Legally, no. You cannot use an NDA to force someone to help you cover your a crime. That’s illegal.
What it might do is get people to come forward, because the threat of the NDA was perceived as real.
Most noncompete agreements are also illegal and unenforceable but if people follow them without seeking advice, they’re doing what the employer intended them to do.
When I had to sign a non-compete as a requirement to accept a job I thought I wanted, my lawyer’s advice was to just sign it because it was completely unenforceable. He said to basically sign it and forget about it.
I’ve never understood how a Trump NDA as something agreed to by members of the US government would have any teeth whatsoever. Any NDA I signed as an employee of the government was between me and the government. I couldn’t imagine my manager making me sign one with him personally.
This has been years in the making. We're going to see a shitload more reports (and books) of how incredibly fucked the entire campaigns and administration was under that orange fuckwit.
NDAs are the biggest crock of shit ever and should be made universally null and void, yes, even in cases where they're valid. What the fuck is the point of having freedom of speech if someone can just coerce/threaten/force you to into signing it away?
I think there is an argument to keep them for things like products in development phases to stop people from blabbing to possible competitors, but this particular situation is bullshit.
Technically a Page 13 in a government/military setting is an NDA. Now in your ideal world, sure, you'd never need to keep secrets, but in the real world, you probably don't want a potential invader to know your exact defense systems, capabilities, guard locations and the best and least guarded places to come in and out.
Even assuming a completely peaceful world, you probably don't want to be sharing the passwords to critical infrastructure or the private medical information of people on a hospital database.