Everybody Scared Ex-President Trump Will Leak Secrets To Our Enemies, Just Like Current President Trump
Parts of this nightmare will endure for years.
One of the biggest fears of the presidency of Donald Trump, one that was realized almost immediately upon his taking office, was that he is a man who has zero business knowing our nation's secrets. The day after he fired FBI Director James Comey, he had these Russians in the Oval with him, and told them how great it was that he had gotten rid of that CRAZY GUY, and that now that Comey was gone, he was totally free to hot tub it up with the Russians.
Then, as a show of good faith, and as a way of impressing the Russians, he jizzed a bunch of highly classified intelligence we got from the Israelis all over those Russians, in the Oval. Code-word level intel. He just spit it out.
Throughout Trump's presidency, this has been a worry. It was a worry with our highest-level spy embedded in the Kremlin, who eventually had to be extracted under mysterious circumstances. He tweets out operational information about military positions, as well as covert US satellite images. He blurts out classified intel in press briefings. Remember when he blabbed to Bob Woodward about a secret nuclear weapons system nobody was supposed to know about?
He is, in short, a fucking moron, and the gravest risk to American national security since Osama bin Laden.
And now, the Washington Post reports, officials are worried he will use his post-presidency to jizz out more state secrets he never had any business knowing in the first place. This, of course, would undermine President Biden, and endanger American national security even MOREFUCKINGMORE. In short, this is one big wayTrump will be destroying America long after Merry Maids gets rid of the smells he left all over the White House.
All presidents exit the office with valuable national secrets in their heads, including the procedures for launching nuclear weapons, intelligence-gathering capabilities — including assets deep inside foreign governments — and the development of new and advanced weapon systems.
He knows where covert spies are. Or, we should say, he knows whatever they've let him know, or whatever he remembers, from the intelligence briefings he is too toddler-stupid to pay attention to. So maybe he doesn't actually know where spies are. This is the counterpoint to the argument that it's absolutely terrifying that Trump will take state secrets out of office with him. His brain may actually not contain much, on balance.
"A knowledgeable and informed president with Trump's personality characteristics, including lack of self-discipline, would be a disaster. The only saving grace here is that he hasn't been paying attention," said Jack Goldsmith, who ran the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department in the George W. Bush administration[.]
Of course, the Post 's sources note that Trump is VERY MAD AT AMERICA, a country he never really seemed to love in the first place, and whose troops he views as losers. This makes him literally prime rib for American adversaries seeking to use him to gain intel:
Not only does Trump have a history of disclosures, he checks the boxes of a classic counterintelligence risk: He is deeply in debt and angry at the U.S. government, particularly what he describes as the "deep state" conspiracy that he believes tried to stop him from winning the White House in 2016 and what he falsely claims is an illegal effort to rob him of reelection.
Basically, he's THE EASIEST mark for the next Russian or Chinese spy who wants to engage him as an asset once he's out of office. He may not know it all, or his brain may not be capable of processing much, but he knows some stuff.
What else could Trump blab? "One former official imagined Trump boasting about the technical features of Air Force One, or where the United States had dispatched spy drones," says the Post . That should make President Biden sleep well at night, on Air Force One.
Also:
Experts agreed that the biggest risk Trump poses out of office is the clumsy release of information. But they didn't rule out that he might trade secrets, perhaps in exchange for favors, to ingratiate himself with prospective clients in foreign countries or to get back at his perceived enemies. When he leaves office, Trump will be facing a crushing amount of debt, including hundreds of millions of dollars in loans that he has personally guaranteed.
Oh yeah. And we still don't know exactly to whom Trump really owes all those hundreds of millions.
Can President Biden do anything about this? The Post says Biden might cut off Trump's access to the classified briefings other ex-presidents get, because as former CIA guy and author David Priess points out in the Post , within that tradition is embedded the idea that current presidents might need to call former presidents for advice, and thus it's good for the ex-prez to know what the new prez knows.
Everybody pause to laugh at the idea of Joe Biden needing to call upon the national security expertise of Donald Trump.
If all of this alarms you, you can always go to Politico, where Natasha Bertrand reports that everybody's freaked out the Trump administration will likely flagrantly violate the law and destroy all kinds of its own records, especially intelligence secrets, like the READ THE TRANSCRIPTS! of his top secret calls with foreign leaders that got stuffed in the Bin Laden vault.
This quote should be comforting to you:
Asked about their compliance with records laws, a White House official said, "We preserve everything we have to preserve." Pressed on whether anything had been deleted from the National Security Council's code word classified system — where some transcripts of Trump's calls with foreign leaders have been hidden — the official replied: "I'm not going to talk about any of that. But we comply with everything. Like, we're really actually not criminals."
Actually .
And then there's the way Trump people like Jared Kushner use encrypted apps like WhatsApp to hide their contacts with foreign officials like the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and the way they all use personal and private BUT HER EMAILS!, and the way Trump goes to "extraordinary lengths" to hide his conversations with Putin, even one time stealing the translator's notes, and yeah, wow, that fucker is going to be a national security threat for generations to come.
[ Washington Post / Politico ]
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Someone (Frank Figluzzi??) had mentioned this some time ago on Nicole's show. Scared the fuck out of me.With everything else going on, I had forgotten about that.Now, another reason to keep me from sleeping. Fuck