A withholding of news or other information. It’s perhaps the most memorable contribution of the 1960s TV comedy “Get Smart.”
That show (later made into a movie starring Steve Carell) was about a bumbling spy who sometimes conversed with his boss in a glass enclosure completely covering their heads. The cone was intended for secrecy, but the two men could never actually hear each other.
In January 2014, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., complained that the full text of an Iranian nuclear deal was shrouded in “a cone of silence.” Four years earlier, Democrat Jay Inslee – then a House member from Washington state, now that state’s governor – also said it was a deliberate Republican tactic to stall a bill to overhaul the financial services industry. “When they wanted to keep a secret so that nobody knew about the secret, they brought down the cone of silence,” he said.
President Obama does have an actual Cone of Silence, but it’s more of a Tent of Silence. The New York Times reported last year that when Obama travels, his staff takes along a security tent with opaque sides and noise-making devices that enable him to read classified documents or have sensitive conversations.