Let us set the dials on the Wayback machine for 43 years … or wait, can it really just be four months?
“Hillary Clinton … sent classified information, even during her travels overseas, jeopardizing the national security of the American people by allowing her emails to be hacked by foreign intelligence services,” Trump’s campaign website declared. But it wasn’t just Clinton who was the target of his criticism: The Democratic National Committee got hacked because it didn’t have a “very strong defense system against hacking” the way the Republicans did.
From the way in which national security was a central part of his campaign, it might be expected that Trump would sign one of those executive orders putting some hard restrictions on how every jot and tittle of government information is handled. But Trump does like to be unpredictable … and who would have predicted that all his talk about national security was just that. Talk.
As Mar-a-Lago's wealthy members looked on from their tables, and with a keyboard player crooning in the background, Trump and Abe's evening meal quickly morphed into a strategy session, the decision-making on full view to fellow diners, who described it in detail to CNN.
In just the last week, Trump also left the locked bag open and accessible to non-approved White House visitors, and we learned that Michael Flynn has been sharing phone calls, texts, and emails with the Russian ambassador over an unsecured line.
During that talk at Mar-a-lago, Flynn was very helpful in shining a light onto security documents from his mobile phone.
Why is this important? Mobile phones have flashlights, yes — and cameras, microphones and Internet connectivity.
That’s the National Security Adviser completely ignoring the most basic principles of security. Not only was Flynn’s phone directly focused on documents, other cameras around the room were focused on Trump and his team, with absolutely no effort to secure the room.
How critical conversations should be handled when the president is on the road.
How those discussions were handled on Saturday by Trump.
It’s not just the phones of Flynn and other advisers that are both insecure and being used in ways that violate basic security protocol. Mr. Oh-Those-Horrible-Emails may be the most careless of all.
“Donald Trump for the longest time has been using a insecure Android phone that by all reports is so easy to compromise, it would not meet the security requirements of a teenager,” Weaver told NPR, and while he couldn’t say for sure, “we must assume that his phone has actively been compromised for a while, and a actively compromised phone is literally a listening device.”
It’s not just a matter of US intelligence ending up in the hands of the nation’s enemies. The sloppiness of the Trump regime is such that allied intelligence agencies are already building an intelligence wall around the United States. Long-serving members of the intelligence community are even warning our allies to pull down the storm shutters.
US spies warned their Israeli counterparts that Russia may have “levers of pressure” over Donald Trump and told them to be careful about sharing intelligence with the White House in case it was passed on to the Kremlin, according to Israeli media reports.
The result of Donald Trump’s casual disregard and open disdain for security is a genuine loss of intelligence, and a genuine increase in the threat both at home and overseas.