CNN's Kate Bolduan was moved to a double-wow reaction to a veteran national security official's explanation of the risks posed by President Donald Trump accepting a luxury jet from a foreign nation.
The president is facing bipartisan backlash for accepting a $400 million Boeing 747-8 "flying palace" from the Qatar royal family, and Brett McGurk, who served as a diplomat and national security official for multiple presidents, said the gift was undercutting Trump's overseas trip to the Middle East.
"What the president did in Saudi Arabia, meeting with the president of Syria and announcing that we will lift sanctions on Syria to a standing ovation from the Arab leaders, that is a bold move," McGurk said. "It's the right thing to do, and now you have the Iran talks ongoing because Iran is in the weakest position it's been in decades, and there's a chance here for a good nuclear deal. So overall, I think this is a really good trip in terms of foreign policy."
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Trump intends to use the plane as Air Force One before its ownership is turned over to his presidential library, and McGurk said that was ludicrously impractical and unsafe.
"Again, the plane thing makes no sense," McGurk said. "I'll just give one other example. You know, whenever you get a anything as a U.S. government official, I'll just give an example. I was involved in the last administration in helping to defend Israel against hundreds of Iranian ballistic missiles, and the Israeli chief of defense, who's now the chief of defense, gave us, my office, a shard of one of the interceptors that took down an Iranian missile that had to go for inspections just to make sure it was secure, there were no devices. I didn't get it back for almost a month, so to retrofit a plane to be Air Force One, I don't even think it could be done in Trump's first term. So that is just a bad idea."
Bolduan was stunned by his example.
"Wow, wow," she said. "I mean, that is maybe the most perfect example of these security concerns – like, times a billion – that would be involved here."
