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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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Only a very, very select group of people has access to all of those channels, and the information that flows through them. That intelligence gets pulled into a daily intelligence summary that goes to the Oval Office – the President’s Daily Briefing – and to a select small group of people. Agents and sources in the field are willing to put their lives at risk only if they believe that the information will be limited to a very limited group of people – among the most trustworthy in the world.
Who in the White House has access to this information?
In the White House, other than the president, it likely to only be the national security adviser, his or her deputy, their chief of staff and the NSC’s staff secretary. It would also include the White House chief of staff, perhaps one deputy, and the staff secretary — the job Porter held. Press reports also indicate that Jared Kushner had access to that information.
The staff secretary is the person who manages the paper flow to the Oval Office. It is hard to imagine that person does not have TS/SCI level clearance, as that would require the NSC staff to navigate around the staff secretary, rather than through him/her.
In Porter’s case, the interim security clearances had been temporary: 180 days with the option for extension (another 180 days). Porter appears to have started on January 20, 2017 – Inauguration Day. Assuming he was given that “interim” clearance on Day 1, it would have expired on January 15, 2018.
The fact that Chief of Staff Kelly -- a former military officer and former secretary of homeland security -- would not have seen this as a problem is staggering. He would know better than anyone that managing highly restricted information is essential to American national security.
Every person who has access to the most sensitive pieces of intelligence must be supremely trustworthy -- capable of being kept in the highest cones of silence. If they leak information, they potentially jeopardize lives of intelligence agents or sources in the field.
So, in essence, Kelly either (a) allowed a key aide in the chain of information access to TS/SCI information without a clearance, (b) waived the process entirely or (c) created a system that worked around him.
If Kelly knowingly allowed Porter access to TS/SCI information without formally approving it, that’s an extraordinary security breach.
If Kelly waived off the TS/SCI restrictions, he likely would have done that formally -- including either with the White House counsel, the FBI, or the president himself. That would require understanding fully the reason Porter was still “interim” – a restraining order preventing him from contacting a former wife who alleged that he physically abused her.
Most defendable is that Kelly allowed a system for moving information -- from August 2017 through February 2018 -- that simply worked around the staff secretary. Porter needed to have been kept out of the loop for any truly sensitive material going into the Oval Office. That would have required a highly disciplined NSC staff which, in essence, would have had to have final control over all Oval Office paper flow.
So, in the coming days, it will be critical to know whether Priebus and Kelly, Flynn and McMaster, and/or the president himself knew about Porter’s security clearance status. Based on that knowledge, did they allow him access to Top Secret/CodeWord intelligence, including the President’s Daily Briefing? If they did know, and they allowed it, what made them feel so secure about Porter?
If they did not know, then who exactly at the White House is protecting our national secrets?
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JERUSALEM — Israel’s military on Sunday confirmed that its downed F-16 fighter jet had been hit by a Syrian antiaircraft missile — the first plane it has lost to enemy fire in more than 35 years.
The Israel Defense Forces had been investigating whether the https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israel-carries-out-large-scale-attack-in-syria-after-israeli-jet-crashes-under-anti-aircraft-fire/2018/02/10/89e0ca2c-0e33-11e8-95a5-c396801049ef_story.html (plane that crashed) in Israel on Saturday after carrying out a bombing raid inside Syria had suffered a direct hit, had been struck by shrapnel or had crashed after its pilots ejected under fire.
“Our preliminary understanding is that the plane crashed due to a ground-to-air missile,” said IDF spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Cornicus said Sunday. “It was hit.” The jet was one of eight planes carrying out a raid inside Syria to bomb the T4 air base near Palmyra, after the Israeli military said an Iranian drone operated from the base had crossed into Israel.
The Israeli military has said the drone was on a “mission” but has not given further details or commented on whether the drone was armed. Iran has dismissed the claim as “ridiculous.”
Israel has not lost a plane in combat since 1982, when one of its jets was also brought down by the Syrians. After the jet was downed on Saturday, Israel embarked on its https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/10/israel-has-taken-its-biggest-step-into-the-syrian-war-yet-what-does-that-mean/ (most extensive bombing campaign) inside the country since that year, when it moved to destroy Syria’s antiaircraft capacity.
In the first direct public acknowledgment of a strike inside Syria during the country’s civil war, Israel said it had bombed 12 military sites across the border — eight Syrian and four that it said were Iranian.
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump slipped into the Oval Office through a wormhole of confusion about the American identity.
We weren’t winning wars anymore. They just went on and on and on, with inexplicable and deceptive aims and so many lives and limbs and trillions lost.
We couldn’t believe in our institutions, with breaches of trust and displays of ineptitude.
We were moving from a white-majority, male-dominated country and manufacturing base to a multicultural, multilateral, globalized, P.C., new energy, new technology world, without taking account of the confusion and anger of older Americans who felt like strangers in a strange land.
Among many, the allure of Barack Obama’s brainy nuance had given way to a longing for a more muscular certainty.
With the Russians sowing confusion, Trump surfed those free-floating anxieties, that fear of not knowing who we are, straight to Pennsylvania Avenue.
And now, thanks to our barmy president and his staff meltdown, we are finding out fast who we are and whom we don’t want to be.
We don’t want to countenance abusive behavior. And we certainly don’t want men like Rob Porter who have punched, kicked, choked and terrorized their wives to be in the president’s inner circle, helping decide which policies, including those that affect women, get emphasized.
We don’t want the White House chief of staff to be the sort of person who shields and defends abusers — and then dissembles about it — simply because the abuser is a rare competent staffer. Or a man who labels Dreamers “too lazy to get off their asses” simply because they didn’t apply for legal protections in time.
John Kelly served as a character witness not only for Porter, after he didn’t receive security clearance because F.B.I. agents had heard the harrowing tales from his battered ex-wives. Kelly also testified as a character witness for Gen. Robert E. Lee and a former Marine who pleaded guilty to sending inappropriate sexual messages to female subordinates; who drove drunk to an arraignment; and who got charged in Virginia with sex crimes against children.
A military hero like General Kelly who made the ultimate sacrifice of losing a son in war should have a higher standard for integrity and honor, the words he lavished on his disgraced aide, Porter.
We want our president to be a moral beacon, not a ratings-obsessed id. We want a president who understands that sexual and physical abuse are wrong. As a more lucid Trump tweeted in 2012 about Rihanna getting back together with Chris Brown, “A beater is always a beater.”
We don’t want a president who bends over backward to give the benefit of the doubt to neo-Nazis, wife beaters, pedophiles and sexual predators — or who is a sexual predator himself. We don’t want a president who thinks #me is more important than #metoo.
We don’t want a president who flips the ordinary equation, out of some puerile sense of grievance, to honor Russia and dishonor the F.B.I.
We don’t want a president who believes that vile behavior is justified by a Vesuvial stock market.
We don’t want a president who is too shallow to read his daily intelligence report and too obsessed with the deep state to deal fairly with our intelligence agencies.
We don’t want a president who is on a sugar high of ego, whose demented tweets about nukes and crowd size scare even Omarosa.
We don’t want a president who redecorates the Oval as an infinity mirror.
We don’t want a president who suggests that Democrats who don’t clap for him are treasonous and who seems more enthralled by authoritarian ways than democratic ones.
We don’t want a president who promises an A team but surrounds himself with dreckitude, a president who vows to pass “the best” bills but then doesn’t care whether he’s selling steak, wine, condos or garbage policies on matters of life and death that he hasn’t even bothered to read.
We don’t want a president who goes to military school but never leaves; who loves generals but trashes Gold Star parents; who wants the sort of chesty military parade that we mock Kim Jong-un for, a phallic demonstration of overcompensation that would only put more potholes in the D.C. boulevards.
We don’t want a president who makes his version of make-believe real, and who looks with favor on deceit, hypocrisy, conflict of interest and nepotism.
We don’t want a president who merits a special prosecutor, let alone one who could be so easily trapped in lies that he can’t even be allowed to talk to an investigator.
We don’t want a president who treats the hallowed house where Abraham Lincoln once wrote the nation’s most sacred texts as the set of a cheesy reality show.
We don’t want a president who treats the presidency as just another personal business franchise or family employment program.
We don’t want a president who glides through the chaos he craves and conjures, while everyone around him immolates and shivers.
And, finally, we surely don’t want a president who seeks advice on foreign affairs from Henry Kissinger. Ever. Again.
Nor do we want a grinning, spineless Congress who know what the right thing to do is but who have no reason to believe they should do it.
I live in Oklahoma. This state is the Republican model -- no taxes and no social spending. (In 2008 we were the only state with no blue counties, in 2016 we were third on the list for Trump.) Today the state is almost bankrupt with legal restrictions on raising taxes. One in five public schools is open four days a week and teachers can barely exist on what they're paid.
Statistical correlations don't always mean a cause-and-effect relationship, but they do in this case. Because of this approach, we (of course) have one of the lowest qualities of education in the country. 48th on most lists. And we vote like we vote. The correlation is this --
You hold onto power by keeping the voting population ignorant.
You should hear people here talk about what a brilliant businessman Donald Trump is and how he's gonna get America back on track. If these people showed up in the lobby of Trump Tower, Donald would call security. But they think he cares about them and is doing everything he can for them.
This is where the Republican way gets you.
Opinion | Trump Shows Us the Way
From a position in Syria, Iran launched a sophisticated drone into the skies of northern Israel. Israel shot it down and responded by destroying much of the Syrian air-defense system. It also punished not only the site from which the Iranian drone had been launched, but struck a dozen or so other Syrian and Iranian military installations in what is being reported as the largest aerial attack since the 1982 war in Lebanon. Along the way, Israel lost an F-16 to a Syrian anti-aircraft missile, and two of its pilots were injured, one seriously.
This is ominous news. The Iranian-Israeli conflict has now arrived on Israel’s doorstep. Israel says it does not want war. But as was the case so often in the past, war may want Israel.
With tension mounting, this is an appropriate moment to take stock of what the Trump administration has done and is doing in the region. How does it differ from the Obama era? Does it make sense?
GOOD MEMO BAD MEMO
https://claytoonz.com/2018/02/11/good-memo-bad-memo/
In a normal world where right-wing lunatics don’t base their political beliefs upon ridiculous conspiracy theories, the Democrats in Congress wouldn’t have to release a memo to counter the cherry-picked blatant partisan one put out by the GOP.
The entire gist of the Republican memo is that the FBI broke rules and procedures by using a dossier, funded by the Clinton campaign, to acquire FISA warrants on Carter Page. Their contention is the judges weren’t aware of the source of the dossier when they granted the warrants. This has been proven false. The entire purpose of the memo is to destroy the Special Counsel investigation into the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia.
The Republicans, who waged a high-profile campaign that Hillary Clinton was careless with classified information, released their memo containing classified information. The FBI and Justice Department warned them and Donald Trump about releasing it. Those warnings were ignored.
The Republican memo is three and a half pages. The Democrats countered with a ten-page memo. The president had five days to read and approve, approve with redactions, or reject entirely. Donald Trump decided against releasing the Democrat’s memo. Perhaps five days wasn’t enough time for him to read ten pages. He probably hasn’t even read the shorter memo by the GOP.
Trump claims the Republican memo “totally vindicates” him (it doesn’t). He claims he didn’t release the Democrat memo because it compromised intelligence sources and methods. That was the argument by the Justice Department for the memo he did release, without any redactions.
The Democrat memo would fall on deaf ears anyway. Trump supporters wouldn’t read it and would refuse to believe anything in it if they did. Even now, they use the Republican memo to argue against the Mueller investigation, and make points they wrongly believe are in the memo.
This was a flagrant move by Trump to declassify selective intelligence to undercut the Russia probe and use his authority to keep information secret that does the reverse. Trump is continuing a pattern of obstructing justice. At the very least, it’s hypocrisy.
You can’t ignore warnings from the FBI about releasing classified intel then portray yourself as a guardian of national security. This is the same man who invited Russians into the Oval Office and then shared classified information with them provided by an ally.
If you’re a reasonable intelligence person and can spot the obvious, then you’re aware that Trump is a man who is incapable of comprehension. He’s claimed Obama wiretapped Trump Tower when he was unable to decipher the fact that the Russian spies he hired for his campaign team were caught talking to Russians the FBI was watching.
It was also reported this week that Trump doesn’t read his daily briefings. He’s even argued in the past he doesn’t need the daily briefings because he’s “like a very smart person.” Even a smart person doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. As George Will has stated, Trump doesn’t know what it is not to know.
Trump prefers to get his information from Breitbart, the National Enquirer, and Fox and Friends.
Trump is a moron who is hiding something. The Republicans in Congress need to stand up for their nation and stop helping him. Trump took an oath to protect this nation, and he’s refusing to keep it.
The Republicans need to join the Democrats and protect the nation from Trump.
