Trump was 'waving around' the lives of our spies for his own sense of entitlement: Ex-DOJ lawyer
June 23, 2023
Former DOJ Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Mary McCord tore into former President Donald Trump for the cavalier way he put lives at risk with his hoard of highly classified national defense information at Mar-a-Lago on MSNBC Friday.
"The 49 pages of Jack Smith's indictment of mishandling and willful retention of classified documents are full of things that no normal president says or does, but here we are," said anchor Nicolle Wallace. "I wonder what you think of this moment in terms of mistakes for U.S. national security."
"I think sometimes when we discuss, you know, this prosecution and, you know, Andrew [Weissman] and I sometimes get into the details on our podcast as former prosecutors, but I think what sometimes gets lost is exactly what you're pointing out, Nicolle, the information we're talking about here that the former president handled so carelessly for his own political purposes," said McCord. "So even if we accept him at his word, right, even if we accept him saying these documents were mine, of course I could take them, they're all mine under the Presidential Records Act — which is incorrect — but if we accept that, he was basically taking people's lives, waving them around publicly, keeping them in box where is they were vulnerable to being exposed to our adversaries, putting them at harm's risk, all so, I guess, he could feel good about having access to things that he felt like he was entitled to."
Notably, McCord added, "never once have you heard him express any concern about the people who have spent their lives' work collecting intelligence to protect our national security, oftentimes putting themselves at great risk and dying."
"I'll just tell you a little anecdote," continued McCord. "When I first came over from the U.S. Attorney's office to the Department of Justice National Security Division, about a month later, the FBI and our military did a capture operation in Libya to capture Abu Khattalah, who we had indicted and charged for crimes related to the attack on our mission in Benghazi, Libya, killing a sitting ambassador and three others, including three other members of our intelligence community. And I didn't sleep the entire night, so worried about the safety of the people who were risking their lives to capture this person, bring him back to be held accountable if a U.S. court for responsibility for killing U.S. nationals. And that's the depth of it, right."
"But you wouldn't get any sense at all from Mr. Trump that he has any recognition of the seriousness of what's in those documents or that he cares," McCord added. "They are just political tools for him."
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