If the President* Does It, It's Not Illegal Le

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If the President* Does It, It's Not Illegal

Leakers will keep leaking.


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By Charles P. Pierce
May 15, 2017

In which Lewis Carroll scarfs down a handful of mushrooms and gets out of the business.

From The Washington Post:

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump's decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State.

After Trump's meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency. "This is code-word information," said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump "revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies."

I don't have the energy at the moment to look up all the tweets in which the president* used an attack on "leakers" to distract us all from the coziness his operation shared with the Russians.

Neither do I have the energy to go back and run a list of all the people who showed their arses over how Hillary Rodham Clinton may have handled "classified information." Suffice it to say, this little tidbit puts the lie to every single bit of it. It's also fairly clear that elements of the intelligence community are kicking back at a president* of whom they disapprove.

This remains an unsettling look at where the real power resides in the government but, still, assuming the Post has this nailed—and god help them if they don't—this is a fairly severe hit below the waterline.

Not that it's severe enough to raise congressional Republicans from their customary supine position on the Lido deck. Take, for example, noted maverick Senator John McCain, who told Erica Werner of the AP:

Erica Werner
✔ ‎@ericawerner

McCain just saw WP: "We certainly don't want any president to leak classified information but the president does have the right to do that."

They're really going to play it this way, the way they played the Comey story? Essentially saying that, if the president does it, it's not illegal?

That's the excuse you use after you've been run out of office on a rail. The level of absurdity in the administration—and among its enablers—is reaching a lethal level.

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

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