‘Doubts’ about Clinton sealed GOP national security letter against Trump

The blistering, blockbuster letter signed by 50 Republican national security officials condemning Donald Trump as unfit to be president came together last week, with the only significant edit being the addition of language acknowledging widespread “doubts” that Hillary Clinton can do the job, several signers told Yahoo News.

The document, first reported on Monday by the New York Times, pointedly does not endorse the former secretary of state, though some of those who signed it will probably do so in the coming weeks, the participants said in interviews on Monday and Tuesday.

“People on the letter are in different places on Hillary Clinton,” said John Bellinger III, who served as legal adviser on the National Security Council and at the State Department under Condoleezza Rice and who drafted the letter. Some of those who ultimately signed said “no way am I going to sign a letter endorsing Hillary — but I am willing to sign one declaring Trump unqualified.”

Three of the signers said that the Clinton campaign did not have a hand in the process but that some of her outside advisers on national security knew the letter was coming. Her team has privately courted the endorsement of roughly one-quarter of the participants, two signers said.

Bellinger predicted that some of the party’s national security “brand names” that were absent from the letter, like Rice, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, or former national security adviser Stephen Hadley, will ultimately speak out about the election. He declined to speculate about what they might say.

“I’m sure that at some point those folks will make statements. Because they are well-known names in their own right, they will pick a time of their choosing,” he told Yahoo News by telephone on Tuesday. “They don’t need to sign on to a group letter.”

Bellinger, who first spoke out against Trump in a December 2015 column, described a Republican national security and foreign establishment that initially confined its unease about Trump to “grumbling at cocktail parties and giving a couple of interviews,” then felt a growing sense of alarm.

Each of the signers Yahoo News spoke to had their own breaking point on Trump, but the most-often cited ones were: the Republican nominee’s public feud with the parents of Humayun Khan, a Muslim American Army captain killed in Iraq; his suggestion that he might not uphold America’s NATO commitments; his attacks on a judge of Mexican-American heritage; his back-and-forth praise with Russian President Vladimir Putin; his calls for restoring interrogation tactics that meet definitions of torture; and his proposal to kill the families of suspected terrorists.

“For me, it was very clear: It was when he went after that American judge who happened to be of Hispanic origin,” said Dov Zakheim, a former undersecretary of defense. The Khans, like other Gold Star parents, “have given their children to the country, and they love the country they gave their children to.”

There were other considerations about career, conscience and country, according to Michael Green, who served as the top Asia official on George W. Bush’s National Security Council, and Kori Schake, a former senior official at the State Department and the National Security Council who advised the 2008 Republican ticket on foreign policy.

“There’s something of an ongoing debate [inside GOP national security circles] about whether we best serve our principles and our national security beliefs by making clear how objectionable Trump’s behavior and his views are, or whether it is more helpful to try and shape Trump’s views,” Schake told Yahoo News on Monday.

Some of the officials who signed the latest letter but not a similar public message in March hoped to stay “clean enough in his world” that they could advise the campaign, or help Trump’s transition if he won, or even serve in his administration, Green said. “The idea was they could be someone he might listen to on the merits of our longstanding alliances or on trade,” he told Yahoo News.

“But the last month has made it clear that he’s not going to listen to anybody, and with his latest comments, it’s just not morally tenable for us to remain silent,” said Green, who described some of Trump’s foreign policy notions as “nonsensical or unethical.”

“The point of the letter was that under no circumstances would the people who signed work in a Trump administration,” though they might help in the transition, said Zakheim.

“A very small number of people didn’t sign the letter because they worried that he might win and that they might be called upon, even unwillingly, to serve,” said Bellinger.

Several signers who asked not to be identified by name told Yahoo News that some of the participants tried to reach out to Trump and his team during the Republican convention, offering advice and suggesting he tone down his controversial rhetoric about Muslim immigration. “Trump’s people didn’t listen, there was no give-and-take, and they rejected anything that wasn’t letting Trump be Trump,” one signer said.

“His four or five outrageous statements in the end of July, his attacks on the Khans, nobody can be commander in chief and do those things,” said Bellinger. “Nobody plays footsie with a Russian leader like Mr. Putin, and Donald Trump does not seem to understand that this is not a frivolous business deal.”

Bellinger, who initially sounded out former colleagues in July about putting together an open letter, drafted the message last week. He sent it to two people, received some edits, circulated it to a broader group of about 25 people, “most of whom signed on with no fidgeting or meddling.” Even though he limited the group to people who served in the executive branch at relatively senior levels, the number of participants quickly grew to 50.

The other participants made just “a few changes” to what was “a fairly mature draft,” former CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden told Yahoo News by email. “Everyone was free to sign or not sign the letter as they chose.”

Only a handful chose not to. Of the 60 people Bellinger approached, 50 signed on. Some of those who did not did so because of legal obligations or because they work for institutions — like nonpartisan think tanks — where they are expected to stay above the fray.

And “one or two dislike Hillary so strongly, and they felt that this was so clearly effectively an endorsement of Hillary, felt that they could not sign it,” Bellinger said.

Just one or two felt they could not sign because they needed “to hold out the possibility — even if it’s not their preferred choice — to serve if asked to serve,” he said.

Still, Green underlined, “we did not endorse Hillary. We thought that would make this more credible.”

Schake told Yahoo News that she had planned to cast write-in votes for her nephews in November, but changed her mind after British public opinion polls failed to predict voters would choose to leave the European Union, making her worry that American polls understate support for Trump.

“It’s an election between two candidates,” she said. “I’m willing to say that I’ll vote for her.”