This incident, and the current re-surfacing of the Clinton email issue, got me to wondering: how is the dissemination of intelligence handled when a person with no intelligence background or, for that matter, clearance, is elected or appointed to an office where they will be privy to and expected to act on intelligence of an extremely sensitive and potentially harmful nature if disclosed. Let's face it; there are very few of the candidates currently running for any office one would expect to get the sort of top-level clearance given to those professionals in the intelligence community if they were subjected to the same sort of background checks and vetting given to those professionals. I mean, anyone could theoretically become President, but does just winning the office automatically make that person qualified to see, act upon and possibly disseminate highly classified intelligence? Do the CIA, NSA, and other alphabet organizations limit or filter the data presented to the President and, if so, who makes the call? What are the dangers if such filtering is tainted by political partisan-ism or vested self interest to retain control and management of the intelligence? Do we really believe any President has, since the advent of modern intelligence gathering, been given the full, undiluted, true state of intelligence operations or knowledge? It would seem, perhaps, who the occupant of the office is of very little matter when it comes to the ability to make decisions about national security; the decisions that do come are apparently based on a very "need to know" set of data and, often, the person who really needs to know, the President, may only really know part of the story...
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