So, according to WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/spies-keep-intelligence-from-donald-trump-1487209351
If true, regardless of who you think might be at fault, I’d hope we can all agree this is no way to run a country.
It’s Trump’s show. So the buck stops at him, regardless.
Then again, don’t discount Trump. He has allies, and many of them, in positions of power. Intel is taking their best shot now, it seems, because they know that they’ll be de-fanged by new leadership in the coming months/years.
I strongly doubt this is their best shot.
I’m curious if any President has ever had a scandal rise to this level and nothing happen. At the very least there will be an Iran-Contra level sideshow, but maybe that’s the model of “nothing happens”? I mean, HW got elected after that.
He does have allies. One thing’s clear about Trump though - he has no actual friends, in DC or in New York. When the tide turns against him, you’ll see supposedly loyal allies turn on him with whiplash speed.
Even if Trump orders a massive reorganization, the IC will be slowed but not defanged. There will be plenty of anti-Trumpers left. Both because the IC is large and because, y’know, the IC is good at doing things like saying-one-thing-while-doing-another and going-to-ground-and-burrowing-in because they’re actually trained to do it.
And of course Trump has rattled their cages. Republican administrations are supposed to be pro-IC but Trump openly loathes the IC and enjoys pissing on them in public. He has many more enemies there now than he did on November 7th.
Yup, while many heads will fall and the reputation of the US will plummet due to the Russia stuff, it’s far more likely the blow that takes down Trump himself will come from his business shenanigans. Both because they’re so blatant (see the Trump Foundation) and because of their scope. Trump might be able to control Congress and Comey, but he can’t control prosecutors in all 50 states and in the countless countries where Trump does business.
I’m sure there are a bunch of State’s Attorneys in New York right now angling to make their political names off of Trump’s dubious business practices; likewise in the other blue states.
(Of course, any court action against Trump isn’t going to directly result in kicking him out of office; only Congress - or the VP + the cabinet in the case of the 25th Amendment - can do that. But it can raise such an unholy political stink that the GOP finally decides that Donnie has health problems and needs to go.)
Do we want the US intelligence agencies to have the autonomy to attack and depose democratically elected Presidents? I guess they have gotten bored of removing democratic leaders everywhere else in the world. Next the newspapers will be telling me Wall St. Bankers are our only hope to remove Trump and stave off WW3, and sadly many left-wingers will probably cheer them on as well.
I’m going to go back to hoping the judiciary and legislative will do it, as they are supposed to.
Before folks get their hopes up, just because the left wing sites are frothing at the mouth, near in mind that the most likely outcome of all this is nothing.
Don’t put all your eggs in this basket.
Nothing will stop Trump and that is why I live a barren husk of a man, hopeless and motivated only by seething hatred for conservatives!
Everybody’s gotta have a hobby…
Do we want the US intelligence agencies to have the autonomy to attack and depose democratically elected Presidents?
I’d like them to have the autonomy to determine to what extent foreign governments conspired to interfere with said democratic election.
Possibly but I’m not basing my hopes on left wing sites frothing at the mouth. The Wall St Journal is (likely accurately from what we’ve heard from other sources) reporting that the intelligence community is withholding critical intelligence from the White House because they fear it’s compromised by our greatest adversary. And the intelligence community is almost certainly right. This is not a tenable situation. The center cannot hold.
No matter how strong their will to stay in power, if it continues like this, at some point the shit storm will overwhelm them.
These people take an oath to the constitution, not the president. If the executive branch takes actions that threaten it they have a duty to root that out. Now yes, you’re right the Constitution provides protection against an executive branch but we do not currently have a Congress that has any willingness to do so. IOW if they have information that demonstrates the executive branch is compromised they damn well better leak it.
Newsweek, WaPo, NYT are not “left wing sites.”
But personally no I don’t have my hopes up and completely agree the most likely outcome of this is nothing. Trump is useful for the GOP not only because he’ll sign their shitty ‘legislative agenda’, but he distracts everyone from what they’re doing. If the Trump shitshow gets too much (which will require actions I can’t even imagine as the Republican base at this point are all just mindless zombies) then the GOP will nobly swoop in, pound their chests about how they love America and they stood up to Trump and see? we love America and the Demorats are the true enemy and on we go with said Republican zombies shuffling off to the polls to re-elect their shitlords.
The intelligence community has always walked a fine line.The people “on the ground,” or at the terminals as it were, doing the gathering and analysis, have nearly uniformly been good, honest, and loyal, barring the crap like Ames, Hansen, Walker, etc. The people in the middle have varied from extremely competent and conscientious long-term pros to career-obsessed mediocrities who would sway whichever way would give them a step promotion, but from what I can tell even that wasn’t super common. There is a certain conservatism that naturally grows in those environments, but at worst it usually results in a reluctance to make a call without overwhelming verification.
At the top, though, whoo boy, all bets are off. At the senior level the politics has always been the bete noir of good intelligence work. My father worked in military intelligence during his career in the Army, mostly counterintelligence. Sent to Viet Nam in the early fall of 1967, his people were picking up clear indications of what was to be the Tet Offensive. So were tons of other people. The info went to MACV, then to Washington, and…nada. Somewhere in between the pros and the politicos, the message got switched to what Lyndon Johnson’s people wanted to hear. We know the rest of the story. That’s anecdotal (my side of it, not the actual happenings, which are pretty well documented), but it illustrates the temptations that the IC has always had at certain levels to shade the truth.
But actually undercutting a president is pretty rare. Maybe you could argue that Carter or even Clinton got some friction from the IC at times, but I can’t really think of any case where the community either withheld info or actively if anonymously expressed its disapproval of the president. So if that’s happening here, it would be pretty unusual.
So unusual that we have to balance the reasonable concern about the tail wagging the dog with the possibility that, in this case, the cure might not be worse than the disease. But, in general, I share strongly this sense of discomfort at the possibility of the system really going off the rails. Once the IC, or the Pentagon, or anyone downstream from the White House starts getting in the habit of playing kingmaker or what not, the path becomes perilous indeed.
This.
Which is exactly why they’re leaking things and denying him information.
I’m not sure “letting us know some of the truth” is the same as “deposing” anyone.
Don’t forget that Trump also picked this fight and called them Nazis. Then showed up to their house and took a shit on their most sacred spot while his paid cronies clapped.
Edit: And the WSJ story we heard about quite a while back from the guy that people were bitching about earlier not having sources or whatever. So that’s another one in his column.
You’re ignoring the context. It’s not about deposing a president. People are talking about exposing potential collusion with foreign intelligence services and corruption which could result in a president getting impeached. And yes, if there’s evidence of that, I certainly do want them to expose it. It’s not like they can go to their boss when he’s the very person in question.
And it’s not like the rest of us can get information about it when it’s all classified.
They could leak it to Wikileaks, except they’d literally rather die first and it would never be published anyway.
Also, if the President if vulnerable to blackmail, this disarms that threat. There’s an argument that this is the goal here, not just pouring petrol on the inferno that is the Trump administration.
But they aren’t what I’m talking about.
To a large degree, they are just reporting the news. But there are other more left leaning places which are adding in the stuff like, “Trump’s going to get impeached! This is the worst thing since watergate!”
I just think you should try to have some perspective here.
On the flip side of things, the idea of Congress now investigating, not the Russian connections, but the idea that “classified data has been leaked” is nonsensical on its face… because no classified data has been leaked.