During election years, the nominees for the major parties are given daily intelligence briefings from the current administration. Many spies are concerned that Donald Trump will leak the sensitive information that he will receive.
A former U.S. Intelligence Officer said:
“My concern with Trump will be that he inadvertently leaks, because as he speaks extemporaneously, he’ll pull something out of his hat that he heard in a briefing and say it.”
Trump just keeps posting everything he’s thinking on his Twitter accounts. He has been talking about many conspiracy theories in his speeches.
He has been accused of regurgitating any information that comes across his desk. Most recently, he said the Ted Cruz’s father helped assassinate JFK. So far, Trump has not shown that he is stable enough to receive classified information. But, out of tradition, they will have briefings with Clinton’s team as well as Trump’s.
Obama gets to determine how much information the candidates receive. Hopefully Trump will get the bare minimum. Since Hillary Clinton has been Secretary of State before, the officials probably won’t hesitate when giving her information.
Trump is the same man that sent private detectives to Hawaii to prove that President Obama was born there. He has said that he saw Muslims celebrating in the streets in New Jersey on 9/11. Also, he called it 7-11 instead of 9/11.
Trump also thinks that Antonin Scalia was murdered.
Another former intelligence official said:
“It’s not an unreasonable concern that he’ll talk publicly about what’s supposed to stay in that room.”
This tradition started in the early 1950s under President Harry Truman. He told the CIA to share information with Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson.
Rep. Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee said:
“The practice of providing intelligence briefings to the presidential nominees of both parties is a sound one. Whether it is premature in the case of Donald Trump is one question; whether it would do any good is another.”
They already have a plan to start briefing the nominees after they are announced this summer. The briefings will get more comprehensive as the election gets closer.
Let’s all just hope that Trump doesn’t post nuclear codes on Twitter.
Featured image via Flickr, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
