It's Frightening All Around.' Former Intelligence Officials Warn Trump's Debt Is a National Security Threat (2020)
time.com
... One of the fastest ways to be denied a security clearance, current and former intelligence officials will tell you, is to carry a load of debt. And then there's President Donald Trump.
New revelations in a New York Times report show Trump allegedly has $421 million of debt coming due over the next four years. An audit fight with the IRS could cost him another $100 million. At the same time, he reportedly paid taxes to foreign nations far larger than the $750 he paid in the United States the year he won the presidency and his first year in office.
For a sitting president, with the power to impose fear or favor across the country and around the world, not to mention access to the nation's most closely held secrets, such financial exposure is more than embarrassing, former intelligence officials and ethics lawyers say: it makes Trump a national security threat.
"For a person with access to U.S. classified information to be in massive financial debt is a counterintelligence risk because the debt-holder tends to have leverage over the person, and the leverage may be used to encourage actions, such as disclosure of information or influencing policy, that compromise U.S. national security," says David Kris, former head of the Justice Department's National Security Division and founder of Culper Partners consulting firm.
If the due dates reported by the Times are accurate, "a second term for President Trump would result in increased vulnerability -- and thus, potentially, risk," says Robert Cardillo, former deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and ex-director of National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. This would look less like traditional foreign influence, and more like "personal financial pressure [that] could adversely affect U.S. national security decisions," he says.
Adds former Director of Intelligence James Clapper, "That has always been the suspicion about Trump -- that the Russians were bankrolling him. If he were a normal' employee, that would certainly be a counter-intelligence vulnerability. It's frightening all around." ...
And then there are those empty classified document folders that were found at Mar-A-Lago. What happened to the contents of those folders?
