Russians figured it out, why can’t Trump?
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I’m not sure Sec. State has authority to declassify material if it is classified by another agency, wasn’t that the case with these emails? Stuff in them was retroactively classified by CIA and/or someone else?
Not trying to defend Lyin’ Donny, and I think it’s actually apples and oranges: while sending the info over private email is unwise and may have increased the likelihood of it being stolen/intercepted, I don’t think it’s the same thing as directly communicating it to a top official in a foreign and somewhat hostile government…
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Surely he couldn’t have been so stupid as to have this discussion without dismissing the Russian state media first… surely…
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…and if his reports of his own behavior are to be believed, he’s of the variety preferred by Georgios Papanikolaou…
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Cool. Who’s your VP?
Well they weren’t really overlooked. There was a whole investigation into the matter, even by the FBI. It shook out to “she shouldn’t have done it, but nothing really bad appeared to have happened”. Soooo, if you are holding your breath for a political elite to be prosecuted for something that ended up to not amount to much, well, good luck with that.
The skeptic in my wants more proof too, but at the same time the source at least appears to be legit, not tabloids or fringe “news” orgs. This at least registers as smoke.
I don’t see how that is possible. Because the original intelligence source knows we can’t keep secrets anymore?
If it’s true they should get a Pulitzer. I personally don’t want a rogue president willy nilly handling intelligence counter to what EVERYONE in the intelligence community would do, and against the wishes of who we got the intel from. We just probably burned that source, or they won’t risk sharing with us in the future.
OH for sure there should be an investigation. But the president is a very smart man. He knew what he was doing. This was no accident.
“You accidentally, expertly, carefully told them our secret intel?”
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Reminds me of this:
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Isn’t this the point in the gong show where the gong gets rung and the act changes?
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The fascinating part of the ongoing leaks is highlighted by ones like this that come from small, intimate meetings: Someone in the room leaked this. Career military and governmental employees with honor-bound allegiance to the most powerful single human in the land are like ‘nuh-uh, fuck this dude.’ Even his inner circle has come to the unspoken conclusion that the only viable option is to sink the ship before it gets too far out of the harbor.
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The only American oath of office that I can find that pledges allegiance to the President is the National Guard. Even the Secret Service only pledges allegiance to the Constitution.
Pledging allegiance to the head of state is more the kind of thing you’d find in a monarchy, not a republic.
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Richard Nixon.
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Dang, I meant to put ‘honor-bound’- changed. Of course a sitting President would never try to solicit statements of fealty from subordinates!
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That’s crazy talk, man. How do you know it wasn’t leaked by some guy from Russia, or from TASS? They were in the room. Or maybe it was some guy in his bedroom in New Jersey.
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So the key is that he is the President and can declassify at will so that’s not an offense. Then national security officials were in at the meeting and confirmed that no disclosures of the means and methods of collection were disclosed. So where’s the breach? WaPo is making it appear as if there was a violation of security when in reality there was none. That is fake news.
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While it’s true that the President can declare any material unclassified and share code-word information at will, and doing so isn’t breaking the law, it doesn’t automatically make it a good idea for the country’s security.
What may be more important here is how awful this looks for him as well as our country. As they say, the optics here are as bad as they can be. In a week’s time, our President fired the man leading an active investigation into Russian entanglements in our government, admitted that he did so to derail the investigation, hosted a known Russian spy in the Oval Office with only TASS reporters allowed to document the meeting, and just admitted to disclosing previously-classified info to that Russian spy. If the President wants to be seen as a traitor, he’s doing a damn fine job of it.
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Again—it’s not technically illegal, that’s not the same as saying it’s a remotely responsible thing to do or that it’s not an impeachable offense. During the campaign Trump brutally, relentlessly attacked Clinton as someone who could not be trusted with sensitive intelligence information (implying he would be a better choice in this regard).
If the best defense you can come up with is “he was within his legal authority to fuck up in that particular way” then heaven help you.
This isn’t a traditional “leak” so much as “the President exercising his legal right to accidentally detonate an explosive in the hull of the ship.”
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Some things are only legal because the people who write laws never dreamed they’d have to stop someone from doing them.
Even Trump seems to be clinging to the “I’m the President so it’s not illegal when I do it” defense.
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The surgical wording of McMaster’s statement speaks volumes. He didn’t just say ‘Bullshit, guys, that story is false’-- he said that the story, “as reported”, was incorrect and that the President didn’t discuss sources and methods. Meaning that there could be one word out of place in the WaPo article that technically, surgically renders it incorrect, and that the President freely and without consultation discussed only the product of intelligence-gathering (which we promised the source not to share anyway), and not the whole-cloth methods.
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I can’t understand how people keep defending Trump saying he didn’t do this or he didn’t say that. Every single time he just comes out the next day and goes, “Yeah, I did it.”
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