I am still quite agnostic as to whether or not there are any direct ties between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Much like SuperPacs always finding ways around election finance laws to coordinate with campaigns, I am sure there are ways for the two to signal to each other that it would be in their best interests to work toward common objectives, even if the ties are not there to see.
However, even if the evidence right now of ties between Trump and Russia is still flimsy, even if the majority of it is circumstantial, it needs to be investigated.
As a reminder: as the presumptive Republican nominee, Trump has already been or will soon be getting classified security briefings.
Weisberg: So how classified is the information you get into in those briefings? Is it comparable to the level of briefing a president gets when in office, or is it something short of that?
McLaughlin: Well, it’s very close. In my experience, this kind of varies from administration to administration in terms of how much freedom the briefer has to go deep. The briefer is going to have to be somewhat improvisational. You have some guidelines, but inevitably the candidate takes you to the things that are of interest to that person. Typically, the rule I always had in my mind was the candidate can be briefed on just about everything except things that are not widely shared within the national security team itself in the government.
So take, as an example, the operation that was mounted in 2011 to take down Bin Laden. If there had been a candidate briefing, say, two or three months before that operation, it almost certainly would not have been discussed because there were many people in senior levels of government who didn’t know about it. It was that tightly held. But beyond those things, I had freedom from the administration to go where I thought the candidate needed to go to understand an issue.
Even if the ties between Trump and Putin are not quite that concrete, it would not take much for him to slip up in one of his diatribes. Especially considering how fond Trump is of discussing NATO and other sensitive foreign policy issues, it is not outside the realm of plausibility to imagine him letting some classified information slip, something about what the US is doing or what the US knows, that could benefit Russia to know about us.
I no longer see this as being a matter of politics, or of an indictment on Wikileaks, Trump, or others. Until we understand the extent of the relationships between Trump and his organization and Russia and their institutions, the ability for the US to respond to Russian threats is seriously compromised.
There’s also the question of how much Trump’s financial ventures depend on Russian business. After all, when people are being given background checks for security clearance, their economic backgrounds are investigated as well. The thinking goes that an individual’s economic situation can make them susceptible to breaching security, such as through extortion or bribery. If Trump is financially invested heavily in certain Russian economic sectors, the question would invariably be how much certain information would be worth. How much would it be worth Trump to divulge state secrets?
Some classified information may not seem all that remarkable, but it can be highly critical that the US is able to protect such secrets. Even basic information about our technology and aircraft and vehicles can lead to those assets being compromised militarily. It can have a serious effect on our ability to defend ourselves, and the punishment for such breaches are correspondingly severe.
Now granted, I don’t expect Trump to be passing on things like our fighter plane specs. But the United States has operations and surveillance going on in all parts of the world; a minor slipup with information that is supposed to be classified could tip off something we are doing, that we do not want our enemies to know about yet. It would also certainly be quite easy for spy groups, though almost impossible to detect, to set up means to communicate with Trump or people within his organization, and then find ways to exchange information and/or resources. This is the Donald Trump who is quite fond of making deals, after all.
Has the United States ever been in such a position that a potential Commander-In-Chief could also potentially be one of its biggest threats to its security?
Either way, discretion on Trump’s part is not enough to ensure critical information does not get into the hands of organizations like Russia’s intelligence agencies. If there are ways for them to put pressure on Trump, we should know about it, as our country would with most any other US citizen who has the potential to compromise security concerns.
And yes, it is also drawn to my mind how overzealously Congressional Republicans have investigated Clinton’s emails. If anything, there should be pressure on Congressional Republicans to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia as thoroughly as they investigated Clinton. While the threats posed by classified leaks of Clinton’s emails were more theoretical than actual, Trump’s ties to Russia are at least equally plausibly a threat to securing US classified info.
Even now, these same Republicans want to prevent Clinton from getting classified briefings:
Congressional Republicans, following the FBI probe into Clinton's handling of classified information on her private server, have sought to block the presumptive Democratic nominee's access to classified intelligence.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, wrote a letter to James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, requesting that Clinton be denied access to such briefings, but was rebuffed.
If they are so intent on safeguarding America’s security, as they ostensibly claim to be, they should be demanding the same level of scrutiny of Trump that they demanded of Clinton. And if they won’t, perhaps we should be questioning them on how much they really love our country’s servicemen and women, if they are so willing to put those same servicemen and women at risk while overseas, to protect a political ally.
Even if it turns out Trump is not doing anything overtly to help the Russians, the potential is there, so at the very least we need to have a better idea of where we most have to be vigilant, and Trump should not be able to plead special treatment to get around such basic precautions.