Regarding Donald's Classified Briefing

THIS YEAR, SOME suggested that Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, should not be privy to classified briefings due to his habit of sneezing out the unfiltered contents of his head into the public domain. “This man is dangerous,” said Sen. Harry Reid, the Democrats’ minority leader, in a recent interview. Reid suggested that intelligence officials deceive Trump with phony secrets: “Fake it, pretend you’re doing a briefing,” he said.

In 1952, Harry Truman started the practice of letting presidential candidates sample secret intelligence. Three candidates have since declined to receive the special briefings — Barry Goldwater in 1964, Walter Mondale in 1984, and Bob Dole in 1996.

  The Intercept

Very interesting. I did not know that. Still, I would have trusted any of those three to keep their traps shut.

But how to deal with a candidate who can’t keep his mouth shut? [...] President Obama decided to admit Trump into the classified world.

Inquiring minds want to know: was Obama high?

[T]his year’s briefings are reportedly classified at the level of secret, not top secret as they were during the 2008 race.

[...]

The intelligence briefs given to the candidates “exclude the most sensitive sorts of information,” wrote Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, in an email. He considers it “unlikely” that the briefings “would create any security risk at all.”

Exactly what I suspected at the time: they're not going to tell him anything they'd be worried about. Very close to "fake it, pretend you're doing a briefing."

Trump got his first two briefings at an FBI field office in New York City, inside a special room known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. [...] He brought along New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, two senior members of his national security brain trust.

Stop the presses. He brought two people with him? Obviously he knew he wasn't capable of absorbing and understanding what he was about to be told.

The leakage began on Wednesday night. [...] Matt Lauer, the moderator and host of the Today Show, asked Trump about his secret briefings. Was there anything surprising about them?

“Yes,” Trump said. “Very much so.” [...] But Trump couldn’t say what it was. What he could say was that the White House had ignored its experts, turned around, and done “exactly the opposite. … Our leaders did not follow what they were recommending.”

Trump knew this, he said, because he could read his briefers’ body language.

[...]

“Our intelligence community historically has been very, very careful not to politicize its message,” says David Priess, a former CIA official and author of “The President’s Book of Secrets.” To alter intelligence to win over a candidate or achieve some political objective, Priess said, “violates the core ethic of the intelligence community: Tell truth to power regardless of what the customer wants to hear.”

Stop the presses again. That's bullshit.

[17 July 2003: CIA director George] Tenet has officially taken responsibility for the president's unsubstantiated claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had been trying to buy uranium in Africa, but he also said his agency was under pressure to justify a war that the administration had already decided on.

[...]

[Newt] Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and according to accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam's menace.

Mr Gingrich gained access to the CIA headquarters and was listened to because he was seen as a personal emissary of the Pentagon and, in particular, of the OSP.

  Guardian

As you were.

It took less than 24 hours for the intelligence establishment to accuse Trump of indiscretion. Michael Hayden, the former head of the CIA and NSA, said his behavior was “awful.” Michael Morrell, the former deputy CIA director, questioned Trump’s claim that his briefers disagreed with Obama’s policies. By wrongly impugning his briefers by accusing them of political bias, Morrell said, Trump had “crossed a long-standing red line.”

[...]

There is something unfair about Trump’s using his briefers as “props,” as Hayden put it, to malign Obama’s policies without offering any names or specifics. But Trump’s misbehavior is not exceptional. His mendacity points to a much deeper problem of how government can claim to serve the people while holding back so much information. Those who have access — or who have been led to believe they have access — to secret information never have to engage in a reasoned debate with those who don’t.

A gambit of presidents and generals since the beginning of presidents and generals, I have no doubt.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.