Three years ago, Iranian officials tried and failed to launch a purported satellite, prompting Donald Trump to publish a tweet insisting the United States was not involved in the incident. The point of the then-president’s tweet wasn’t altogether clear, though by most measures, the Republican simply seemed eager to taunt Tehran.
But as regular readers might recall, Trump’s tweet didn’t just feature text; it also included a detailed photo of the Iranian launch pad. As MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported at the time, it wasn’t long before observers started wondering whether Trump had publicly released classified material.
Three years later, the answer has come into focus. NPR reported:
[A]erospace experts quickly determined it was photographed using one of America’s most prized intelligence assets: a classified spacecraft called USA 224 that is widely believed to be a multibillion-dollar KH-11 reconnaissance satellite. Now, three years after Trump’s tweet, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has formally declassified the original image.
According to the reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, declassification came as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request by NPR, and followed “a grueling Pentagon-wide review to determine whether the briefing slide it came from could be shared with the public.”
At issue is a striking series of events. On Aug. 29, an Iranian rocket exploded at a launch site deep within the country. One day later, the then-American president shared an incredibly detailed image with the world.
Many assumed it was a classified reconnaissance photograph. Based on NPR’s findings, we now know it was.
The point is not that Trump did something illegal. He suggested at the time that he’d declassified the image, and while in office, he had the authority to do so.
Rather, the point is that the Republican president was careless to the point of recklessness — for no apparent reason and with no apparent benefit for his own country — with sensitive, classified information.
Steven Aftergood, a specialist in secrecy and classification at the Federation of American Scientists, told NPR, “He was getting literally a bird’s eye view of some of the most sensitive U.S. intelligence on Iran. And the first thing he seemed to want to do was to blurt it out over Twitter.”
If this were an isolated incident, it would still be embarrassing and highly controversial. After all, American presidents aren’t supposed to be irresponsible with classified intelligence. But what makes a story like this vastly worse is that it’s part of a pattern: Trump mishandled national secrets with such frequency that I put together a Top 10 list a couple of years ago, highlighting the most dramatic examples. And that was before we knew about the Republican’s willingness to bring classified materials to his unsecured glorified country club. The entire point of the Hillary Clinton email “controversy” in 2016 was that the Democrat had been irresponsible with sensitive information, and she therefore couldn’t be trusted. Six years later, where are the GOP hysterics about Trump repeatedly blurting out secrets? What’s more, now that the former president is on the comeback trail, how confident can the public be about his ability to keep classified intelligence secret, given how frequently he’s done the opposite?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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