During a segment on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," national security expert Ken Dilanian explained that an out-of-office Donald Trump is a threat to the United States and that incoming President Joe Biden might be forced to ask that an FBI team monitor his movements out of fears he will trade top secrets in return for favors from foreign governments.
Speaking with host Joe Scarborough, Dilanian said Biden is already being faced with the question of whether he will allow Trump to receive reports from U.S. intelligence services as has been the custom with previous presidents once out of office.
"What my national security sources say he fits the security risk, he's deeply in debt and you have people like former Bush administration official Jack Goldsmith openly speculating that Donald Trump may well sell secrets," Dilanian reported. "Goldsmith told me he's worried that a foreign country will put Trump on retainer to get the information in his head. As we know, Donald Trump is more than $400 million in debt and it's held by a foreign bank with ties to Russian oligarchs -- so there's that question. But even if you put that aside and say, look, Donald Trump is not going to commit a federal crime and sell the secrets in his head or some he might get, but then there's the record of indiscretions and carelessness with classified information."
"I think it certainly would be reasonable and rational for intel -- the intel community -- to be concerned that this guy could trade information through a third party to be able to get -- start building a tower in a country that wants desperately needs information from the United States that they can't get," host Scarborough interjected. "So what in the world could be done?"
"Well, I'm not sure what could be done," the national security w expert conceded. "I mean, if Joe Biden assigns an FBI counterintelligence team to monitor Donald Trump, imagine how that would go over."
"We have never had a former president with these kind of foreign business entanglements," he added. "Even leaving aside the massive debts that we know that Donald Trump is in, just the idea that he has current or the possible business deals in adversary countries like Russia and China and his close relationship with the Gulf Arabs, with Saudi Arabia, that raises so many questions. In fact, somebody with that profile would never under normal circumstances be given a security clearance."
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