I protected top secret documents. Donald Trump should never see them again

It’s been 50 years since I last laid eyes on a classified document. As a junior Naval officer stationed at a joint command intel center in Norfolk, Va., my entire job had been devoted to the protection of “compartmental” intel, information deemed so delicate that it required clearances way above “Top Secret” on a strictly “need to know” basis. Most such clearances carried letters from the NATO phonetic alphabet: Alpha, say, or Gamma. Some letters were so secret they had their own rooms equipped with multiple cypher locks.

The sources for the material in these documents varied. It might be COMINT (intercepted communications) SIGINT (signal intelligence), or HUMINT (intel from agents). Much of it came from various branches of the service, but also from the CIA, DIA, NSA, and their counterparts in various allied governments. This was at the height of the Vietnam War, but our Cold War enemy was clearly the Soviet Union, and on the East Coast that’s what most of the intel concerned.

As an untrained, 22-year-old liberal arts grad, my job had little to do with the substance of all this intel. Instead, I oversaw the various systems for granting access to the compartments, inspected the physical facilities where the documents were stored, and signed off on their destruction.

We took our jobs very seriously. The underlying theory was that any slip-up — access by the wrong individual, a single scrap of information gone astray — could lead to the Soviet intel apparatus finding some piece to complete a puzzle. As for access, we regularly turned away flag officers who demanded to come in because they lacked, say, the Papa clearance.

Why did Trump squirrel some 300 documents in an unsecured part of his Mar-a-Lago getaway? A broad contempt for our national security and its protocols is one bet: We know now, of course, that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was blocked from a top security clearance to work in the White House until the president overruled the rule-makers. We also know enough about Trump himself to assume he never would’ve qualified for a clearance had he not been commander-in-chief.

Leaving classified documents unaccounted for is much like leaving money unguarded. The world is full of folks who would sell classified information to the highest bidder at the drop of a hat. I doubt Trump would sell state secrets to a Putin or the Saudis. I’m more persuaded by the idea that the papers helped him create the illusion that he is still the president, a clownish potentate reveling in piles of important papers as props in a teledrama of his own imagination.

I’m sure most people who have worked in a highly classified environment share my sense of, what? Astonishment? At the sheer spectacle of perhaps the sloppiest, most brazen security breach ever.

My fury extends to the absurd knee-jerk defenses offered by his GOP supporters, especially those who definitely know better. Let’s pick my home state senator, Lindsey Graham, for one. Once an Air Force prosecutor, Graham knows the rules as well as anyone. Remember him rising to prominence as a House prosecutor in the Clinton impeachment trial, staunchly defending the Constitutional principle that no one — not even a president — is above the law?

As it turns out, much of the information my colleagues and I were protecting in Norfolk was at that same time being sold to Soviet spies by the notorious John Walker, a watch officer in the building next to the one in which I worked. Revealing much of how the U.S. tracked Soviet submarines, it is counted among the most damaging military intel breaches of the Cold War.

So, while I cannot imagine Trump is competent enough to be some latter-day character from John Le Carre’, this execrable episode reveals a pattern of behavior so utterly lacking in regard for the gravity of our secrets that it on its face represents a grave compromise to our national security. For this alone he deserves to suffer some serious consequences. He certainly should never again lay eyes on classified material.