@edgarblythe,
Quote: he misled Vice President Mike Pence about those conversations. His survival in the job may hang in the balance.
A question. Can we be sure that pence and tRump dident know Flynn was in contact with the Russians considering how many lies they have told over the last year?
@RABEL222,
A lie detector test about now could destroy Trump and his gang of crooks.
@edgarblythe,
edgarblythe wrote:
Robert Reich
3 hrs ·
Disturbing news this morning about how much “truth” about the rest of the world is getting to Trump.
1. The Observer reports that the U.S. intelligence community is so convinced that Trump and his administration has been compromised by Russia that they are no longer giving the White House all of their most sensitive information, lest it end up in Putin's hands. A senior National Security Agency official explained that the National Security Agency was systematically holding back some of the “good stuff” from the White House, fearing Trump and his staff cannot keep secrets.
2. The intelligence community is concerned that even the Situation Room – the conference room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings -- has been compromised by Russia. A senior Pentagon intelligence official stated that “since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM. There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point,” the official added in frustration.
3. The New York Times reports “chaotic and anxious days inside the National Security Council.” Council staff get up in the morning, read Trump’s tweets, and struggle to make policy to fit them. Most are kept in the dark about what Trump tells foreign leaders in his phone calls. Some staff members have turned to encrypted communications to talk with their colleagues, after hearing that Mr. Trump’s top advisers are considering an “insider threat” program that could result in monitoring their cellphones and emails for leaks.
4. National security adviser Michael T. Flynn has hunkered down since investigators began looking into what, exactly, he told the Russian ambassador to the United States about the lifting of sanctions imposed in the last days of the Obama administration, and whether he misled Vice President Mike Pence about those conversations. His survival in the job may hang in the balance.
Bottom line: U.S. foreign policy is now in the hands of a man with a severe personality disorder, who is not getting the information a president needs about the rest of the world. If that doesn’t worry you, nothing will.
Where does Reich get this this ****? Does he wake up in the middle of the night and write down his dreams?
@McGentrix,
Which parts are not accurate?
@edgarblythe,
edgarblythe wrote:
Which parts are not accurate?
I would figure this part:
Quote:The Observer reports that the U.S. intelligence community is so convinced that Trump and his administration has been compromised by Russia that they are no longer giving the White House all of their most sensitive information, lest it end up in Putin's hands. A senior National Security Agency official explained that the National Security Agency was systematically holding back some of the “good stuff” from the White House, fearing Trump and his staff cannot keep secrets.
You gotta love the "anonymous sources"...
But you know they like Trump and are giving it up, entirely?
@edgarblythe,
edgarblythe wrote:
But you know they like Trump and are giving it up, entirely?
That is their job and he is President so, yeah. If they aren't they won't have their jobs long.
@McGentrix,
So everybody in government does their jobs?
@edgarblythe,
edgarblythe wrote:
So everybody in government does their jobs?
...boy, that's a loaded question.
On Saturday last weekend, Donald Trump alleged in a series of tweets that former President Barack Obama orchestrated a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap Trump’s phones at his Trump Tower headquarters last fall in the run-up to the election. Trump concluded that the former president is a “Bad (or sick) guy!”
Last Sunday morning, Trump’s White House called for a congressional investigation.
Trump cited no evidence for his accusation.
Folks, we’ve got a huge problem on our hands. Either:
1 Trump is more nuts than we suspected — a true delusional paranoid. Trump’s outburst was seemingly triggered by commentary March 3 in the alt-right publication Breitbart News, which reported an assertion made the night before by right-wing talk-radio host Mark Levin suggesting that Obama and his administration used “police state” tactics last fall to monitor the Trump team’s dealings with Russian operatives.
If this was the case, we’ve got a president willing to put the prestige and power of his office behind baseless claims emanating from well-known right-wing purveyors of lies. Which means Trump shouldn’t be anywhere near the nuclear codes that could obliterate the planet, or near anything else that could determine the fate of America or the world.
2 The second possibility is that Trump is correct, and the Obama administration did in fact tap his phones. But if this was the case, before the tap could occur, Trump was likely to have committed a very serious crime, possibly treason.
No president can order a wiretap on his own. For federal agents to obtain a wiretap on Trump, the Justice Department would first have had to convince a federal judge that it had gathered sufficient evidence of probable cause to believe Trump had committed a serious crime or was an agent of a foreign power, depending on whether it was a criminal or foreign intelligence wiretap.
In which case we have someone occupying the Oval Office who shouldn’t be making decisions that could endanger America or the world.
3 The third possible explanation for Trump’s rant is that he’s trying to divert public attention from the Jeff Sessions imbroglio and multiple investigations of Trump associates already found to have been in contact with Russian agents during the election, at a time when Russian operatives interfered with the election on Trump’s behalf.
Maybe he’s trying to build a case that the entire Russia story is a plot concocted by the Obama administration — along with the intelligence agencies and the mainstream media — to bring Trump down. That way, he can inoculate himself against more damaging evidence to come.
But if it’s all a big show to divert attention and undermine the credibility of the intelligence agencies and the media, Trump is willing to do anything to keep his job — even if it means further dividing America, undermining trust in our governing institutions, and destroying the fabric of our democracy.
So there you have it. Whatever the reason for Trump’s rant, America is in deep trouble. We have a president who is either a dangerous paranoid who’s making judgments based on right-wing crackpots, or has in all likelihood committed treason, or is willing to sacrifice public trust in our basic institutions to further his selfish goals.
Each of these possible reasons is as terrifying as the other.
But for Democrats to be the only ones sounding the alarm risks turning it into a new normal of partisanship. For Obama himself to respond to Trump’s latest rant would only dignify it.
So the responsibility falls to Republican leaders. They must stand up and call this what it is: dangerous demagoguery.
We are depending on former Republican Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, former Republican senators and members of Congress, and current Republican senators and members of Congress, to have the courage and decency to stop this outrage.
We are in a serious crisis of governance, and their voices are critical.
© 2017 Robert Reich
Robert Reich
16 hrs ·
Yesterday several right-leaning news outlets reported that some of the materials the White House shared with Devin Nunes showed that Susan Rice, Obama’s national security advisor, had requested the names of Trump associates under investigation by intelligence agencies be “unmasked” – that is, revealed in the intelligence reports that went to Obama (and then, presumably, to Trump).
Conservative talk radio and Fox News is treating this as a major scandal. Rubbish. Unmasking occurs all the time when intelligence agencies decide that a president needs to know the identities of various individuals in order to make sense of an intelligence report.
It’s another part of Trump’s ongoing attempt to deflect attention from the big story – the FBI’s investigation into collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives – to a Trumped-up story about Obama administration wiretapping or spying on Trump.
Keep your eyes on the big story. Make sure everyone else does, too.
@edgarblythe,
Yeah and MSNBC is calling it racists and sexist because Rice is a black woman...
There is A LOT of there, there. It should be easy enough to see how many "unmasking" requests she made and to compare them from before Trump was candidate and after Trump was candidate.
From what I have read, the NSA says that this is NOT a common practice. Otherwise, whats the point of masking them?
@McGentrix,
Quote:From what I have read,
Maybe you should take some reading classes because what I read says its a common practice, especially when its communists they are talking too.
@RABEL222,
That depends on what YOU read and whether you understood it correctly. Perhaps you should consider some classes in spelling and grammar.
Robert Reich
1 hr ·
Trump told reporters today that he’s had “one of the most successful 13 weeks in the history of the presidency.”
Um. …
First of all, it's been a disaster. His repeal of Obamacare went nowhere. His entire legislative has been stalled. His Muslim ban is held up in the courts. His possible collusion with Russia over the 2016 election is preoccupying Congress and the White House. He had to fire his national security advisor. His Attorney General had to recuse himself from the investigation. His White House is in chaos. And his non-stop lies have brought his favorability rating to the lowest of any president in history at this point in office.
Oh, one other thing. He hasn't been in office for 13 weeks. It’s been 11.
Other than that, Trump has a point.
Robert Reich
29 mins ·
Presumably one of the reasons Trump attacked Obama again today for “improperly surveilling me and so many other people,” was because of reports that the FBI obtained a secret court order last summer to monitor the communications of Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy adviser, as part of its investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign.
To get that secret order, the FBI had to convince a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of Russia.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer has sought to distance Trump from Page, describing Page as only one of many campaign "hangers-on."
But Trump himself listed Page as one of his foreign policy advisers in a March 2016 interview with the Washington Post.
@edgarblythe,
Quote:Trump told reporters today that he’s had “one of the most successful 13 weeks in the history of the presidency.”
Another of Trump's mental deficiencies. He ignores the fact that his approval rating is one of the lowest in history for his first 100 days in office - hovering in the mid-thirties.
Robert Reich
49 mins ·
What the hell is going on? The Pentagon announced today that U.S. forces in Afghanistan dropped a 22,000-pound GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB), on Islamic State forces in eastern Afghanistan.
It’s the first time the bomb -- nicknamed the "mother of all bombs," and one of the largest air-dropped munitions in the U.S. military’s inventory -- has ever been used in a combat. (By comparison, U.S. aircraft commonly drop bombs that weigh between 250 to 2,000 pounds.)
The target was an ISIS cave and tunnel complex and personnel in the Achin district of the Nangarhar province in northeast Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border. It’s unclear what the GBU-43 strike accomplished, since the bomb is not designed to penetrate hardened targets such a bunkers or cave complexes.
But the bombing could represent a shocking escalation of America’s war in Afghanistan—and one that place more civilians in greater danger than ever before.
After years of limiting air strikes in order to minimize civilian casualties, Trump seems to be making good on his promise to “bomb the ****” out of ISIS. The Pentagon says “U.S. Forces took every precaution to avoid civilian casualties with this strike,” but what does that mean? The Pentagon is now hitting suspected militants faster and with less vetting. Inaccurate U.S. air strikes reportedly killed hundreds of civilians in Mosul in Iraq last month.
Trump seems to have unleashed his generals for all out war on – exactly whom? Assad? ISIS? ISIS in all its forms and permutations, wherever they occur? The Taliban? Al-Qaeda?
Does Congress have any say in this? Do we as citizens of the United States have any say? Where is this leading?
@edgarblythe,
Quote:Does Congress have any say in this? Do we as citizens of the United States have any say? Where is this leading?
You didn't seem to give 2 shits about Obama expanding US bombing campaigns from 2 nations to 7 nations in 8 years and taking drone usage to an all time high. You guys only give a **** now because someone without a Nobel Peace Prize doesn't have his finger on the button...
Your faux outrage is starting to show, give it up.
@Baldimo,
It's very funny watching you guys point at each others presidents -
Baldimo: Yours is a bigger war criminal/liar/terrorist than my guy.
Whoever: No, he isn't. Yours is a bigger war criminal/liar/terrorist than my guy.
Baldimo: blah blah blah, ....
"hypocrisy" can't be in US editions of M-W.
