Former WH Press Secretary: Donald Trump has No Respect for Classified Documents – Former President Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, slamming Hillary Clinton for her lax handling of classified material with her server.
“In my administration, I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law,” Trump said during an August 2016 speech at a rally in North Carolina.
However, former White House Press Secretary and Communications Director Stephanie Grisham alleges that Trump’s actions and his rhetoric did not match while he was president. The sitting president showed a cavalier attitude about classified documents. Grisham served as press secretary for six months without having held a single press briefing in 2019-2020.
“I watched him show documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room patio,” Grisham said back in July. “So he has no respect for classified information, never did.”
Donald Trump Caught on Audio Allegedly Sharing Classified Document
Audio emerged back in the summer of Trump allegedly talking about classified documents that he allegedly showed to a reporter and staffers about Iran.
The former president claimed he showed them news articles. Such clippings frequently find their way into classified documents according to sources who have held high-level clearances. In the audio obtained by CNN, Trump can be heard ruffling through papers bragging about how the documents he had showed that Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley wanted to start a war with Iran and not him.
“He said that I wanted to attack Iran, Isn’t it amazing?” Trump said. “I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him. They presented me this – this is off the record but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.
Trump continued: “I was just thinking, because we were talking about it. And you know, he said, ‘He wanted to attack Iran, and what…’”
He then claimed he never declassified the document.
“See as president I could have declassified it,” Trump says. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
“Now we have a problem,” his staffer responds.
“Isn’t that interesting,” Trump says.
Grisham: Trump May Have Endangered Lives
Grisham back in July alleged this sort of behavior was par for the course with Trump.
“I can’t stress enough how by being so loose with this stuff, he’s potentially putting people in danger,” she said back in the summer. “It’s vital to our country and our national security that only people with these clearances have access to any of these documents.”
The indictment stated that documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago included documents related to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that includes the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States. The over 100 documents taken from Mar-a-Lago included ones from the CIA, NSA, National Reconnaissance Office, Department of Energy, and the State Department’s intelligence bureau among others.
The former president also allegedly showed a classified map to someone at his Bedminster, N.J. golf club in September 2021. Trump’s failure to live up to the standard he set himself as a candidate and to ensure the documents were not available to foreign intelligence operatives potentially could have put lives on the line. This is especially true if the documents contained the names of CIA operatives in the field.
John Rossomando was a senior analyst for Defense Policy and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
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