Biden says Trump should not receive intelligence briefings
Bt Benjamin Din
Politico
February 5, 2021
President Joe Biden says Donald Trump should not receive intelligence briefings now that he’s no longer in office.
The former president’s “erratic behavior, unrelated to the insurrection” disqualified him from receiving intelligence briefings, a courtesy typically extended to former presidents after they have left office, Biden told CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell in an interview excerpt that aired Friday.
In the clip, Biden questioned why Trump would need to receive the briefings.
“What value is giving him an intelligence briefing?” he said. “What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?”
Biden’s remarks in his first sit-down network interview as president — set to air in full before Sunday’s Super Bowl game — are his strongest to date on the topic. In a previous White House briefing, press secretary Jen Psaki said the decision to restrict Trump's access to intelligence briefings was still under review and would be up to the discretion of intelligence officials.
“You’ve called him an existential threat,” O’Donnell said in the interview. “You’ve called him dangerous. You’ve called him reckless.”
“Yeah, I have. And I believe it,” the president responded.
Even before Trump left office, several high-profile Democrats had called on Biden to take the action.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that Trump should be barred from intelligence briefings.
“There's no circumstance in which this president should get another intelligence briefing, not now, not in the future,” Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said days before the inauguration. "I don't think he can be trusted with it now and in the future."
Sue Gordon, Trump’s former principal deputy director of national intelligence, argued in an op-ed published in The Washington Post that Trump “might be unusually vulnerable to bad actors with ill intent” because of his intention to remain in politics.
Such concerns have long swirled around the ex-president, dating back to his first presidential campaign in 2016 when Trump offered up a politicized readout of the confidential national security briefings he received as the GOP nominee, setting off alarm bells in the intelligence community.
If Trump were to lose access to the intelligence briefings, it would be a stunning reversal for a president who once threatened to revoke the clearances of Obama-era officials who were critical of the Trump administration.
1 comment:
If I were President Trump I would not want intelligence briefings. When I left my position in LE I shut down all my access passwords and cleaned my computer hard drive. I didn't want any of my old cases left on my computer so I reverted it back to factory memory. I had several cases pending in court so I kept the hard copies. After 3 years of retirement I've only been called to testify once.
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