could become important to his due-process argument.
But even here, the outcome is not simple.
Security-clearance disputes have historically received unusual deference from courts because they directly involve executive-branch judgments about national security.
A judge reviewing Kendall’s lawsuit may therefore distinguish between constitutional retaliation claims—which courts have sometimes entertained—and the underlying merits of whether someone should be trusted with classified information.
Zaid’s case demonstrates that a plaintiff can sometimes get into court.
It does not establish that every clearance holder is entitled to full judicial review whenever access is revoked.
That is why Kendall’s lawsuit could matter beyond him.
If he wins on a broad theory, the decision could place meaningful limits on presidents using security-clearance authority against former officials who criticize them.
If the administration wins on a broad theory, the executive branch could preserve enormous discretion to revoke access when it invokes national-security concerns.
And if the court resolves the case narrowly—perhaps by requiring ordinary procedures without questioning the president’s substantive security judgment—the larger constitutional fight could remain unsettled.
There is another practical consequence.
Security clearances have value after public service.
Former officials often work for contractors, consult on government programs or participate in boards dealing with classified matters.
Kendall has spent much of his career inside the defense establishment.
Before serving as Air Force secretary from 2021 to 2025, he held senior Defense Department acquisition positions during the Obama administration and had extensive experience in defense technology and procurement.
Revoking his eligibility therefore is not merely symbolic.
It can limit the types of defense-related work he may perform.
That strengthens his incentive to litigate rather than simply absorb the political criticism.
It also helps explain why Zaid’s own clearance case mattered professionally.
Zaid argued that losing his access impaired his ability to represent clients whose cases involved classified material.
A federal judge accepted enough of that argument to issue preliminary relief.
Kendall will likely make a similar practical argument about injury.
But the government will have another response.
A security clearance is not a trophy or honorary credential.
If officials genuinely believe Kendall disclosed classified capabilities involving Air Force One, they would argue that leaving his eligibility intact would defeat the entire purpose of the clearance system.
That is why the factual question comes first.
What did Kendall disclose?
Until the Pentagon answers that publicly—or provides the evidence in litigation—the political arguments will run ahead of the documented facts.
There are several things we know.
Kendall discussed the accelerated modification of the Qatari Boeing 747.
He said there was not enough time to give it every normal Air Force One modification.
He expressed concerns about using it overseas under heightened threat conditions.
News organizations separately reported more specific information about defensive shortcomings.
The Justice Department attempted to identify those publications’ confidential sources through grand-jury and records subpoenas.
Those subpoenas were withdrawn after a federal judge questioned the government's legal work and procedures, though the underlying leak investigation was not necessarily abandoned.
The Pentagon then accused Kendall of an unauthorized classified disclosure and revoked his eligibility.
Kendall denies being the source of the specific defensive-capability leak and says he did not disclose classified information.
He has hired counsel.
He says he will sue.
As of August 15, however, publicly available reporting describes the lawsuit as planned, not as a complaint that has already been filed in federal court.
That distinction matters too.
The next step belongs to Kendall and Zaid.
Once they file, the complaint should reveal precisely what constitutional, statutory or procedural theories they intend to use.
It may allege First Amendment retaliation.
It may allege denial of due process.
It may challenge whether established clearance procedures were followed.
And it may rely heavily on Kendall’s claim that he was punished without being told what supposedly classified information he disclosed.
Until that filing appears, those legal theories remain possibilities rather than claims already before a judge.
The same caution applies to the government.
The Pentagon has made a serious accusation.
It has not filed a criminal charge.
There has been no trial.
No court has determined Kendall leaked classified information.
And the government has not publicly produced evidence showing that he did.
That is the central distinction missing from the most partisan versions of this story.
Supporters of the administration can reasonably argue that Air Force One capabilities deserve the highest level of protection and that former officials cannot reveal classified information simply because they disagree with Trump.
Critics can reasonably argue that a president should not be able to label public criticism a security violation, strip a former official’s clearance and refuse to identify what classified material was supposedly disclosed.
Both arguments depend on a fact we do not yet know.
Whether Kendall actually disclosed something classified.
The broader record gives both sides reasons to push hard.
Trump has unquestionably used clearance revocations against political adversaries. His March 2025 memorandum explicitly named a long list of people whose access he wanted removed.
At least one of those people—Mark Zaid—has already persuaded a federal judge that the administration’s summary approach could amount to improper retaliation and lack adequate process.
But Kendall’s case includes something Zaid’s original presidential memorandum did not:
A specific Pentagon accusation that classified national-security information was improperly disclosed.
If that accusation can be substantiated, it may justify exactly the kind of action the clearance system exists to permit.
If it cannot, Kendall may have a much stronger argument that national security was being used as a label to punish criticism.
That is why the case could become more important than another feud between Trump and a former Biden official.
It sits at the intersection of three powers that presidents traditionally guard fiercely.
Control over classified information.
Authority over the national-security bureaucracy.
And the ability to decide who is trusted with secrets.
Kendall is asking the judiciary to impose limits on how those powers are used.
His own lawyer has already demonstrated that courts are not necessarily powerless when clearance authority is allegedly used as political retaliation.
But that victory came with an important caveat:
The government remained free to act against Zaid through ordinary clearance procedures for genuine security reasons.
That caveat may become the entire Frank Kendall case.
Was this a genuine security decision?
Or political retaliation dressed as one?
The Pentagon says Kendall disclosed classified information about one of the most sensitive aircraft in the world.
Kendall says the government has not even told him what supposedly classified statement he made.
For now, both statements are part of the record.
Only one is the government's accusation.
Neither has yet been proven in court.
And when Kendall follows through on his promise to sue, the most important question may not be whether Donald Trump has the authority to revoke security clearances.
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Presidents unquestionably have enormous authority in that area.
The question will be whether that authority can be exercised against a former Cabinet official on an accusation the government has not publicly explained—and whether a court will demand that the administration show more than a Pentagon social-media post before allowing the decision to stand.
