New York Daily News

Breach-er creatures

Security is ‘amateur hour’

- BY ADAM EDELMAN

PRESIDENT TRUMP blasted Hillary Clinton countless times during the campaign for being “reckless” with sensitive informatio­n, but the commander-inchief has himself been a part of two extraordin­ary and “unpreceden­ted” situations, experts say.

In just the past several days of what is only Trump’s fourth week as President, news has emerged that he looked the other way after his ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn was questioned by the FBI about having misled senior officials about discussion­s he had with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. regarding sanctions. In addition, Trump, during a weekend get-together with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., scrambled to come up with an official response to North Korea’s ballistic missile test at a public dinner table, with documents sprawled within plain sight of nearby guests.

“There is so much drama, real drama, and no one seems to be in charge,” said national security analyst Juliette Kayyem, who worked in the Obama Department of Homeland Security. “I’ve actually never seen anything like this.”

Jens David Ohlin, an associate dean at Cornell University Law School, was more blunt.

“It looks like amateur hour over there,” he told the Daily News. “It’s irregular and it’s disconcert­ing.”

“The fact that all of this is playing out in public, on the front pages of newspapers, and on the patios of Mar-a-Lago, is definitely odd, if not totally unpreceden­ted,” Ohlin said.

While there is no evidence the bizarre Saturday scene at Mar-aLago was illegal or an actual breach of national security secrets — the White House maintains they were only planning the logistics of a press conference — it has raised concerns.

House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz is asking Trump’s chief of staff for informatio­n about the incident, and “whether and how the guests, employees, and residents at Mar-a-Lago are vetted in order to ensure that they are not foreign agents or spies.”

Flynn’s situation is also problemati­c. “The issue is whether he violated the Logan Act,” Ohlin said, referring to a federal law prohibitin­g private U.S. citizens from trying to influence a foreign government in disputes with the U.S.

Zero people have been found guilty of violating the act in its more than 200-year history, but “if he had these calls before the inaugurati­on, that’s clearly problemati­c and could violate the law,” Ohlin said.

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