Some Democratic legislators, and even some former Trump administration officials, have questioned the wisdom of allowing Trump to continue to be briefed.
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Susan Gordon, who served as the principal deputy director of national intelligence during the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019, in a Washington Post op-ed last month urged Biden to cut Trump off.
“His post-White House ‘security profile’, as the professionals like to call it, is daunting,” Gordon wrote days after a pro-Trump mob invaded the US Capitol last month. “Any former president is by definition a target and presents some risks. But a former president Trump, even before the events of last week, might be unusually vulnerable to bad actors with ill intent,” she said.
Whether to give a past president intelligence briefings is solely the current officeholder’s prerogative.
Biden, however, said his hesitance to allow Trump access to the briefings was “unrelated to the insurrection”.
Gordon also raised concerns about Trump’s business entanglements. The real estate tycoon saw his business founder during his four years in Washington and is weighed down by significant debt, reportedly about $US400 million ($520 million). Trump during the campaign called his debt load a “peanut” and said he did not owe any money to Russia.
“Trump has significant business entanglements that involve foreign entities,” Gordon wrote. “Many of these current business relationships are in parts of the world that are vulnerable to intelligence services from other nation-states.”
Democrat Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, also urged Biden to cut off briefings for Trump.
“There’s no circumstance in which this president should get another intelligence briefing,” Schiff said shortly before Trump ended his term last month. “I don’t think he can be trusted with it now, and in the future.”
