Trump’s Casual Approach to National Security at Mar-a-Lago Causes Concern

Richard DeAgazio was already seated for dinner, on the Mar-a-Lago Club’s terrace, when President Trump entered with the prime minister of Japan on Saturday night. The crowd — mostly paying members of Trump’s private oceanfront club in Palm Beach, Fla. — stood to applaud. The president’s party sat about six tables away.

Then, DeAgazio — a retired investor who joined Mar-a-Lago three months ago — got a text from a friend. North Korea had just test-fired a ballistic missile, which it claimed could carry a nuclear warhead. DeAgazio looked over at the president’s table.

“That’s when I saw things changing, you know,” DeAgazio recalled in a telephone interview with The Washington Post on Monday. He said a group of staffers surrounded the two world leaders: “The prime minister’s staff sort of surrounded him, and they had a little pow-wow.”

What was happening — as first reported by CNN — was an extraordinary moment, as Trump and Abe turned their dinner table into an open-air situation room. Aides and translators surrounded the two leaders as other diners chatted and gawked around them, with staffers using the flashlights on their cellphones to illuminate documents on the darkened outdoor terrace.

The scene of their discussion, Trump’s club, has been called “The Winter White House” by the president’s aides. But it is very different than the actual White House, where security is tight and people coming in are heavily screened. Trump’s club, by contrast, has hundreds of paying members who come and go, and it can be rented out for huge galas and other events open to non-members. On the night of the North Korea launch, for instance, there was a wedding reception underway: CNN reported that Trump dropped by, with Abe in tow.

As a Mar-a-Lago member, DeAgazio already had remarkable access to a president that day. He had earlier snapped pictures of Trump and Abe golfing and of the president and White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon schmoozing guests.

Now, as a national-security crisis broke out in front of him, DeAgazio continued snapping pictures — and posting them on Facebook.

“The President receiving the news about the Missile incident from North Korea on Japan with the Prime Minister sitting next to him,” DeAgazio wrote as the caption for a photo he posted on Facebook at 9:07 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday.

Later, he posted other photos of Trump and Abe’s discussion, including some that seemed to have been taken from just a few feet away. Those photos have now been seen around the world, providing photographic proof of this unusual moment.

“HOLY MOLY !!!” De Agazio wrote later, when he posted those closer-up photos. “It was fascinating to watch the flurry of activity at dinner when the news came that North Korea had launched a missile in the direction of Japan. The Prime Minister Abe of Japan huddles with his staff and the President is on the phone with Washington DC. the two world leaders then conferred and then went into another room for hastily arranged press conference. Wow…..the center of the action!!!”

DeAgazio told The Post that, after Trump and Abe had spoken for a few minutes, they left the open terrace and spent about 10 minutes in private before conducting a joint news conference at about 10:30 p.m. Eastern time. Later, he said that Trump and first lady Melania Trump had returned to listen to music on the terrace — which faces the Intracoastal Waterway — and shake hands and speak with club members.

DeAgazio said he’d been impressed with how the president had handled the situation.

“There wasn’t any panicked look. Most of the people [on the terrace] didn’t even realize what was happening,” DeAgazio said. “I thought he handled it very calmly, and very presidentially.”

Security experts have said this casual approach to national security discussions was very risky.

The two leaders could have discussed classified documents within earshot of waiters and club patrons. Those cellphones-turned-flashlights might also have been a problem: If one of them had been hacked by a foreign power, the phone’s camera could have provided a view of what the documents said.

But DeAgazio, for one, said he was impressed that Trump had not gotten up from the table immediately, to seek a more private (and better-lit) place for his discussion with Abe.

“He chooses to be out on the terrace, with the members. It just shows that he’s a man of the people,” DeAgazio said.

Membership at the Mar-a-Lago Club now requires a $200,000 initiation fee — a fee that increased by $100,000 after Trump was elected.

DeAgazio also posted photos of himself with a man that he identified as the military member who carries the “football” that would allow Trump to launch a nuclear attack. In that Facebook post, DeAgazio described how “the football” functions, but said that the military member did not divulge that information to him.

“I looked it up” on Wikipedia, DeAgazio said. “He didn’t say anything to me.”

Was DeAgazio worried about the national-security implications of Trump’s al-fresco discussion with Abe? He was not. He said he was sure they had not been overheard.

“You don’t hear anything. You can’t hear,” DeAgazio said, because of the background music and other diners’ chatter. “I mean, I can barely hear what’s going on at my table.”

After The Post spoke to DeAgazio, he deleted his Facebook account.

(h/t Washington Post)

Black Plastic Covers Windows, Blocking Reporters’ Views of Trump Golfing

Reporters who are supposed to keep an eye on President Trump couldn’t see him Saturday morning.

White House reporters tasked with covering Trump tweeted they were holed up in a clubhouse basement of the luxurious Trump National Jupiter Golf Club & Spa.

That wouldn’t be so bad if the windows and doors weren’t covered with black plastic, blocking all views of the outside world, including Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the golf course.

“Trump’s press corps has been placed in a basement suite at Jupiter golf club,” tweeted Jennifer Jacobs, a White House reporter for Bloomberg. “Black plastic over windows to give Trump privacy as he golfs.”

Later, Jacobs tweeted that Japanese reporters were also in the room, and it wasn’t clear if “US side or Japan side vetoed golf pix.”

Jill Colvin of the Associated Press also tweeted a picture of the doors covered with black plastic. Twitter followers urged the reporters to rip down the plastic or tear peep holes in it.

Trump had set aside two days for Abe’s visit, including golf time. The two headed to the Trump National Jupiter Gold Club & Spa Saturday morning.

Once there, the traveling press pool was escorted into the clubhouse and downstairs into what was supposed to be a room to file stories. That’s when they saw the blackout. “The door and windows are covered with black plastic so we can’t see out,” the official White House pool report stated. The reporters were told they would be there for awhile, according to press pool reports.

And awhile it was according to Julie Dash, a White House reporter for the New York Times, who tweeted in the afternoon that reporters were “staring at black plastic-covered windows” when Trump and Abe arrived to golf.

Later in the day, Trump posted a picture on Facebook and Instagram of the two of them golfing.

Meanwhile, reporters were able to follow first lady Melania Trump and Abe’s wife, Akie, who spent the morning touring the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens in Palm Beach County.

Trump met Friday in the Oval Office with Abe. After a meeting, working lunch and news conference, Trump and Abe boarded Air Force One for a trip to the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.

“Melania and I are hosting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Mrs. Abe at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. They are a wonderful couple!’’ Trump tweeted Saturday morning.

(h/t USA Today)

Ivanka Trump’s Presence at Meeting With Japan’s Leader Raises Blind Trust Questions

President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly said that there would be no conflicts of interest during his administration because his vast business empire would be in a “blind trust.” But White House ethics lawyers in both parties have criticized that, noting that having his children run the company means it would be neither blind nor a trust.

The very first meeting that the President-elect held with a world leader, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is prompting further criticism—even alarm. According to photographs taken at Trump Tower in New York City and published this week, the session was attended by Ivanka Trump, who has no government security clearance and is an executive at the Trump Organization.

“This is not the way we behave in the world’s leading constitutional democracy,” says Norman Eisen, special counsel and ethics adviser to President Barack Obama between 2009 and 2011. “It’s like something out of a tin-pot oligarchy.”

Members of the press were also barred from the meeting, adding to building criticism that a President Trump will not honor White House traditions of transparency. Ivanka Trump’s presence apparently only became public because the Japanese government released photos; it is not clear whether she was present for the entire meeting.

Meanwhile the New York Times reports that Jared Kushner, Trump’s trusted son-in-law, consulted a lawyer to find out how he could join Trump’s forthcoming administration without running afoul of federal laws prohibiting nepotism. Kushner was also present at the Abe meeting, according to another photo published by Reuters and the Japanese government. He too lacks government security clearance.

In an interview with Fortune, Eisen says Ivanka Trump and Kushner’s apparent presence at Trump’s first face-to-face meeting with the leader of one of our key allies was “shocking” and unprecedented. “If you’ve got one member of the power couple—Jared Kushner, whispering in the President[-elect]’s ear—and if you’ve got the other, the wife and daughter, who is running businesses, it merges the Trump Organization and the United States into one huge conglomerate managed by the Trumps for their own interests,” he says.

He adds that the fear is that their involvement will turn “our intelligence community into a management consulting firm for the Trump family business. That can’t be right. Ivanka must go, and Kushner can’t stay.”

Eisen and Richard Painter, White House ethics adviser to President George W. Bush between 2005 and 2007, on Tuesday wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post urging Trump to put his “conflict-generating assets in a true blind trust run by an independent trustee.”

Unlike most other federal employees, the President of the United States isn’t bound by the federal conflict of interest law. But Eisen tells Fortune that several lawyers, including those who are part of the Republican party, are “worried about this unprecedented blurring of lines” and President-elect Trump should “expect massive litigation if he proceeds on this collision course.”

(h/t Fortune)

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