![]() ![]() Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney regularly watched such “kill videos” during their morning intelligence briefings. But Trump will: After such attacks, the president and vice president are also among the select group of government officials who can, if they choose, watch the high-tech videos of the drone strikes themselves. We’ll never know who exactly will be named to the new administration’s “kill list,” and we may never know what happens to them. The exact process for such “kinetic” attacks, never publicly revealed in depth and not beholden to any judicial oversight, will be explained carefully to the new president. Bush have enjoyed wide latitude in designating suspected terrorists for lethal strikes in areas like Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan. While political assassination is forbidden by Executive Order 12333, Presidents Barack Obama and George W. One of the relatively new powers of the presidency is the ability to sign off on strikes from Predator and Reaper drones run by the CIA and the Pentagon. ![]() It’s anyone’s guess what Trump might do to embarrass intransigent foreign leaders, or what late-night or early-morning tweetstorms might erupt from the White House if he senses hypocrisy from an ally-or what will happen when a president whose family will still control his complex business empire has access to important geopolitical developments or early market data. What is the good stuff, and how might Trump use it? Many of the specifics are cloaked in deep shadow-that’s obviously the point-but thanks to decades of dogged reporting, lawsuits and historical archives, we do know a significant amount about the types of secrets a president learns. And that’s all before he has learned any of what President George W. Already, before taking office, he has tweeted out claims about his meetings with intel agencies, asserted that he knows information the rest of the government doesn’t and tried to embarrass and undermine rivals or critics through insinuation. Given Trump’s behavior so far, it seems almost assured that he will deploy and weaponize those same secrets in “unpresidented” ways, to win personal fights and minor PR battles. The United States has invested trillions of dollars to ensure that its president can know more than anyone else on Earth-knowledge meant to be deployed to the country’s advantage in trade negotiations, military posturing and a thousand other ways big and small. He’ll even be first in line for some mundane but important things: As president, Trump will be one of just four senior officials to learn sensitive market-moving economic data from the Labor Department up to 12 hours before it is released publicly. He will know about blacked-out special forces raids and UFO-like spy planes, the next-generation cyberattacks that would come in the opening minutes of a new war, and the dozens of secret classified procedures and laws written down by his presidential predecessors. He will have the ability to see inside the most sensitive and covert programs run by the United States and its allies around the world he will have access to surveillance tools, covert payrolls and personal secrets about foreign leaders. While much attention has been focused on Trump’s access to the nuclear launch codes and the President’s Daily Brief-the classified intelligence report delivered inside a locked briefcase each morning to the Oval Office-those represent only a tiny sliver of the massive top-secret universe that Trump personally will suddenly be privy to. ![]() And on January 20, the person being handed access to all of those secrets will be Donald J. The president of the United States has more access to official secrets than any other human being in the country-and the potential to know more about the world than anyone else on the planet. ![]()
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