- White House officials were reluctant to hand intelligence over to Donald Trump, the NYT reported.
- Sources told the paper the former president had a habit of "blurting out" secret information.
Officials were often reluctant to hand over sensitive intelligence to Donald Trump over concerns about how he handled information, The New York Times reported.
The ex-president's habit of hanging on to some documents created anxiety among top officials who had grown hesitant to relay everything to him, the report said, because of his "penchant for blurting out secret information."
Citing former administration officials and those involved in briefing Trump during his time in office, The Times reported that his interest was mostly piqued by information on the private lives of other world leaders.
Trump's handling of classified information while in office is currently the subject of intense scrutiny in the wake of the August 8 search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate by the FBI. Agents in the search retrieved stashes of highly classified information they believe Trump wrongly took with him after leaving office.
Sources told The Times that Trump would occasionally take a document from a classified briefing or request that National Security Council staff fetch him a document but those could not have added up to the hundreds of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago.
Insider has contacted representatives for Trump for comment.
The National Archives and FBI had been trying to get Trump to hand back documents he took with him after leaving office for months before the August 8 raid.
Aides handed over information in January and then in June, after which officials obtained a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago because they believed information had been held back.
Some of the intelligence retrieved by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago was at the highest levels of classification, and in a picture submitted by the DOJ as part of a court filing Tuesday highly classified documents were shown alongside a box of old "Time" magazine covers featuring Trump where they had been kept.
There had reportedly long been concerns among officials about the way Trump handled secret information while president.
After an intelligence briefing in 2019, Trump declassified then tweeted out a picture of an Iranian military facility, while in a meeting with Russian officials in 2017 he reportedly revealed highly classified information about terrorist group ISIS that had been shared by Israel.
Trump has claimed he broadly declassified information he took to Mar-a-Lago before leaving office, while his lawyers have argued that the documents are shielded under executive privilege rules.