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This is a useful explainer of the code word classified system in use at the White House, called NICE. I’m surprised at one assertion, though. A brief thread to explain why. nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/… 
The executive orders that govern classified information (the main one: archives.gov/isoo/policy-do…) establish the various levels of classification that exist (confidential, secret, top secret) and provide a framework for creating, handling, sharing, safeguarding, etc. each level.
A particular preoccupation of the EO linked above is oversight of what it calls special access programs, also known as code word or SCI programs, which are protected at the highest level and only shared with those with a bona fide need to know.
Because they’re so secret and so closely held, special access programs are recognized as a potentially cozy place for the executive branch—or particularly agro executive branch officials—to commit abuses and keep them secret from everybody.
(The term special access program, coined in the 1990s, is a successor to the term black program—which became irretrievably stigmatized in the scandals of the 1980s. Iran Contra was a black program, code word “Yellow Fruit.”)
Out of at least a superficial concern for preventing another scandal, the EO has all kinds of mechanisms for overseeing special access programs—annual reviews, periodic reports, accounting systems, etc.
It also provides for sanctions against anyone who is found to “create or continue a special access program contrary to the requirements of this order.”
There’s a serious tension, it seems to me, between all those rules intended to prevent abuse and the idea that officials can treat information classified at a lower level as a special access program in all but name—keep it on the code word servers, limit access as severely, etc.
If that loophole exists, it wouldn’t just let WH officials squirrel away embarrassing transcripts of the president engaged in graft. It’s big enough to drive another Iran-Contra through.
So I think the better reading of the executive order is that there is, in fact, a rule that “prohibits putting a file with a lower-level classification into the NICE system in order to take advantage of its greater access restrictions.” It’s this one.
