National security expert warns Trump was an easy mark for foreign spies: 'These techniques work' on him

24 October 2023

A veteran former FBI agent says recordings of former president Donald Trump discussing sensitive national security information with foreign guests at Mar-a-Lago indicate he was likely an easy target for foreign spies.

Several months prior to leaving office, Trump had several discussions with Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida about the US' nuclear submarine capabilities. He also shared that information with approximately 45 other individuals, including six journalists, 10 Australian government officials, three former Australian prime ministers, and even 11 employees of his own company.

In a recent MSNBC panel discussion, host Nicolle Wallace and several national security experts — including former US Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Mary McCord, former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissman, and former FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok — discussed how these reports reveal both the transactional nature of the Trump presidency and the ease in which Trump disclosed highly classified information.

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"It is clear that one of the ways [Trump] used this classified information is to make somebody look bad, or to impress somebody," Strzok told Wallace. "But guess what? Every intelligence service in the world, including the CIA here at home or overseas in Russia and China are well-aware of using the exact same motivations to extract classified information."

"Those are exactly the ways a hostile foreign intelligence service would seek to elicit classified intelligence information from him," Strzok said. "When it comes to Trump, these techniques work."

Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is currently prosecuting Trump for both his role in the January 6 insurrection and for the alleged mishandling of classified documents, has spoken with Pratt over the course of the Mar-a-Lago investigation. Mary McCord speculated that Smith's questioning of Pratt will likely help prove that Trump knew what he was doing when sharing sensitive information, and that he simply didn't care.

"The case will be stronger if it shows how careless Mr. Trump was with national security information," McCord said. "These are things that are, high likelihood of being highly classified, and his willingness to tell people, really for his own transactional, sort of business, personal sort of interest about them, will likely be admissible to show Mr. Trump's intent, his knowledge, the absence of any mistake... it will be Jack Smith's burden to prove the intentional or the knowing, at least, mishandling of that classified information."

Watch the full video of the discussion via the video below, or by clicking this link.

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