There is zero part of me that has ever thought he is the type of guy who could keep a secret. He’s proven this several times by disclosing the contents of off-the-record meetings and private conversations in order to get digs in on people who had “wronged” him.
Unfortunately, as a candidate for president, Trump is granted access to top secret intelligence briefings in preparation for the possibility that he will be sitting in the oval office someday.
There was never any way that would end well and it appears to have already gone south, mere days after getting access as Trump described in detail an apparently top-secret video he watched.
Donald Trump on Wednesday described vivid details from a video he said he had watched earlier in the day of Iranian officials unloading cash from an airplane. The money was part of a payment, announced earlier this year, from the U.S. to Iran to settle a decades-old dispute over an incomplete weapons sale.
“I’ll never forget the scene this morning,” Trump told the crowd in Daytona Beach, Florida, of what he said he had watched. “Iran ― I don’t think you’ve heard this anywhere but here ― Iran provided all of that footage, the tape, of taking that money off that airplane.
“Over there, where that plane landed, top secret, they don’t have a lot of paparazzi, you know,” Trump said. “The paparazzi doesn’t do so well over there.” But “they have a perfect tape, obviously done by a government camera, and the tape is of the people taking the money off the plane. It’s a military tape. It’s a tape that was a perfect angle, nice and steady.”
No publicly available video matches what Trump described. This raises the possibility that Trump was either fabricating the contents of a non-existent video, or he was disclosing information to which he has newly been granted access.
If it is confirmed that it was top secret briefings he was referencing, the next step will be a scolding from the media and pundits, a promise of pivoting, and then Trump making fun of people freaking out followed by Ann Coulter saying it was a brilliant move. That’s the circus of a GOP candidate we have.
But as amusing as it’s been at times to see how insane Trump and his following can be, this spilling of the beans combined with his recent comments on use of nuclear weapons, paints the perfect portrait of a dangerous man who we must take seriously and, importantly, who we must prevent from ever sitting in that chair.
HuffPo offers an update just now to their report:
UPDATE: 9:11 p.m. ― A video clip shown on Fox News Wednesday morning appeared to show U.S. citizens arriving in Geneva on Jan. 17. The video was clearly marked “Geneva, Switzerland.”
If this is the “top secret” Iran video that Trump claims to have seen, it would mean that Trump told his audience a half-dozen things about the tape that aren’t accurate. Contrary to what Trump said about the video he claimed to have seen, this video was not shot in Iran, it did not show the exchange of cash, it was not “top secret,” it was not “a military tape,” and it was not “provided by Iran.” Nor was it released to “embarrass the United States,” as Trump repeatedly claimed.
On the contrary, the safe return of U.S. citizens to neutral Switzerland was widely viewed as a victory for international diplomacy and U.S. foreign policy.
A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign did not respond to an inquiry about whether Trump was referring to the Geneva tape.
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