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Top GOP National Security Officials Rebuke Trump’s ‘Risky’ Behavior, Worldview

Fifty top Republican national security officials, mainly former aides for President George W. Bush, issued a joint statement on Monday saying they will not vote the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, in the November 8 election.

“From a foreign policy perspective, Donald Trump is not qualified to be President and Commander-in-Chief,” they wrote in a letter first published by The New York Times. “Indeed, we are convinced that he would be a dangerous president and would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

Signatories include former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff; Eric S. Edelman, who served as Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser and as a top aide to Secretary of Defense Bob Gates; James Jeffrey, a key strategist in Bush’s National Security Council; former CIA director Michael Hayden; former under Secretary of Defense Dov Zakheim, and his son Roger Zakheim, who served as a deputy assistant in the Pentagon; as well as former State Department officials Eliot A. Cohen and Michael Green, among others.

As noted by The New York Times, none of the living Republican former secretaries of state – Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Baker III, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice – signed the letter.

According to the Republican officials, Trump has shown “no interest in educating himself” and “continues to display an alarming ignorance of basic facts of contemporary international politics.”

A similar letter was issued during the Republican primary earlier this year.

The current statement underscores the “ongoing frustration of leading Republicans in the national security community,” Dov Zakheim, one of the signatories, told Jewish Insider. According to Zakheim, “Trump has not shown the slightest inclination to follow anybody’s advice except for his immediate family and whoever works for his enterprises.”

National Security Letter by Jake Korn on Scribd

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