New York:President Barack Obama confirmed on Thursday that Donald Trump will get national security briefings ahead of the November election, but he warned the Republican candidate, whom he has called \u201cunfit\u201d for office, that information from the meetings must be kept secret.
\nObama, a Democrat who endorsed his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 White House race, has made clear his dismay over Trump, a New York businessman who has proposed temporarily banning Muslims from entering the United States and building a wall on the US border with Mexico.
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\nOn Tuesday Obama questioned why leading Republicans have not withdrawn their support for their presidential nominee. On Thursday he dismissed as ridiculous Trump\u2019s claims that the election may be rigged.
\n\u201cOf course the elections will not be rigged. What does that mean?\u201d Obama said with exasperation. \u201cIf Mr. Trump is up 10 or 15 points on Election Day and ends up losing, then maybe he can raise some questions. That doesn\u2019t seem to be the case at the moment.\u201d Trump is trailing Clinton in polls.
\nDespite his disdain, Obama said Trump would get the top secret briefings on world crises and security threats to which he, Clinton and their respective vice presidential running mates are entitled.
\nSome Republicans have said Clinton should be denied access to such briefings because of her handling of classified material on a private email server while she was secretary of state.
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\n\u201cWe are going to go by the law, which is that, in both tradition and the law, that if somebody is the nominee \u2026 they need to get a security briefing so that if they were to win, they are not starting from scratch in terms of being prepared,\u201d Obama said.
\n\u201cWhat I will say is that they have been told these are classified briefings,\u201d he added, in response to a question about whether he was concerned about Trump obtaining the classified information. \u201cAnd if they want to be president, they got to start acting like president, and that means being able to receive these briefings and not spread them around.\u201d
\nTrump has placed blame on Clinton and Obama for the rise of Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
\n\u201cThe Obama-Clinton foreign policy gave rise to ISIS, made Iran flush with cash, and is now admitting vast numbers of refugees and migrants into the United States from some of the most volatile regions in the world,\u201d Trump senior policy adviser Stephen Miller said in a statement.
\n\u201cBut none of this is surprising from an Administration that allowed its Secretary of State to threaten the country with a private email server, delete her records, and lie about it to us all,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
New York:President Barack Obama confirmed on Thursday that Donald Trump will get national security briefings ahead of the November election, but he warned the Republican candidate, whom he has called \u201cunfit\u201d for office, that information from the meetings must be kept secret. Obama, a Democrat who endorsed his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-world"],"yoast_head":"\n