Trump Tweeted Classified Image From Spy Satellite While In Office

Newly declassified intelligence has confirmed that Donald Trump tweeted out a classified photo from a spy satellite while he was serving as President. The intelligence community at the time of the tweet was absolutely floored that the President would do this, as it risked exposing our capabilities and operations. Farron Cousins explains what this new information means.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

According to recently declassified information, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request from npr, Donald Trump did in fact tweet out a classified image from a US spy satellite while he was president of the United States. This classified image was presented to Donald Trump in his daily intelligence briefing, and it showed a missile launch site in Iran where the missile exploded at the launch site before they could actually fire it. Trump tweeted out that the US had nothing to do with this, and he put the actual spy satellite photo in the tweet, which immediately caused the intelligence community here at the United States to panic because, and this is the weirdest part, the image was so crisp, so clear, so clean, that because of the crystal clear image, our enemies, our adversaries all over the planet now, know that we have these kinds of capabilities. See, they weren't necessarily upset that Trump shared the classified image. They were upset because it was from one of our best spy satellites out there that they didn't want the rest of the world to know that we had.

Now, they did. So they were, they were noticeably perturbed by this. But as I said, Trump got this image in his daily, you know, intelligence briefing. And what happened according to the reports, is that Trump, after the briefing was like, Hey, can I keep, can I, can I keep this photo? I, I wanna keep this. So they said, O okay, um, you can keep it. An hour later, he tweets it out to his 60 million followers at the time, and he even used some of the language from his daily intelligence briefing in the tweet, which is how we know that that's where he got it from. Now at the time, obviously this was big news, and Trump came out and he said, Hey, listen, I had a photo. I tweeted it. And his, you know, defender said, well, technically the president can declassify whatever he wants. So there's really no legal ramifications of this. And, and that's true, but I'm gonna go ahead and throw cold water on that defense here, because the defense at the time was that he's the president, he can declassify this, it, it, it was, it was just declassified. Um, this, this week, this past week actually. So he didn't declassify it at the time that everybody said it's okay, because he, he can, but then why would it have to be declassified now if he had done it back then?

Do you see what I'm saying? Like that, that defense doesn't add up. So, so all I see here is a government official releasing classified information to the world, releasing classified information that put our intelligence operations in payroll role. Now, if I did that, I, I, I'd, I'd be prosecuted actually under a law that Donald Trump signed himself. I would be prosecuted and I would be going away to jail for many, many years. So would literally anyone else in this country if they did that, but Trump did it and nothing, nothing. And we just have to sit here and accept that, okay, he's, he's an idiot sharing classified information, and there's nothing we can do. Like, we can't now prosecute him Now that we know it was classified and he didn't declassify it at the time. That, that seems stupid to me. But, but maybe I'm thinking logically and apparently our government does not because I think this is a big deal. But I guess the DOJ has so many other Trump investigations going on. They probably don't even have time to look into this one now, but kind of seems like this is important, especially considering the guy once again wants to run for president and get his hands on classified documents. So this kind of seems like a big red flag and a giant warning as to why we never need to let that happen ever again.