O'Neill to Newsmax: 'Too Many People Have Access' to Classified Info

Retired SEAL Team Six member Robert O'Neill told Newsmax on Wednesday that "too many people have access" to the type of classified information that was leaked from the Pentagon about Ukraine, South Korea, and Israel in recent months.

"There's bureaucracy all over the place, and I like redundancy in some things, but there's way too much redundancy, and it's way too easy to get a clearance," O'Neill said during an appearance on Newsmax's "John Bachman Now." "There are so many people running around with clearances that are getting emails they don't need to send.

"You can't bring in a USB, you can't plug into a computer, but there's just so many emails flying around with different names on them. Too many people have access and they got away from the need-to-know.

"I'm a big believer that on operations, I want my people to know everything they can so they work more efficiently, but not every civilian contractor needs to have access to top secret information.

"Something happened here. They're going to have a hard time finding it. I mean, it was on Minecraft for awhile. Who has access to this? Too many people."

O'Neill said part of the problem is that too much government information is marked classified unnecessarily.

"I think too much is classified … because somewhere, again, in the bureaucracy, someone needs to seem important enough to label it as, 'Secret. This is top secret. Look at me,'" he said. "It goes as far as you walk into a room and they see someone with just a secret badge, and not a top secret badge, they turn on these flashing lights, like on a police car, and they can yell, 'Secret only!' just so they sound important."

He also said that while not everything needs to be classified, there are some appropriately marked classified materials that, if leaked, could be damaging to the United States' international relations.

"If we're leaking that there's special forces operating in Ukraine, and they find out about it, that we're taking pictures of bases of our allies, this is a very, very big issue," he said. "It harms our allies, it hurts the alliance and then it emboldens the enemy."

About NEWSMAX TV:

NEWSMAX is the fastest-growing cable news channel in America!