My understanding is because the President can basically declassify anything at any time. He could literally Tweet out state secrets or tell them to a crowd if he wanted. Hell, he could email them to the Chinese and just say, “Yeah, I declassified them.”
There are no laws against the President being fucking stupid and mishandling material. Because it was never an issue before and no one ever thought it ever would be. Plus the President is, ultimately, the final word on this sort of thing. You can’t go over his head. If he wants to Tweet out the nuclear codes, legally there is nothing saying he couldn’t.
Overall I feel that our Prime Minister acquitted himself well. He was respectful, and at the same time stated that we have fundamentally different views in some areas. He also acknowledged that you don’t go to someone else’s house and criticize how they do things. The unspoken message is that once back home, that could change if the behaviour is egregious. But as Trudeau also stated, we have a long-standing and unique partnership that is too valuable to just throw away.
In terms of the handshake thing, it pretty much went as I predicted. Trudeau boxes, so I wasn’t surprised to seem him maintain balance, poise, and not give an inch. Politically, he did not want to seem “weak” and succeeded through an effortless (looking) tug of war. At the same time, he was smiling and cheerful and the gift he brought Trump was a photo of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Justin’s father) with Trump in 1981, acknowledging tacitly that Trump was a “big man” back then, big enough for the Prime Minister to meet at the time.
And whoever came up with the idea to do a Women’s Entrepreneurship conference as a major event of the trip deserves an award. Trump gets to improve his image with women (slightly), Trudeau gets to make the point that he’s an avowed feminist, and Ivanka is included which makes Trump happy. And in this case, it’s appropriate to include her because whatever else you may think about her, you cannot deny that Ivanka is a female entrepreneur.
It’s worth watching what Flynn does next. If his “consulting” firm gets a new high-profile contract or he takes a lucrative job. Someone has a lot of leverage right now, lets see if Flynn cares about the optics of this.
Which is why they don’t defend anything. He’ll just tweet something stupid about how the Academy Awards show is probably going to discriminate against Mel Gibson, or something, and all the media cats will run after that toy for the next two weeks. Already they couldn’t care less about how terrible he is with security and email servers himself. When he threatened to put her in jail for…whatever.
How many days in and his administration is already lost its National Security Advisor due to a scandal. Great job.
Any rational conservative (or Republican…they are different things) who voted for him should not only be embarrased, but be ashamed.
And no one will investigate shit if that happens. Fucking partisan bullshit. I saw an investigation is being called for regarding the White House leaks but of course no one’s concerned about Trump’s Russian ties & all that other apparently “trivial” crap.
And then lying to federal investigators about it. I’m sure they’ll pick him, he’ll be confirmed by spineless Republican Senators, and the GOP will just pretend they didn’t rail for months about emails & private servers.
