The Swamp Strikes Back
Do you remember when the Clinton people, stung by the Bush election, removed all the "W" keys from the White House keyboards before they left office?
Well, it appears that there are no less base but less juvenile and far more damaging sabotage outgoing administrations can conjure.
Daniel Henninger is no friend to Trump. But in a recent article in the WSJ he is a very unhappy guy.
His concern is the broad, shallow pool of accusations and innuendos connecting the Trump administration to the Russians. The KGB could not have dreamed of this kind of success.
First he quotes the esteemed NYT from their article on March 1:
"In the Obama administrations last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J Trump and Russians — across the government..........
At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low classification level to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government — and, in some cases, among European allies. This allowed the upload of as much intelligence as possible to Intellipedia, a secret wiki used by American analysts to share information.
Do you remember when the Clinton people, stung by the Bush election, removed all the "W" keys from the White House keyboards before they left office?
Well, it appears that there are no less base but less juvenile and far more damaging sabotage outgoing administrations can conjure.
Daniel Henninger is no friend to Trump. But in a recent article in the WSJ he is a very unhappy guy.
His concern is the broad, shallow pool of accusations and innuendos connecting the Trump administration to the Russians. The KGB could not have dreamed of this kind of success.
First he quotes the esteemed NYT from their article on March 1:
"In the Obama administrations last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J Trump and Russians — across the government..........
At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low classification level to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government — and, in some cases, among European allies. This allowed the upload of as much intelligence as possible to Intellipedia, a secret wiki used by American analysts to share information.
There was also an effort to pass reports and other sensitive materials to Congress. In one instance, the State Department sent a cache of documents marked “secret” to Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland days before the Jan. 20 inauguration. The documents, detailing Russian efforts to intervene in elections worldwide, were sent in response to a request from Mr. Cardin, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and were shared with Republicans on the panel."
So the Obama administration bundled the Russian Rumors and released them--released them!--to intelligence agencies and Congress under low levels of security, essentially making them available to all intel groups, foreign and domestic. This virtually assured the constant flow of unverified information on Trump from multiple anonymous but respected sites. Trump, characteristically, hit back and impugned the intel sources--not Obama--and isolated himself from the seventeen intel groups.
Trump is going to be awash with the innuendos and insinuations for the rest of his presidency. And the U.S. will be impaired with a diminished president and an isolated intel community. It will do this country a lot of damage.
Obama has stepped beyond the national interest and the effectiveness of the intel community for his own, higher personal motives. What a guy.
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