Political news comes at the speed of tweets these days. In the deluge of breaking news, it’s easy to forget what happened in the not-so-distant past.
In 2017, then-President Donald Trump disclosed “highly classified” intelligence to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during a meeting in the White House. The intelligence was “code word” information, obtained by an American ally and shared with the United States only in the strictest confidence.
In 2019, Trump tweeted a remarkably clear image of a rocket that had exploded on a launch site in Iran. It turned out this was a classified image taken by a classified reconnaissance spacecraft. The image was finally declassified three years after Trump had shared it with the public.
People are, of course, fallible. The president surely receives an overwhelming amount of classified information, and the president is human. The president could accidentally slip and reveal something that he shouldn’t have. (Personally, I’m more forgiving of inadvertent disclosures during conversations than I am of disclosures in tweets, because you have an opportunity to think, and ask for review, before you tweet something. But occasional slip-ups don’t surprise or outrage me.)
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