(C) Daily Montanan This story was originally published by Daily Montanan and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Trump's classified document debacle endangers more than 100,000 Americans – Daily Montanan [1] ['More From Author', 'July', 'Steve Corbin'] Date: 2023-07-03 Under the U.S. Constitution, the president is Commander in Chief, with ultimate responsibility for the safety and security of the United States and its citizens. That means using wise judgement to protect more than 330 million citizens. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence – including past and current presidents — knows the U.S. employs about 100,000 consultants and foreign nationals to collect, support and safe guard America’s security information. About 6,000 of this group are employees of CIA’s Division of Clandestine Services who are, predominantly, working abroad. It’s a worthy side note that one expert estimates there are about 100,000 foreign agents (i.e., spies) from around 60 to 80 nations operating in America. Former and current leaders of these nations – I’m sure – are doing everything in their power to keep their security information under lock and key just as we “should” do in the U.S. America’s agents trust their identity will be kept confidential so they may be effective at accomplishing the specific role they’ve been assigned. Knowing our democracy has different presidents, the agents trust their identity plus their work will not only be kept under strict confidentiality by the current president, but by past presidents and all personnel who have ever known who they are and what they do. It’s safe to say it’s critical to protect the identities of its agents, their families and their confidential informants. Anyone who thinks otherwise must be narcissistic. Donald J. Trump, America’s 45th president, put – at least — 100,000 fellow Americans in peril by his purposeful mishandling and showing classified documents to people who didn’t have security clearances. Our agents thought their classified documents would be stored in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) office. Wrong! As pointed out by Heather Cox Richardson’s June 11 blog, Trump also endangered employees of the CIA, Department of Defense, National Security Agency, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, Department of Energy and State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Avraham Shama, in writing for The Hill, notes of the 100,000 spies, consultants and foreign nationals who support America’s security information: “Many live under cover, leading double lives, lying to family and friends about who they are and what they do, living on edge thinking about what might happen to them if they were to be exposed.” Trump’s careless actions just exposed 100,000 Americans, threw them under the bus, put them in harm’s way; many will quit, which will further erode U.S. intelligence gathering capability. Steve Schmidt, a strategist for John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger and George W. Bush’s Republican campaigns said, “There is no person who has ever held a security clearance and been trusted with government secrets who is not shocked, dismayed and alarmed after reading the (Trump) indictment. Any person who cares about America’s national security would be. … It is far more dangerous to our future than Trump’s alleged criminality.”. As Richardson notes, “Trump was not charged of illegally keeping any of the 197 documents he returned. He was charged only for ones he kept, lied about, showed to other people, and hid.” The GOP’s revered former Attorney General Bill Barr told CBS recently, “had the President just returned the documents. But he jerked them around for a year-and-a-half.” In the Wall Street Journal’s June 12 issue, Alan Dershowitz, Trump’s attorney in 2020, notes “tape-recorded conversations form the basis for several charges under the Espionage Act. … The reason this recording is so powerful is that it is self-proving. It doesn’t rely on testimony by flipped witnesses or antagonists of Mr. Trump. It is the kind of evidence every defense lawyer dreads and every prosecutor dreams about.” As the Wall Street Journal, owned by Republican Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., noted in its June 10-11 editorial, “Republicans deserve a more competent champion with better character than Mr. Trump.” Trump’s lack of “character” and self-centered behavior has endangered hundreds of thousands of Americans. Anyone who supports Trump – at this juncture – has not thought through how many fellow Americans he’s put in harm’s way. Their patriotism is now under challenge. [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2023/07/03/trumps-classified-document-debacle-endangers-more-than-100000-americans/ Published and (C) by Daily Montanan Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/montanan/