Now that Donald Trump is the official Republican nominee for president, he is due to get security clearance to receive classified U.S. intelligence briefings. This represents an unprecedented and immediate threat to the security and well-being of the United States and its allies, for the following reasons:

(1)    Mr. Trump has demonstrated consistent disregard for learning even the most basic tenets of Constitutional and international law, of current treaties and alliances which have helped maintain order throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He has shown profound ignorance of important figures and even important nations, ethnic, and religious groups and organizations. Throughout his campaign for over a year, he has demonstrated that, despite a lot of impressive-sounding rhetoric, he is unwilling to do the work of learning these basics, choosing instead to focus his energy on drawing attention to himself and carrying on petty personal feuds on Twitter.

(2)    Trump has been known for many years to be impatient, inattentive, and impulsive, with an obvious penchant to improvise and speak “off the cuff.” Intelligence analysts have already expressed unease at the possibility that Trump could simply spill sensitive secrets in the midst of one of his freewheeling talks.

(3)    More disturbingly, there is an increasing body of evidence that Trump and his team (in spite of their “America First” slogans) are concealing agreements and business arrangements with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle of oligarchs, in direct conflict with the security and interests of the United States and its allies. (A sampling of such evidence is described in the section below.) In light of this, the release of sensitive classified intelligence to Donald Trump and members of his team represents an unacceptable threat to our nation’s stability and security. We therefore call for the CIA to immediately rescind the security clearance of Donald Trump to receive classified intelligence briefings, until Donald Trump’s international financial, contractual and political arrangements have been made fully transparent, to the full satisfaction of the intelligence community, the Congress, and the citizens of the United States.

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ADDENDUM: SOME ITEMS INDICATING DONALD TRUMP’S PERSONAL AND FINANCIAL CONFLICTS OF INTEREST AGAINST THE SECURITY OF THE UNITED STATES AND ITS ALLIES:

- All major US banks except DeutscheBank have ceased to do business with Trump because of the high risk of lending him money and because of a long history of unscrupulous business practices.

- Consequently, Trump is increasingly beholden to Russian oligarchs in Putin's inner circle, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in debt they have helped finance; Trump has been trying for decades to expand his real estate and hotel businesses throughout Russia, and he refuses to pledge to detach himself from his current business ventures, creating obvious conflicts of interest versus security concerns for the U.S. and its allies.

- Donald Trump, Jr. even went on the record about this in 2008, saying, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Kazakhstan has been named as another source of funds for Trump's business ventures. Trump still refuses to release any of his income tax data. While some theorize he is hiding how little tax he has paid (or perhaps that his total worth is much less than the $10 billion he claims), analysts have theorized recently that he doesn't want to reveal just how much of his money comes from the Russian oligarchs.

- Trump's chief campaign  strategist, Paul Manafort, has received millions of dollars lobbying and facilitating arms sales for warlords and dictators throughout Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe; also Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and others. He helped arrange the sale of French submarines to Pakistan and the laundering of that sale's proceeds into political races. More recently, he was on the payroll of pro-Russian Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych, who was deposed in 2014.

- Trump's foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom, creating obvious pressure to align with Vladimir Putin's wishes.

- Putin has made unprecedented moves to influence the United States' presidential elections in Trump's favor. He has given support to Trump's presidential campaign, overtly with the support of Russia 's state-controlled news media, and covertly, as seen with the recent DNC leak, which was found to have originated from the same server as Russian hacks of the German Bundestag, and which was clearly timed to interfere with the Democratic Convention.

- Trump has been steadfast in his refusal to criticize Putin's unlawful interference with, and invasions of, neighboring sovereign nations. He refuses to criticize Putin despite the Putin regime's history of threatening, imprisoning and murdering political opponents and journalists. Instead, he compliments Putin on being "strong."

- When Republicans crafted their platform for last week's convention, Trump's team was hands-off to the point of indifference (also a historic anomaly), with the exception of one item: They pressured hard to remove language pledging to supply weapons support to Ukraine to fight Russian forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington.

- Trump has also gone on record saying that if he is President, the U.S. might not give assistance to NATO member nations if they are attacked by Russia -- a stunning disavowal of a treaty which, since 1949, has been a major cornerstone of security and cooperation between the U.S. and its allies throughout Europe. Analysts report that such a move would have massive destabilizing effects throughout Europe and Asia, freeing Putin to reestablish an expanding Russian empire in Eastern Europe and, in turn, prompting a new era of nuclear arms proliferation and worsening economic instability.