Way back in late August of 2019, then-President Donald Trump infamously tweeted out (back when he still had a Twitter account) an infamous image that lit the internet ablaze at the time, as thousands upon thousands of people believed that the photo was likely a classified image that the sitting US president had absolutely no business making public.
Turns out… They were right.
NBC News is out with bombshell new reporting on the matter, calling it “an infamous moment in the Trump presidency — one that former intelligence officials say perfectly illustrated his approach to dealing with state secrets,” writing that on August 30, 2019, a “former senior intelligence official with firsthand knowledge told NBC News that Trump did indeed tweet a highly classified image taken by a secret spy satellite, as many experts suspected at the time. And in doing so, the official and others said, Trump gave U.S. adversaries keen insights into the U.S. capabilities to spy from above.”
Of course, Donald Trump’s Twitter account is long gone and over with now, after the popular platform banned the now former president from the social media site indefinitely, over his dangerous rhetoric surrounding the fatal January 6th Capitol attack. With that ban, record of all his tweets on the site was wiped out with him.
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However, the Internet Archive does possess a screenshot (in what appears to be Finnish) of the aforementioned tweet.
Former National Security Advisor John Bolton spoke with NBC News on the matter, saying, “The president tweeted a picture of an Iranian missile launch site that showed a failed ICBM test launch that everybody acknowledged was a highly classified picture taken from space. He tweeted it out, and that, of course, declassified it by definition, but also showed what could happen when such a picture, even on a Twitter attachment, was then able to be analyzed by foreign intelligence services.”
One former senior intelligence official also spoke out, “We had this image of the Iranian missile blown up, and it was exquisite intelligence, and he didn’t even wait. As soon as we showed him, he said, ‘Hey, I’m tweeting this.'”
That same former official went on to tell NBC News that Donald Trump “spent no time understanding what made something a secret and what we protected.”
NBC’s report goes on to add, “CIA Director Gina Haspel and Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire tried to talk Trump out of doing it, noting that the U.S. spent billions of dollars developing capabilities to capture images from space, and told Trump, ‘You can’t do this. If you put this out, they’re going understand what our capability is.'”
Trump reportedly responded, “Look, I’m the president, I can declassify anything.”
In fact, that is not true. He cannot.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
