Will Joe Biden revoke Donald Trump's access to intelligence briefings? White House says it's 'under review'
The administration of President Joe Biden is assessing whether to take away the capacity of Donald Trump to get classified security briefings as a former president in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot. On Monday, February 1, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed that the president’s national security team was indeed reviewing the matter.
“This is a good question. It’s something that’s obviously under review,” she said when a reporter asked whether the current administration would “continue to extend the privilege” of classified information to the ex-president. The question of reviewing the Republican’s ability to get briefed came up as his critics demanded that he should be asked to relinquish some of the perks that a former president enjoys. One of them is to get classified briefings, although not at the highest levels like the incumbent.
Trump, the 45th president who failed to get a second term, skipped Biden's inauguration on January 20 after refusing to concede the 2020 presidential election, which he claimed to have been stolen. He said before leaving the White House that he will be back in some form and set up a former president’s office after moving to his luxury resort in Florida. Speculation is rife that the controversial businessman-politician will run for presidency again in 2024 though the Republican Party is seriously split at the moment over supporting Trump who was impeached last month by the House on charges of inciting the January 6 disturbance at the Capitol.
Trump has a small team of staff that is running out of Mar-a-Lago where he shifted after his term ended. Former presidents get a decent office stipend and Secret Service protection costing up to $1M annually. Even the former president’s adult children and two of their spouses besides some ex-officials are getting Secret Service protection for six months after the conclusion of his term, ABC News reported.
Even though it looks unlikely at the moment, if the Senate went on to convict Trump over the impeachment trial, it could see the former president losing his ability to hold any public office in future. It is not clear what perks Trump would lose if he were convicted.
Trump's controversial meetings with Russian FM, former envoy to US
Trump’s links with Russia have always been under the scanner when he was at the Oval Office. It was reported during his 2017 meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and former Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, that he revealed highly classified information about the Islamic State to the representatives from the Cold War enemy. It was reported that the intelligence related to the IS in Syria had been provided by Israel. CNN cited several officials of the previous administration to exclusively report that the US extracted a top-level source inside the Kremlin.
Also, Trump, who is now banned by Twitter, had once posted on the social media platform a classified photo of an Iranian nuclear installation. The former president said he was empowered to declassify things.
Weeks after Trump lost the presidential election, NBC News came up with a report on the same. It cited former intelligence officials who felt that Trump should not be made part of the tradition of consulting former presidents about some of the nation’s secrets, besides being granted access to. The report quoted Jack Goldsmith, a former senior justice department official in the George W Bush administration, as saying: "This is not something that one could have ever imagined with other presidents, but it's easy to imagine with this one.”
"He's shown as president that he doesn’t take secret-keeping terribly seriously," he said in an interview. "He has a known tendency to disrespect rules related to national security. And he has a known tendency to like to sell things that are valuable to him."
Meanwhile, when Psaki was asked by reporters on Monday whether the Biden administration was benefiting from Trump’s ban on Twitter, she said: “This may be hard to believe, we don't spend a lot of time talking about or thinking about President Trump here – former President Trump, to be very clear. I can’t say we miss him on Twitter.”