Another Gobsmacked Moment: Trump To Get National Security Secrets
And the future gets even darker.
As mind boggling as it seems, despite all of trump’s words and actions and against all common sense, because of longstanding tradition, trump will be privy to the nation’s most guarded secrets on the inevitable moment after he is declared the Republican Party nominee for president.
The scenario is ludicrous as trump has long proven his untrustworthiness with national security along with his impetuousness and lack of judgement.
For example, trump said the U.S. would not defend a NATO nation from invasion if NATO members refuse to increase their payments to the mutual self-defense treaty that has proven invaluable since its inception after World War II.
Trump has encouraged rioters to support him in his effort to retain the presidency through a grossly false, wide conspiracy claiming voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
After he lost the presidency, trump refused to turn over top secret documents that he had kept unsecured at his Mar-a-Lago palace, with some squirreled away in bathrooms and closets.
Trump has praised North Korea’s President Kim Jong Un along with other despots and dictators around the world. And he complimented Russian President Vladimir Putin for his “genius” and “savvy” in invading Ukraine.
Trump has repeatedly lied about everything from the safety of American cities to his most recent incredibly irresponsible and utterly false claim he made at a campaign event that “everybody in this room is in great danger right now. We have a nuclear weapon that if you hit New York, South Carolina is going to be gone too.”
The former president has had a longstanding animus toward the intelligence community, claiming the CIA and other intelligence organs were out to get him and were responsible for the investigation into Russian interference in trump’s 2016 election campaign.
It has only been relatively recently since candidates were allowed to see government secrets. Presidential candidates were kept in the dark until Vice President Harry S. Truman became President Truman after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
After leading the nation for more than 12 years, through the nation’s darkest periods, Roosevelt died of a massive stroke on April 12, 1945. The end of the war in Europe was less than a month away but Japan remained a threat to the U.S. and the world. American scientists were working feverishly to beat the Nazis in development of an atomic bomb. Truman took office after Roosevelt’s death but the new leader had been told nothing about the top secret, A-bomb program, known as the Manhattan Project.
Truman had been vice president for less than three months when Roosevelt died. The incoming president said that his experience as vice president was “as useful as cow’s fifth teat.”
“I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me,” Truman told reporters upon his appointment as president.
When Truman was sworn in, the world was in a dangerous, critical state; the war in Europe was coming to an end but the Cold War was about to start and Japan remained a deadly threat. Just 12 days after he became president, he was given the news of a terrible new weapon that the U.S. had developed and if unleashed, would create unimaginable dangers to the world.
On April 24, 1945, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and army general Leslie Groves briefed Truman on the Manhattan Project and told him that Russia was expected to have nuclear weapons in five years. Truman made the historical decision to continue the A-bomb project, leading to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender.
The new president vowed that future presidential candidates would never again be shielded from important government information the way he had been.
“There were so many things I did not know when I became President,” Truman said.
Truman was elected president in 1948. Four years later, he decided not to try for second elected term, leaving the field to the leading candidates, Illinois Democratic Gov. Adlai Stevenson and war hero and Republican hopeful Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Fortunately for the nation, unlike trump, Stevenson and Eisenhower both had proven loyalty, courage and deep understanding of the nation and the military. Eisenhower had been Supreme Allied Commander in Europe both during and after World War II, and Stevenson worked in various posts under the Roosevelt Administration and at positions at the newly-formed United Nations.
Per Truman’s orders, both candidates became the first party nominees to receive intelligence briefings. Since then, classified briefings have been offered to every party nominee. The CIA gave the briefings until the 2004 election, when the Director of National Intelligence took over.
Trump has frequently disparaged the intelligence community.
On Jan. 11, 2017, trump accused U.S. intelligence agencies of leaking an unsubstantiated report that Russia had damaging information on trump. He claimed the leak was done to take “one last shot at me,” and compared it to “living in Nazi Germany.”
Most recently, trump’s lawyers said they planned to claim in trump’s defense, that the intelligence community was biased and politically motivated against the ex-president.
Trump’s ongoing claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” includes reference to a letter signed by former intelligence agents weeks before the 2020 election. The letter said the release of emails supposedly sent and received by President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
There has been no proof of Russian involvement in the release of the emails but Republicans have said the letter helped discredit negative stories about the Biden family just before the election.
The campaign for the 2016 presidential election created new questions over offering top secret information to presidential candidates. Supporters for trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton both claimed their adversaries could not be trusted with sensitive government information. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said the briefings would be offered as part of “a long tradition.”
The matter of providing security reviews to presidential candidates took on special meaning in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump was criticized after government reports that the Russian government interfered in the election with the goals of sabotaging the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and increasing political and social discord in the United States.
Clinton then generated controversy when it was disclosed that she had used a private email server for official public communications rather than using the official State Department email accounts. The trump campaign attacked Clinton and claimed that she had destroyed thousands of sensitive documents to shield them from view.
Trump held a news conference on July 16, 2016, when he urged Russia to commit cyber espionage against Clinton.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” trump said. “I think you’d be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention that “Donald Trump once again took Russia’s side. We cannot afford an erratic finger on our nuclear weapons.”
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid commented that night from the convention.
“I hope that they don’t tell him [Donald Trump] anything” because “you can’t trust him,” Reid said.
At the same time, Republican officials attacked Clinton.
In an open letter to CIA Director of Intelligence James Clapper, Speaker Paul Ryan wrote, “I am writing to formally request that you refrain from providing any classified information former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the duration of her candidacy for president.”
Ryan said that Clinton should be denied access to classified information because she had used private email service to send and received emails containing classified information during her time as secretary of state.
Clapper denied Ryan’s request.
“Nominees for president and vice president receive these briefings by virtue of their status as candidates, and do not require separate security clearances before the briefings,” Clapper wrote. “Briefings for the candidates will be provided on an even-handed non-partisan basis.”
The 448-page Mueller report, made public in April 2019, examined over 200 contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates.
And after a years-long FBI investigation, it was determined that Clinton’s server did not contain any information or emails that were clearly marked classified.
The central question is whether trump can be trusted with classified government secrets. He has shown by his actions and words that he would very likely compromise and weaponize U.S. intelligence secrets to benefit his presidential campaign. Trump also would be placing the nation in danger while discouraging other nations from trusting the U.S. with its own intelligence.
Essentially, it would be in character for trump to disclose intelligence that supports his beliefs and withhold information that contradicts his arguments.
His poor judgement was in full view after the August 2022 discovery of a stash of classified documents were found at trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Trump has been indicted for taking classified materials containing intelligence on nuclear weapons programs and information on the nation’s defense capabilities. Trump returned only a few of the documents and repeatedly tried to obstruct government efforts to retrieve the documents.
At one point, trump recklessly and cavalierly disclosed a top secret document during a meeting at his golf course in Bedminster. After leaving the White House, trump reportedly discussed sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines with an Australian billionaire who was a member of the Mar-a-Lago Club.
In May 2017, trump bragged about highly classified intelligence in a meeting with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador, providing details that could expose the source of the information and the manner in which it was collected, officials said. Trump disclosed secret information about an Islamic state plot in a meeting with Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S.
In 2019, Trump tweeted an image of a rocket that had exploded at an Iranian space center from what appeared to be an American surveillance photo of the site. The photo was a classified surveillance photo from American intelligence agencies. In 2022, , the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) formally declassified the original image.
Yet another concern would be whether trump would peddle sensitive information to offset his debts, which now stand at more than a half a billion dollars that he was ordered to pay after a conviction of fraud in New York.
Here is a summary of the 99 felony counts against trump, further cause for concern that he could distort intelligence information to falsely bolster his claims of innocence.
Trump was indicted for mishandling top secret documents at Mar-a-Lago. The indictment alleges that trump used aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators and that he showed off a Pentagon “plan of attack” and classified map. In all, Trump faces 40 felony charges in the classified documents case. The most serious charge carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.
A second case was an indictment on felony charges for working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump was indicted on criminal charges stemming from hush money payments he made during the 2016 presidential campaign to bury allegations of extramarital sexual encounters.
Trump and 18 others were charged with violating the state’s anti-racketeering law by scheming to illegally overturn his 2020 election loss.
In a civil case, trump was found guilty of duping banks and others with financial statements that inflated his wealth. A judge has ordered trump and his companies to pay $355 million, plus daily penalty charges.
In January, trump was ordered to pay $83.3 million to pay to E. Jean Carroll for his continued social media attacks against the longtime advice columnist over her claims that he sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store. He was already the subject of a $5 million sexual assault and defamation verdict last year from another jury in the case.