A former Trump administration official stressed the critical importance of protecting classified documents amid new charges against former President Donald Trump alleging he mishandled secret material after leaving office.
Trump was charged Thursday with three additional felony counts in the Justice Department’s probe, adding to the 37 he was already facing. Two new charges stem from alleged efforts to obstruct the investigation, including by ordering the deletion of incriminating security camera footage. A third charge is related to previously reported audio of Trump discussing a sensitive military document about possible attacks on Iran.
“Everybody assumed that, knew that, the president was aware of the fact that classification mattered,” Dan Coats, who served as director of national intelligence from 2017 to 2019, said in an interview on CNN Thursday.
“It is sacrosanct, really,” he continued. “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’ll see a bunch of stars.”
Those stars memorialize officers who die in the line of duty, Coats said, “because somebody’s got their names out, maybe on a classified document.”
He also noted that millions of dollars are spent on intelligence-gathering.
“If that’s breached because somebody gets a classified document floating around … we lose that information that we are grabbing,” he said.
“So it’s more than just a bunch of papers,” he added. “Lives can be lost.”
Coats said intelligence agency employees are reminded every day to properly protect classified documents, because “there are deadly consequences.”
Coats left the Trump administration in 2019 amid reports his relationship with the then-president had soured.
Federal prosecutors allege Trump put national security at risk by improperly storing boxes of classified information at his Mar-a-Lago resort, defying attempts to retrieve them and obstructing the investigation.
He is also accused of showing classified documents to others on two occasions in 2021. On one of those occasions, at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, Trump allegedly showed a document and described a classified “plan of attack” at a meeting with two aides and people working on a book, none of whom had clearance.
In an audio recording of that conversation, Trump bragged that he had a “highly confidential” document from the Department of Defense that he never declassified.
Trump has claimed that he was showing newspaper clippings, not a classified document, and that his boasts were “just bravado.”