Former President Donald Trump published classified information in a tweet three years ago - this is what the NPR news site revealed today (Friday).
The tweet shows a photograph showing a missile that exploded on a launch pad in Iran, and next to it the president at the time pointedly wrote "It's not us", meaning that there was no intention to act by the United States.
According to the publication, the image was not taken by an ordinary satellite but by a classified American spacecraft.
"This image is so good, you see a lot of detail in everything," explained Jeffrey Lewis, a satellite imagery researcher at the Middlebury Observatory in Monterey.
"At first I thought it must have been taken by a drone or similar vehicle." However, aerospace experts determined that the photo was taken using one of the United States' most valuable intelligence assets, which is the spacecraft, which operates as part of a project worth billions of dollars.
According to reports, Trump first saw the photo during a daily intelligence briefing where he was updated on the failure of the Iranian missile launch.
Trump asked at the same time to keep a copy of the photo and an hour later distributed it to more than 60 million followers on Twitter.
The photo that was originally classified and tweeted by Trump 3 years ago (photo: official website, from Donald Trump's Twitter account)
Today, three years after Trump distributed the documentation in a tweet, the US National Visual and Geographical Intelligence Agency NGA officially declassified the original image. This, after the NPR network requested it by virtue of freedom of information, and after the Pentagon's review of whether the image can be disclosed to the public.
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