He’s been spilling even more nuclear secrets but his hand-picked judge in Florida continues to protect him by slow-walking the trial
A delay to consider how long to delay the trial. Trump’s documents case, in Judge Cannon’s hands, is going nowhere fast. https://t.co/GxcTZhkqK0
— Steven Mazie (@stevenmazie) October 6, 2023
We just learned that Donald Trump has been whispering American nuclear secrets in the ears of his Mar-a-lago members and they’ve been spreading them around to anyone who will listen.
Torri Otten at TNR reminds us of all the other times he’s done this:
Trump allegedly told Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt in April 2021 that Australia should start buying its submarines from the U.S. Trump then told Pratt the supposed exact number of nuclear warheads a U.S. sub can carry, and how close it can supposedly get to a Russian sub without being detected, ABC News reported late Thursday, citing anonymous sources.
Pratt then told at least 45 other people—including six journalists, 11 employees at his company, 10 Australian officials, and three former Australian prime ministers—about Trump’s comments before he was approached by special counsel Jack Smith’s team.
Smith’s team was looking into whether Trump had mishandled national security secrets after leaving the White House. Pratt told investigators he didn’t know if Trump’s comments were true or just showing off, but investigators told him to stop sharing the numbers, “suggesting the information could be too sensitive to relay further,” ABC wrote.
Smith indicted Trump two years later for hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Of the 40 total charges against Trump, 32 are for willful retention of national defense information. He is accused of keeping an array of classified national security material after leaving the White House, despite being unauthorized to do so.
The incident with Pratt is far from the first time that Trump shared classified information with people unauthorized to hear it. In May 2017, Trump shared highly classified information with the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador to the United States that the U.S. hasn’t shared with some of its closest allies. Current and former U.S. officials warned that Trump had jeopardized a crucial intelligence source on the Islamic State group.
Later that month, Trump told then-Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte that the U.S. had positioned two nuclear submarines off the Korean peninsula. The locations of nuclear subs are meant to be kept secret, as a matter of national security. In fact, only the captains and crews know the sub’s exact location.
Then, in July 2017, CNN reported that the U.S. was forced to extract a spy embedded in the Russian government after concerns that Trump had shared classified information that could have exposed them.
Rather than learn his lesson, Trump met privately with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the G20 summit (also in July 2017). Trump confiscated the interpreter’s notes at the end of the meeting, an unusual move that led intelligence officials to believe he had shared more classified information.
Trump tweeted a video in December 2018 of the Al Asad Airbase in Iraq, exposing a SEAL team’s faces and location. The next year, he bragged about U.S. nuclear weapons capabilities to reporter Bob Woodward and tweeted photos that revealed the location of U.S. spy satellites.
And of course, it didn’t stop after he left office. One of the documents he allegedly kept detailed a plan to attack Iran. He is accused of waving the paper around in front of people.
I guess it’s pointless to mention that he’s the putative GOP nominee for president again which suggest that his voters think this is all just fine. Either they think everyone is lying about these incidents or they believe that Dear Leader knows best and that sharing nuclear secrets with an Australian rando is some kind of savvy, high level strategy. Or maybe they just don’t give a damn about American national security.
Either way, it’s pretty frightening. Their idol is simply too stupid to keep his mouth shut and may very well have given/sold equally valuable secrets to those “friends” of his who have a keen interest in getting them. And there doesn’t seem to be any way to persuade them that this is a problem despite their shrill, shrieking denunciations of Hillary Clinton for sending emails of far, far less value to our adversaries over a private email server. But then, they are shameless so that argument is completely pointless too.
Speaking of which, the right wing is having a full-blown meltdown over her comments yesterday suggesting that the right may need a “formal de-programming.” She’s right. It’s a cult. Nothing shows it more than the Republican party’s indifference to the fact that their leader is under indictment for 91 felonies, is on trial for fraud, has been found liable for rape, is credibly accused of stealing classified information and sharing it with unauthorized people and trying to overturn a legitimate election. If that isn’t a cult, I don’t know what is.