Trump on track for intel briefings despite alleged classified docs compromise

08 March 2024

When former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley ended her campaign after Super Tuesday, doubts that anyone other than Donald Trump will be the 2024 GOP presidential nominee were eliminated.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, President Joe Biden's fiery State of the Union speech on Thursday night, March 7 made it clear that he is quite serious about defeating likely nominee Trump in November.

All this comes at a time when Trump is facing four criminal indictments, one of which is special counsel Jack Smith's Mar-a-Lago documents case. Smith alleges that Trump endangered the United States' national security by storing classified government documents at Mar-a-Lago after leaving office.

But despite the criminal charges in that case and three others, Trump — according to NBC News — will receive briefings from U.S. intelligence agencies if he officially receives the GOP presidential nomination, which appears almost certain at this point.

Dan De Luce and Andrea Mitchell of NBC News report, "The intelligence community is likely to adhere to past practices for nominees and has no plan to cancel the briefings if Trump becomes the GOP nominee, two sources with knowledge of the matter said. Scrapping the briefings for Trump could open President Joe Biden up to accusations of politicizing access to intelligence, one of the sources said."

Intelligence briefings for presidential nominees are a U.S. tradition that, De Luce and Mitchell note, were "launched by President Harry Truman in 1952."

It was in the 1952 presidential election that the GOP nominee, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, defeated Democratic rival Adlai Stevenson — making him the first Republican to win a presidential race since Herbert Hoover in 1928. And the intelligence briefings tradition, as envisioned by Truman, was designed to ensure a smooth transition from the Truman Administration to the incoming Eisenhower Administration.

Since then, everyone from John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon to Barack Obama received intel briefings after winning their party's nomination. But the 2024 election is unprecedented in that the likely GOP nominee, according to NBC News, is on track for an intelligence briefing despite facing four criminal indictments.

Former National Security Adviser John Bolton believes that giving Trump an intelligence briefing is a bad idea in light of Smith's Mar-a-Lago documents case.

Bolton told NBC News, "No prior presidential candidate has ever been under indictment for compromising classified information. That alone is reason to withhold intelligence briefings. There is no legitimate argument that denying the briefings would impair Trump's campaign — he doesn't understand what they would brief anyway."

Former CIA Director John O. Brennan, however, has noted that the intelligence briefings given to presidential nominees are limited compared to the briefings they receive if they win the general election and actually become president.

Brennan, during a March 7 appearance on MSNBC's "Deadline: White House," told host Nicolle Wallace, "I'm pretty certain my former intelligence colleagues will provide briefings that are not going to do any type of damage to sources and methods in terms of providing information to Donald Trump that he could misuse. But they will provide analytic overviews about some of the hot spots letting Donald Trump know what the assessments are at this point. I think it's going to be analysis that will be devoid of the sources and methods."

Read NBC News' full report at this link.

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