How the shutdown put American intelligence in jeopardy

There's a chance the government shutdown was more dangerous than we thought.

About 800,000 federal workers went unpaid for more than a month during the shutdown, leaving some fed up with the government that's supposed to pay them. That number included national security workers — some of whom could've easily spilled American secrets in exchange for a foreign reward, ABC News reports.

The 35-day-long shutdown over President Trump's demand for border wall funding forced some federal workers to head to food shelters or fall behind on their rent. Some 420,000 employees had to work without pay, including FBI, homeland security, and State Department officials. That frustration and financial distress provides a perfect opportunity for foreign intelligence officers, who search for "people who aren't being paid, people who aren't being respected by their government," when targeting potential espionage agents, former CIA station chief turned ABC News contributor Darrell M. Blocker says.

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Marc Raimondi, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice National Security Division, said his division "was not worried" about espionage threats "at this point." After all, missing two paychecks "was not going to cause a rational human being to commit espionage," former CIA analyst Nada Bakos told ABC News. But she added that if "there's somebody on the verge of it, that could push them over the edge."

Bakos said there's some combination of "money, ideology, coercion, and ego" that convinces intelligence agents to engage in foreign espionage. So with morale tanking along with some employees' bank accounts, experts say the odds are now higher that a national security employee could take the plunge. Read more at ABC News.