washington. we re in the situation room. we want to welcome our sures near the united states and around the world. we re standing by to hear from president biden as he faces reporters to hear about the classified documents found in his former private office here in washington. any moment now, president biden will face reporters as he attends this key summit in mexico city. right now let s bring in our chief white house correspondent phil mattingly. phil, the revelation of classified documents found at the president s former office here in washington has clearly overshadowed his trip to mexico right now. he is about to face questions from reporters there. we ll have live coverage of that coming up. but set the scene for us. what you re looking at right now is where the president s focus has been and where white house officials have wanted it to be over the course of these last two turbulent days, given the revelations tied to those ten classified documents that were discov
analyst is joining us right now. you ve done a lot of work in national security, carrie. these documents were related we re told to the united kingdom, iran and ukraine, and some of these were marked top secret, as i said, sci, which is highly sensitive information. you ve worked in the intelligence community. what concerns does all this raise to you? well, first of all, in present day context, from a national security homeland security perspective, it s a huge distraction. here the president is in mexico. he is supposed to be talking about one of the most critical homeland security issues that is important to both parties right now. very important to the new republican congress border security, migration, and that is being overshadowed by this new classified document issue. obviously, whenever classified documents are in a place that they are not supposed to be, that is a problem. and that s why it s appropriate that the justice department look
is very much like him when it comes to the upcoming elections. speaking of the word danger, there s an another excerpt from the book that details twice in the final months, general milley was so afraid that donald trump would spark a war with china that he made secret calls to his chinese counterpart to ease tension. from a homeland security perspective, olivia, what do you make of that? how extraordinary were the concerns if this was the length that general milley was willing to go? i think general milley did the right thing. i think what he was trying to do through diplomatic channels was to sort of assuage any concerns and prevent an escalation or a natural disaster, natural security disaster from happening by the chinese misunderstanding whatever trump s rhetoric was at the time and preventing this conflict from escalating. because the president would say
military installations leaving these military installations and they don t pass the screening and vetting at the end of the day. todd: and the permit of the went security securing the homeland what are the ramifications of the homeland of these if they are not carried out well by dhs? it is extremely serious. when we look at afghanistan, the disastrous way we conducted this withdrawal my concern from homeland security perspective is we are allowing afghanistan to become a safe haven for terrorism. isis k and other groups, their ultimate goal is to strike here in the homeland and have that reach here so if we continue to foster that and allow it to continue without any assets on the ground in afghanistan that is from the homeland security perspective and when we look closer to home on the southwest border we have 200,000 individuals coming across the border every month.
thinking rationally. the taliban should realize that it is not in their own selfish interest to see another terrorist organization crop up within their midst. that happened 20 years ago. it didn t end so well for the taliban 20 years ago. so it s in their interest to make sure that al-qaeda or the islamic state does not crop up. but we need to be vigilant. from a homeland security perspective, we need to be vigilant. the president today talked about the over horizon capability. what he means by that is the ability to monitor whether a terrorist organization is propping up in afghanistan from outside the borders of afghanistan. we do have that capability. and, so, we need to be vigilant in afghanistan. and in other parts of the world. but let s not forget, wolf, that right now the number one terrorist threat to our homeland is what dhs talked about just the other day in a bulletin,