The impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump saw numerous nonpartisan national security officials testify about the irregularities in foreign policy ordered by President Donald Trump's administration.
A recently released memoir by Trump's former national security advisor John Bolton made multiple alarming claims about Trump's dealings with China and his knowledge of foreign affairs as a whole.
Now, new reporting from CNN says that Trump's behavior on calls with foreign leaders alarmed numerous national security officials like then-Chief of Staff John Kelly and then-Defense Secretary James Mattis.
The article is by renowned journalist Carl Bernstein, most famous for being one of the reporters who was instrumental in exposing the Watergate scandal that led to former President Richard Nixon's resignation.
The report states:
"In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials...that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations."
The report emphasizes concerns about Trump's fealty to Russian President Vladimir Putin, breaking just after other reports that Russia paid bounties to the Taliban for the murder of United States soldiers in Afghanistan. The Trump administration insists that the President wasn't briefed on these bounties and Trump has disputed their legitimacy on Twitter.
In his calls with representatives of Turkey and Russia, Trump reportedly trashed the tenures of former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
People found the details in the report alarming, but sadly not surprising.
People criticized the national security officials who were disturbed by Trump's correspondence, yet still failed to act.
The President has yet to tweet about the report.
@joehas/X