President Donald Trump has been forced to sideline the Qatari private plane gifted to the United States, and one national security expert called it an outright “admission” that they messed up. Ultimately, Trump may never get to use it.
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Speaking to CNN on Monday, former FBI agent and national security expert Juliette Kayyem put aside the corruption aspect of the gifted plane and pointed to a larger concern over whether it would ever be possible to retrofit for a president.
Trump had to ditch the plane on his way back to the United States from Turkey to the U.K. due to Secret Service concerns about its safety. The president now says that it’s going back to be “maxed out,” leaving many to wonder why it wasn’t already, if that was the initial purpose of the reconstruction. Though Kayyem said she’s not certain what that even means.
“And we tend to use this term called ‘upgrades’ as if that’s just sort of making it nicer,” she explained. “But really we’re talking about the fundamental and basic needs of an Air Force One for any president, which is, as we’re reporting, the defensive measures to protect a president domestically and internationally.”
The fact that Trump was already flying in it around the U.S. and abroad “suggests that for some period of time, the president was riding in an airplane that at least now is viewed as unsatisfactory for the commander-in-chief, the, you know, the head of our constitutional succession. So, that’s where we find ourselves [with] a plane that many of us thought he never should have bought that was not built, you know, by design for the president, instead had to be retrofitted for a lot of the taxpayers’ money.”
She added that it shows the president’s “short-sightedness” regarding the gift.
When asked whether he should have flown to the NATO summit in the first place, Kayyem made it clear that he never should have been on the plane.
Trying to explain it “in basic English,” she said, “They’re given a plane. It has, you know, the same name, right? The plane as an Air Force One. And now they’re retrofitting it for the purposes that a president would need.”
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In the past, such a plane was built from the bottom up specifically for the president. A new set of Air Force One planes is being built after Trump ordered them in 2018. They’re four years behind schedule and aren’t slated to finish until 2028.
“So this is kind of a lot of band-aids and a lot of band-aids that the taxpayers’ dollars [are paying for]. I’ll put the, the sort of the gifting corruption aspects to the side, but just for the safety and security issues, this plane was not built to be safe for the president of the United States. So it’s a lot of band-aids,” she explained, adding no one should put themselves at risk by flying in it.
The New York Times reported that the plane had serious security vulnerabilities, specifically that it lacked an anti-missile defense system. That reporting led the FBI to launch a leak investigation into reports about the plane.
“So the attacks on the New York Times reporters, the subpoenas, the subpoenas against their family members, whoever they’re going after, are simply, I think, an admission by the White House that they just didn’t want this truth to be known,” Kayyem said.
Trump claimed over the weekend that the renovations were continuing to strengthen and improve the plane. But she said that the reality is that it was never acceptable from the start.
“I would suspect that his plane will not be utilized for a commander-in-chief because once they pull it off, it’s going to take weeks, months, years to get it in a position that it is worthy of the commander-in-chief, not just Trump, but any commander-in-chief, no future president either is likely to use it,” she said.
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