U.S. Intelligence Officials: Hillary Clinton And Donald Trump Can’t Be Trusted With State Secrets
Senior U.S. intelligence officials expressed concern over pre-election briefings of “Top Secret” information to presidential frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump once they become the official nominees.
According to The Hill, eight security officials told Reuters that they feel uneasy with Trump’s “shoot from the hip” style and Hillary’s FBI probe on whether she comprised national security by using a private email server.
“People are very nervous,” said a senior U.S. security official.
While pre-election briefings are mostly a broad overview of national security intelligence and do not contain the most sensitive government secrets, Wong says the nominees are warned not to share details.
The briefings usually provide an “overview of pressing issues and hot spots around the world,” former CIA officer David Priess told Reuters.
“If (Trump) reads the papers every day, he won’t hear much that will surprise him,” one U.S. intelligence official.
Breitbart News reports that these new revelations could give the FBI the evidence needed to indict Hillary per the Espionage Act for mishandling national defense information through “gross negligence.”
Officials are now concerned, however, that Clinton may have exposed several names of concealed U.S. intelligence assets around the world while using her unprotected email server.
“The only candidate who has proven incapable of handling sensitive information is Hillary Clinton,” Michael Short, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, told Reuters. “If there is anyone they should be worried about it is Hillary Clinton.”
A number of redacted names were cited in the State Department’s email release, per the Freedom of Information Act, with the designation code”B3 CIA PERS/ORG,” which suggests a highly specialized classification, according to Breitbart.
Newsweek also cites a retired senior State Department military adviser who said that Clinton’s email server had “sloppy communications with her senior staff” and may have compromised at least two counter-terrorism operations.
“I had several missions that went inexplicably wrong, with the targets one step ahead of us,” Bill Johnson, who was the State Department’s political adviser to the special operations section of the U.S. Pacific Command, told Newsweek in an interview. “We had good intel. We knew where he was, we knew he was getting tipped off somehow. We just didn’t know why.”
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on the other hand, defended Hillary on Friday by claiming that “nobody is going to die” from her unsecured server.
“She has said she made a mistake, and nobody is going to die as a result of anything that happened on emails,” Albright, who is a Clinton surrogate, told CNN.
Rwanda. 800,000 dead. Genocide. #KeepYourAdvice #clintonemails
Albright:Nobody is going to die from Clinton emails https://t.co/1GxIVm8IYP
— Ben Collins (@BenCollins1776) June 3, 2016
Albright then expressed concerns over Trump’s statements regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin and general foreign policy experience.
“I am concerned about some of the statements that Donald Trump has made that are dangerous,” Albright said. “On the issue of Russia, the fact that Donald Trump admires Putin is one of the reasons that I can’t agree with a word he says because the reset takes two to reset.”
“Donald Trump’s ideas are not just different, they are dangerously incoherent,” she said to a room of supporters in San Diego, California. “They’re not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies.”
Fortunately, intelligence officials told Reuters that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will not have access to sensitive covert operations, which are among the nation’s most tightly guarded secrets, during pre-election briefings.
[Photo by Kevin Lamarque/AP Images]
