TRUMP WORSE than they warned in 2016, GOP security officials say in letter.
GOP senior security officials urge voters to support Biden
Four years after 50 of the nation’s most senior Republican national security officials warned that President Donald Trump “would be the most reckless president in American history,” they are back with a new letter, declaring his presidency worse than they had imagined and urging voters to support former Vice President Joe Biden.
The new letter, released just hours before Biden formally accepted the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, lays out a 10-point indictment of Trump’s actions, accusing him of undermining the rule of law, aligning himself with dictators and engaging “in corrupt behavior that renders him unfit to serve as president.”
They also accused him of “spreading misinformation” and “undermining public health experts,” making him “unfit to lead during a national crisis.”
“When we wrote in 2016, we were warning against a vote for Donald Trump, but many of the signatories were not ready to embrace his opponent,” Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, noted John Bellinger, a former legal adviser at the State Department and National Security Council who was among the authors of the past and current letters.
“This is different: Each of the signatories has said he or she will vote for Biden. Signatories are now even more concerned about Trump, and have fewer concerns about Biden,” the letter reads.
For the Democratic National Convention, Biden invited a series of Republicans to speak, most notably Colin Powell, the former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Democrats are betting that the cross-aisle endorsements will attract moderate Republicans who may have supported Trump four years ago and are struggling with whether they can vote for a Democrat.
“While some of us hold policy positions that differ from those of Joe Biden and his party, the time to debate those policy differences will come later,” the new letter says. “For now, it is imperative that we stop Trump’s assault on our nation’s values and institutions and reinstate the moral foundations of our democracy.”
THE SIGNATORIES
The letter was released by DefendingDemocracyTogether.org, an advocacy group created in 2018 by anti-Trump Republicans and conservatives. They are spending about $20 million to oppose him, the group says, including placing the full letter in an ad in The Wall Street Journal on Friday.
Among the signatories are former officials from the Reagan administration; others who served George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush; and a few, like John Negroponte, the former director of national intelligence, and Gen. Michael Hayden, who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, whose service extended over Democratic and Republican administrations.
The letter also includes a handful of midlevel officials who served under Trump. But the list of signatories misses most of the biggest names in national security who entered the administration, only to be fired or resign. Among those missing are Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, and three former generals who served in high posts: John Kelly, the former chief of staff; H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser; and Jim Mattis, the former defense secretary.
John R. Bolton, who was fired as national security adviser last year, has said publicly that he will not vote for Trump, but he has refused to embrace Biden, saying he will write in a conservative Republican instead.
As the most recent letter laid out, Trump “proclaimed his ‘love’ and ‘great respect’ for the North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un, endorsed ‘brilliant leader’ Xi Jinping’s move to serve as China’s president for life,” and “repeatedly sided with Vladimir Putin against our own intelligence community.”
Within the Republican national security establishment, there are arguments about whether such letters actually harm Trump or help him.
Peter Feaver, a veteran of the Clinton and Bush administrations, who helped draft several versions of the 2016 letter, decided not to sign the one released Thursday.
“I don’t regret signing the 2016 letters, and I think the new letter is accurate in its critique of Trump’s performance,” Feaver, a professor at Duke University, said in an interview.
But he said he worries that “letters like this have some unintended consequences. Trump was able to fundraise off the 2016 letter and buy himself some anti-establishment street cred,” Feaver said. “His team even thought the letters were a net plus for him.”
Republicans split in 2017 between those who refused to serve under Trump and others, like Tillerson and Fiona Hill, the Russia expert who joined the National Security Council and later testified at impeachment hearings about Trump’s actions in Ukraine, who believed they had an obligation to try to guide his foreign policy.
But in private, they were often accused of quietly undermining his policies or acting as secret sympathizers with the “Never Trump” movement.