Politics - News Analysis

Experts Warn Trump Was an Easy Target for Foreign Spies, ‘When it Comes to Trump, These Techniques Work’

Let’s face it, Donald Trump was a neophyte in politics when he was elected president, who probably had no idea how foreign relations really work. It could be said that he didn’t seem to learn much during his four years in the highest office in the land.

And a veteran former FBI agent has now revealed that there are recordings of the former president sharing sensitive national security information with foreign guests at Mar-a-Lago, meaning Trump was probably an easy target for foreign spies, RawStory reports.

Long before leaving office, Trump had many discussions with Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt at Mar-a-Lago about the U.S.’s nuclear submarine capabilities. That’s not even the half of it. Trump also discussed this information with roughly 45 individuals. This includes six journalists, 10 Australian government officials, and three former Australian prime ministers. Heck, Trump even talked this up with 11 employees of his own company.

That’s astonishing. Hell, it leaves me dumbfounded.

But during a recent MSNBC panel discussion, host Nicolle Wallace and a number of national security experts — among them: former U.S. Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Mary McCord, former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissman, and Peter Strzok, a former FBI counterintelligence official, mulled over how these reports reveal the transactional nature of the Trump presidency and the ease in which Trump revealed this highly classified information.

“It is clear that one of the ways [Trump] used this classified information is to make somebody look bad, or to impress somebody,” Strzok told Wallace. “But guess what? Every intelligence service in the world, including the CIA here at home or overseas in Russia and China are well aware of using the exact same motivations to extract classified information.”

It’s typical of Trump to use information like this for his own personal gain, but he could have walked the U.S. into some horrible news by doing this.

“Those are exactly the ways a hostile foreign intelligence service would seek to elicit classified intelligence from him,” Strzok said. “When it comes to Trump, these techniques work.”

This information will likely give Special Counsel Jack Smith some ammunition. Smith is currently prosecuting Trump for his role in the January 6 attack and for the alleged mishandling of classified documents, and he’s talked to Pratt as the Mar-a-Lago investigation continued. This has led Mary McCord to speculate that by questioning Pratt, this will help Smith prove that Trump was completely aware of what he was doing when he shared this sensitive information and that he just didn’t care.

“The case will be stronger if it shows how careless Mr. Trump was with national security information,” McCord said. “These are things that are, high likelihood of being highly classified, and his willingness to tell people, really for his own transactional, sort of business, personal sort of interest about them, will likely be admissible to show Mr. Trump’s intent, his knowledge, the absence of any mistake… it will be Jack Smith’s burden to prove the intentional or the knowing, at least, mishandling of that classified information.”

So, you could say there’s an interesting conundrum here — Trump was sharing the nation’s deepest and most dangerous secrets, and now we are learning all of his. I’m confident this trial will continue to unwind more and more of this man’s secrets and then we’ll really know who he is.

meet the author

Megan has lived in California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida and she currently lives in Central America. Living in these places has informed her writing on politics, science, and history. She is currently owned by 15 cats and 3 dogs and regularly owns Trump supporters when she has the opportunity. She can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/GaiaLibra and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/politicalsaurus

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