Early on, senior intelligence officials realized that President Donald Trump wouldn't be interested in reading short summaries of his intelligence briefings. Several officials familiar with the briefings told NBC News that the CIA officers who prepared the briefings made sure they came to the Oval Office with striking images and diagrams.
Doug London, a former CIA officer who helped assemble the briefing material, said it was important to use images and headlines that had his name in them.
The dangers of that approach were brought to the attention of top spies on August 30. A former senior intelligence official told NBC News that a highly classified image was taken by a secret spy satellite, as many experts suspected. The official said that Trump gave U.S. adversaries insight into the U.S. capabilities to spy from above.
John Bolton, who was in Poland when the picture was taken from space, told NBC News that the picture was taken from space. He showed what could happen when a picture can be analyzed by foreign intelligence services by declassifying it and posting it on the internet.
The episode is indicative of a mindset in which Trump or people close to him thought it was permissible to bring and store highly classified documents in Mar-a-Lago.
A former senior intelligence official said that he spent no time understanding what a secret was.
A photo from one of the America's premier spy satellites was included in the president's intelligence briefings, according to a former senior official. A photo shows the aftermath of a rocket failure.
The former official said that the image of the Iranian missile was blown up and that he didn't wait to see it. As soon as we showed him, he said, "Hey, I'mtweeting this"
The official said that the U.S. spent billions of dollars to develop capabilities to capture images from space and told Trump that he couldn't do it. They will understand what we are capable of if you put this out.
According to the former official, Trump was not moved.
The official said that the president said he could declassify anything.
The intelligence officials asked Trump to wait so they could give the same image with less resolution.
The former official said that Vice President Mike Pence and Robert O'Brien were in the meeting.
They all declined to speak. The office of the former President did not reply.
The government went through a process to make sure no sources or methods were exposed when satellites were declassified in the past.
There were other instances in which Trump was accused of leaking classified information.
In May of last year, Trump told the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador in the Oval Office that the Islamic State had used stolen airport security equipment to make a bomb that could be hidden in electronic devices and sneak into an airplane cabin, according to officials. The officials said that he named the city where the intel was gathered.
The former official said that senior intelligence officials never brought highly classified images to the Oval Office again.
According to London, the former CIA officer, Trump would ask for highly classified images.
We didn't know what happened to the sensitive documents when the president asked to keep them. He wasn't fully aware of the risks to sources and methods and other dangers of revealing classified information that it might get out to the wrong people.
You would have to wrestle it back if he liked it.
In order to counter that, briefers would blow up images to the size of posters so Trump wouldn't take them.
He didn't seem to understand that he didn't act as if he had an obligation to protect secrets.
Mark Zaid, a lawyer who handles cases involving intelligence officers and classified information, told NBC News that Trump could not have been responsible for all the classified material that ended up at Mar-a-Lago.
He doesn't think anyone would believe that Donald Trump took the documents off of his desk and put them in a U-Haul box. others did it for him There must be more than one person in the Justice Department who is looking into the Espionage Act and other statutes.
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