Loose lips sink ships
by digby
I hadn't thought out that:
As Donald Trump nears the magic number of 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the Republican nomination, he is assuming many trappings of a man who might be president. He has secret service agents protecting him. World leaders react to his comments. He regularly receives far more media coverage than the other GOP candidates.
If he becomes the presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July, he’ll also obtain something most real-estate developers will never receive: his very own top-secret briefings, delivered by the US intelligence community. And there appears to be little stopping him from repeating to his roaring crowds what he hears there.
[...]
That means, if Trump were the nominee, a man famously without filter will be privy to national secrets – and compartmentalizing his thoughts from his public utterances has never been one of his strengths. He has tweeted random, and sometimes untrue, items he read on the internet; he’s trumpeted false crime statistics; he’s even been fine with quoting Benito Mussolini. So far, he’s been able to get away with much of it by disavowing responsibility afterward.
So what would be the ramifications if Trump discloses something classified on the campaign trail? Say the US intelligence community discovers North Korea is about to test another nuclear weapon, or hears Iran is about to embark on a major military campaign. What’s to stop Trump from calling a press conference to blast Pyongyang or Tehran?
He clearly has strong opinions – including legalizing waterboarding – about how to fight terrorism that could be buttressed, rightly or wrongly, by this sort of insider information.
Apparently, there's nothing to stop him. There's no law because it's never been necessary. Nobody dreamed anyone would actually nominate such a man.
It's not so much that he would do it for nefarious purposes. His recent interviews with the Post and the Times have shown that he's completely clueless about everything. And he has no impulse control -- he can't even stop himself from calling Ted Cruz a pussy on the campaign trail.
Update: I should have said there's no specific law against him "spilling the beans". But as twitter follower @fgcallari points out, there are laws that could apply.
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