All posts tagged "Classified Information"

MSNBC editor Steve Benen couldn't believe the words that came out of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's mouth Tuesday regarding his handling of classified information.

Hegseth spent part of the morning on Fox News defending his use of the unsecured Signal chat app to disseminate the timing and coordinates of a Houthi airstrike in Yemen.

Benen referenced a clip in which Hegseth said, "There's a reason why our nation's most closely held secrets are contained in certain places with only access from certain people. Nobody takes that more seriously than me."...

Former President Donald Trump's one-time Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor recounted an incident in his book "Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump" in which White House staffers were afraid he had exposed classified information to reporters, said NBC News on Friday.

Trump is now under indictment for Espionage Act violations and obstruction of justice, after he hoarded boxes of highly classified military secrets at his Mar-a-Lago country club in South Florida. One of his top aides who allegedly helped him conceal the boxes from authorities, Walt Nauta, is also facing charges.

"Miles Taylor, who was a top aide to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, writes about the 2018 episode in a book set to be published this month," reported Peter Nicholas. "As a sitting president at the time, Trump had broad powers to declassify information. Yet the incident Taylor describes suggests that his aides still believed he needed to show more care toward state secrets — an issue that landed him in legal peril after he left office and took sensitive records with him."...

A top Donald Trump 2024 campaign advisor who prosecutors allege viewed classified documents is employed by a firm with links to China that poses a potential national security threat and enables human rights abuses, The New York Post reports.

Susan Wiles serves as co-chair of Mercury Public Affairs, which has taken millions of dollars from several high-profile Chinese companies including Yealink, Hikvision, and Alibaba.

Wiles also served on the staff of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 2018 gubernatorial run. ...

Former President Donald Trump has staked out a claim that he has the right to declassify documents whenever he wants and for whatever reason, as a defense to the criminal investigation into classified documents stashed at his Mar-a-Lago resort. That attitude is likely to cost him should charges actually go to trial, argued former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance on MSNBC Wednesday.

"So this is from last summer," said anchor Joy Reid. "Ludicrous, ridiculous, complete fiction, former Trump officials claim that he had a standing order to declassify documents. 18 former top Trump administration officials have told CNN that they never heard any such order issued during the time working for Trump and that they believe the claim to be patently false. Several officials laughed at this idea. If there was a magical declassification system that doesn't exist, Donald Trump never said to anyone at the time contemporaneously that he was declassifying things. That seems to me to also be a problem."

Vance agreed, saying, "I think it is a problem."...

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) suggested President Barack Obama might be a terrorist supporter and said he’s considered releasing classified information to hurt the administration.

FORT MEADE, Maryland (Reuters) - Washington had to restrict access to an intelligence-sharing system after the biggest leak of classified information in U.S. history, a former official said on Friday at the sentencing hearing of Bradley Manning, the soldier convicted of the leaks.