Security Experts Fear State Secrets Won't Be Safe With Indebted Donald Trump
Security experts are raising concerns about the safety of state secrets accessible to Donald Trump, particularly as massive debts on his businesses come due.
Trump already has access to secrets that could be devastating to the U.S. if they were leaked or sold. In addition, presidents typically continue to be briefed on national security in certain circumstances even after they leave office, NBC News reports.
Trump has proven to be dangerously reckless with intelligence and confoundingly supportive of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But classified information could also now represent a “profit center” to the heavily indebted president, according to NBC. The New York Times recently reported that Trump owes $421 million in business debt that he has personally guaranteed. Forbes investigations have indicated Trump could owe closer to $1 billion.
“Is that a risk?” former CIA officer and author of “The President’s Book of Secrets” David Preiss asked in an NBC interview. “If it were someone applying for a security clearance, damn right it would be a risk.”
Such concern about state secrets is “not something that one could have ever imagined with other presidents, but it’s easy to imagine with this one,” Jack Goldsmith, who worked as a senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, told NBC.
“He’s shown as president that he doesn’t take secret-keeping terribly seriously,” Goldsmith added. “He has a known tendency to disrespect rules related to national security. And he has a known tendency to like to sell things that are valuable to him.”
Former CIA officer Doug Wise noted in a piece in Just Security earlier this month that Trump’s large debts pose “obvious and alarming counterintelligence risks” to the U.S.
“A frightening scenario is where the owners of Trump’s debt or actors like Putin who have the massive capacity to make him debt free pressure Trump into making decisions that are
