All the Lights Are Blinking Red Let’s face fa

All the Lights Are Blinking Red

Let’s face facts. This kind of leak doesn’t happen unless somebody very important doesn’t see any other way to warn the country about something he’s not important enough to stop.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politic...nl20639483

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
JUN 30, 2020



Remember when Richard Clarke talked about how “all the lights were blinking red” in the intelligence community in the summer of 2001 during what later would be seen as the run-up to the 9/11 attacks? In that case, the blinking red lights were all located within the various spook HQs. That was bad enough.

But now, the intelligence community seems to be going door-to-door with warnings that the President* of the United States is as big a danger to the country’s security and stability as COVID-19 and modern country music combined. They’re doing everything except staple warnings to lamp posts in Dupont Circle, and some of them apparently jammed Carl Bernstein’s phone lines over the past few weeks. From CNN:

The calls caused former top Trump deputies -- including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials -- to conclude that the President was often "delusional," as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders.

The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest.

These officials' concerns about the calls, and particularly Trump's deference to Putin, take on new resonance with reports the President may have learned in March that Russia had offered the Taliban bounties to kill US troops in Afghanistan -- and yet took no action.

CNN's sources said there were calls between Putin and Trump about Trump's desire to end the American military presence in Afghanistan but they mentioned no discussion of the supposed Taliban bounties.

Let’s face facts. This kind of leak doesn’t happen unless somebody very important doesn’t see any other way to warn the country about something he’s not important enough to stop. This is a massive breach of protocol on a dozen levels, not the least of which is the obvious fact that some important person feels no compulsion to show deference to the incumbent president*. I mean, really, what do they have to do? Tie the documents to a brick and throw it through Mitch McConnell’s window?

Trump incessantly boasted to his fellow heads of state, including Saudi Arabia's autocratic royal heir Mohammed bin Salman and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about his own wealth, genius, "great" accomplishments as President, and the "idiocy" of his Oval Office predecessors, according to the sources.

In his conversations with both Putin and Erdogan, Trump took special delight in trashing former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and suggested that dealing directly with him -- Trump -- would be far more fruitful than during previous administrations. "They didn't know BS," he said of Bush and Obama -- one of several derisive tropes the sources said he favored when discussing his predecessors with the Turkish and Russian leaders.

If he had any capacity for shame, he’d suddenly discover a heretofore undiagnosed heart murmur that renders him incapable of running for re-election. Or he’d slink off to Bimini with half the Treasury in his valise. What the sources in this story are desperately trying to tell the country is, for the love of the living god, don’t re-elect this guy.

One person familiar with almost all the conversations with the leaders of Russia, Turkey, Canada, Australia and western Europe described the calls cumulatively as 'abominations' so grievous to US national security interests that if members of Congress heard from witnesses to the actual conversations or read the texts and contemporaneous notes, even many senior Republican members would no longer be able to retain confidence in the President.
I wouldn’t make book on that.

The insidious effect of the conversations comes from Trump's tone, his raging outbursts at allies while fawning over authoritarian strongmen, his ignorance of history and lack of preparation as much as it does from the troubling substance, according to the sources.

While in office, then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats expressed worry to subordinates that Trump's telephone discussions were undermining the coherent conduct of foreign relations and American objectives around the globe, one of CNN's sources said. And in recent weeks, former chief of staff Kelly has mentioned the damaging impact of the President's calls on US national security to several individuals in private.

Two sources compared many of the President's conversations with foreign leaders to Trump's recent press "briefings" on the coronavirus pandemic: *free form, fact-deficient stream-of-consciousness ramblings, full of fantasy and off-the-wall pronouncements based on his intuitions, guesswork, the opinions of Fox News TV hosts and social media misinformation.

Yes, that is a bell you hear tolling.

*Perfect description of many, many, RW word-salad conspiracy theory laden posts.