CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins and former Trump Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats recently noted the “deadly consequences” of the behavior former President Donald Trump is accused of in new charges.
It has been noted that news broke Thursday afternoon that Special Counsel Jack Smith has filed three additional charges against Trump in a superseding indictment that included one additional count of unlawful retention of National Defense Information related to the now-infamous document Trump referred to in an audiotaped conversation, and which Smith’s team now has possession of.
On Thursday night’s edition of CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Coats spoke poignantly about the lives lost due to the mishandling of classified information, and Collins observed “there’s deadly consequences” for such behavior via Media Ite:
“COLLINS: I mean, as the director of national intelligence, you did brief him on a daily basis.
Did you ever have concerns about how he handled classified information? Are you surprised by any of this?
COATS: Well, I assume that his staff, as my staff did for me and everybody else, remind him that: This is classified. It has to be careful.
I didn’t have a direct talk with him on that. Some — his chief of staff, Jack — John Kelly, and others so forth were managing that. So, I think everybody assumed that the president knew, the president was aware of the fact that classification mattered.
And it’s sacrosanct, really. And people — a lot of times, people say, well, what’s the big deal about all of this?
If you walk into the lobby of the CIA and look to the right wall, you see a bunch of stars. Their names aren’t there, because they were covert. But they’re dead because somebody got their names out maybe on a classified document.
If you — we put millions of dollars into technology for gathering intelligence. And if that’s breached because somebody gets a classified document floating around or knows of it, we lose that information that we are grabbing. So, it’s more than just a bunch of papers and what a big deal is this and so forth.
Lives can be lost. Money can be misspent. We can be — our adversaries are out there searching, trying to get this kind of information, because they want to undermine us. These are — so, we have these threats that come in.
And so, it’s something that we remind our people every day every time every new person comes into the DNI or to any other intelligence agency, you must do this. You must take care of it. Don’t carry this around. Put it in the safe before you leave.
COLLINS: There’s deadly consequences.
COATS: It’s — yes, there are deadly consequences.
COLLINS: When you hear what we have learned about the new document, this was — it was related to a potential attack plan on Iran.
I mean, as you know, you don’t just draw up a new plan like that every day, regardless of whether or not you’re using it. I mean, the idea that, the accusation, he was showing it to people who didn’t have security clearances.
