Declassified documents confirm that former President Donald Trump illegally tweeted a satellite image of a failed missile launch in Iran in 2019. The image showed a missile exploding on a launch pad after the country’s officials unsuccessfully attempted to launch a satellite. Trump reportedly released the image to make it seem like the US was not involved in the incident.
“The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the launch of the Safir SLV at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran,” Trump wrote at the time. “I wish Iran the best of luck and good luck in determining what happened at Site One.”
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The image was so sharp that some experts suspected it was not taken by the satellite at all. “This picture is so fine and you see so much detail,” Jeffrey Lewis, who studies satellite imagery at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, told NPR. “At first I thought it must have been taken by a drone or something.”
Through a Freedom of Information Act request, NPR obtained the original image from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). The paper says they went through a full review with the Pentagon to confirm the image can now be shared with the public. However, some details remain redacted.
Steven Aftergood, a secrecy and classification specialist at the Federation of American Scientists, told NPR that the decision shows that Trump seemed to have no problem sharing highly sensitive information on social media when he was president.
“He was literally looking at some of the most sensitive American intelligence on Iran,” Aftergood told the paper. “And the first thing he seemed to want to do was show it on Twitter.”
When the image was first posted, aerospace experts determined the photo was taken by a classified spacecraft called USA 224, believed to be a multi-billion dollar KH-11 reconnaissance aircraft. The spacecraft is similar to the Hubble telescope, but instead of taking a closer look at the stars, it looks at the Earth’s surface.
According to reports last year by Yahoo! News, Trump was shown the satellite image during a daily intelligence briefing with top national security advisers. According to Yahoo, a former Trump administration official told the outlet that Trump had asked if he could keep the photo. After some hesitation, he was told he could. About an hour later, Trump sent the image to his millions of Twitter followers.
Aftergood told NPR that by releasing the image, Trump may have provided invaluable information to other countries, including Russia and Iran, saying that if one of those countries had released a similar image, the U.S. would have gathered a task force to learn what they might have around them. Information.
This new information comes just days after Trump officially announced his bid to run for president in 2024. The announcement now makes him immune to fact-checking on Facebook, under Meta’s policies that prevent moderators from weighing in on politicians’ posts. And it’s anyone’s guess whether he’ll continue to post whatever he wants on Truth Social or whether he’ll return to his old stomping grounds, awaiting the green light from Twitter after being banned for his role on January 6.
The news about the reckless posting of classified photos may not come as much of a surprise to those who follow. The former President seemed to have a thing for classified information. Over the summer, the FBI seized a trove of classified documents from his Mar-a-Lago estate.
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