Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Wednesday slammed President Trump for setting “a dangerous precedent” by revoking the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan, who is a frequent critic.
Warner suggested that Trump was trying to distract attention from other issues by targeting former President Obama’s former intelligence chief.
“This might be a convenient way to distract attention, say a damaging story or two. But politicizing the way we guard our nation’s secrets just to punish the president’s critics is a dangerous precedent,” Warner said in a tweet.
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Trump, in a statement released earlier in the day, asserted that Brennan’s “lying and recent conduct characterized by increasingly frenzied commentary is wholly inconsistent with access to the nation’s most closely held secrets and facilities.”
The president said he has a “unique constitutional responsibility to protect the nation’s classified information.”
Trump is reviewing the access of other former officials who served in the Obama administration, such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI Director James Comey, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and former national security adviser Susan Rice.
These former officials have also criticized the president or administration policy.
Former Obama Secretary of State John Kerry, who once served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also blasted Trump’s decision.
“This is putting personal petty politics ahead of patriotism and national security, end of story,” he said in a tweet.
“You expect this banana republic behavior in the kind of countries that the State Department warns Americans not to travel to, but not at home in the USA,” he added.