Trump threatens intel. leaks to gain advantage: Scholar
US presidents leak classified intelligence in order to gain political advantage and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will likely do the same if elected president, an American scholar says.
“This is a common practice of presidents in recent US history,” Dr. Kevin Barrett said during a phone interview with Press TV on Friday.
“It is routine for them to leak material from sensitive and even classified areas in order to gain political advantage, they all do this,” Barrett said.
On Thursday, US Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said Trump would leak classified intelligence if he thought he could gain political benefit.
“He wouldn’t think twice of taking classified information and putting it out in the public realm if he thought it served his political purposes," Murphy, the junior senator from Connecticut, told BuzzFeed.
US presidential candidates traditionally receive classified briefings from intelligence officials during the campaign as part of the transition process.
Barrett offered a few examples of Trump “blurting out the truth.”
“Most recently, he has spoken about the likely role that Ted Cruz’s father played in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” he said.
Trump’s comments, in a Fox News interview on Tuesday, came following an article in The National Enquirer magazine claiming to have definitive photographic evidence that Rafael Cruz was with Lee Harvey Oswald not long before Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
Trump has also reportedly told his supporters that he will expose the culprits behind the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that killed thousands of Americans.
Trump was alluding to the “controlled demolition” of the World Trade Center in New York City on 9/11, said Barrett, who has been studying the events of 9/11 since 2003.
The September, 11, 2001 attacks, also known as the 9/11 attacks, were a series of strikes in the US which killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.
US officials assert that the attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists – 15 of them were Saudi citizens - but many independent researchers have raised questions about the official account.
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