Intel Agencies Keep Pres Trump in the Dark

There is a fanciful article on the Wall Street Journal front page that shows the length some people will go to discredit President Trump.  The article claims intelligence information was withheld because      " they are concerned that it would be leaked or compromised".  I say "fanciful" because I don't know one Intelligence professional who would  say such a thing for what is clearly a deep political purpose intended not to reflect the facts of any particular incident.  People in the Intelligence Community don't do that, and are not happy about someone else doing it either.  This was not a career Intelligence Community person.

Intelligence people are apolitical because they serve an audience of government persons who are political.  Those political people twist facts to suit their own political agendas, and that is often hard to deal with.  They take raw intelligence, or "unsubstantiated material" (remember the attachment to the report on Russian involvement in the election?) and use it as fact.  They take statements made in one line of a 50 page report as the "analysis supporting the facts" that so-and-so has occurred.  They listen in closed sessions of Congress and come out before the cameras saying what they want to believe and not what was presented.  Get over it.  That part has been going on forever and is not going to stop.  What happened to produce this article in the Journal is a little different.

When I wrote my second book, Keeping Secrets about the inability of the Obama White House to protect secrets that were among the most sensitive ones the U.S has, there were things that could, and probably did, literally get people killed.  The fact that President Obama pardoned two people directly connected with those leaks (Chelsea Manning and General Cartwright) shows the high regard  that was placed on leakers.  For whatever reasons, the White House chose to allow them to go free.  In Cartwright 's case, his lawyers may have been right, in that they said he trying to prevent disclosure of some information that somebody else in the White House gave to the New York Times. That person will never be identified, but there are plenty of good suspects over the many years the leaks were occurring.

Those leaks were for a political purpose - to make the President look good at a time when it appeared he was not doing very much and an election was approaching.  These leaks are for the opposite reason.  The election is over, but the purveyors  of the Keeping Secrets leaks have a sense that the strategic benefit of leaking can serve more than one purpose.  They got good at it and hate to give it up.

Not one of them has a thought to national security.  If you leak to make the President look good or bad, the damage is still the same to the country.  We have some narrow minded idiots who think politics is an end to itself and has nothing to do with governing.

I am kind of skeptical that they will ever be found though looking for them might be a good idea anyway.  Somebody was passing around very highly classified transcripts of a conversation between a U.S citizen and a Russian minister.  Many businessmen will have concerns with that since they probably would not like their discussions with foreign leaders anywhere being passsed around in the Congress.

It could happen to any businessman anywhere and they don't have to be U.S. Citizens to for it to occur.  In my entire time in counter-intelligence I never saw a transcript of a conversation - not once.  People would tell us what we needed to know about - nothing else and no transcripts were made to be left lying around.  They are that sensitive, and seen by all investigative partners that way.  This didn't happen the way the Journal reported it.