President Joe Biden has said he doesn’t think Donald Trump should receive intelligence briefings, a privilege typically afforded to former presidents, because of his “erratic behaviour.”
“I think not,” he told the CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell during a televised interview broadcast on Friday evening.
“I just think that there is no need for him to have the intelligence briefings. What value is giving him an intelligence briefing? What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that Biden’s administration was “obviously” reviewing whether to continue extending the courtesy to Trump, whose supporters stormed the US Capitol last month. The former president also has a history of revealing classified information and has a friendly relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin, critics have warned.
It’s likely Trump won’t miss the intelligence reports. While in office, he reportedly rarely read them and instead turned to his confidants and conservative media as sources of information. A senior administration official told CNN that Trump has not yet made any requests for intelligence briefings since leaving office.
Biden said in his interview Friday that he’d “rather not speculate” on the worst possible outcomes of Trump receiving the briefings. He added that he stands by past criticisms that his predecessor is “reckless” and an “existential threat.”
The president also declined to say whether he’d vote to convict Trump in the upcoming impeachment trial if he were still a senator.
“Look, I ran like hell to defeat him because I thought he was unfit to be president,” Biden said. “I’ve watched what everybody else watched, what happened when that ― that crew invaded the United States Congress. But I’m not in the Senate now. I’ll let the Senate make that decision.”