My internet is down and will be down according to Verizon until late this afternoon. It crashed at the exact same time as every Russian story in the universe hit the webs last night. So, I’m using my phone’s hotspot to connect and that’s a little expensive. As a result, I’ll keep this shorter than I otherwise would.
One way I can tell the Intelligence Community is loaded for bear and deadly serious about taking the Trump administration down is that former high-and-low ranking officers are coming out of the woodwork to shovel dirt on The Donald.
Former acting CIA director John McLaughlan on Friday responded to reports that President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner discussed setting up a secret communications line between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, saying if such reports are true, it would be considered espionage.
“I don’t want to overstate this because obviously there is a lot we don’t know — we don’t know the exact content of the conversation. We don’t know the objective that was a part of the conversation — those things we don’t know,” McLaughlan said on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” Friday.
“But I can’t keep out of my mind the thought that, if an American intelligence officer had done anything like this, we’d consider it espionage.”
But I have a simpler way of gauging this. When the Allies cracked the Nazi’s ENIGMA encryption during World War Two they allowed people to march into certain death rather than risk revealing that they could read the Germans’ internal communications. But the fact that we intercepted the Russian ambassador’s communications with the Kremlin was just presented as the evidence for Jared Kushner wanting to set up a private network with Moscow. That should be the most closely guarded secret we have, or close to it. So, to just go ahead and risk losing that capability is an indication of how serious of a risk they think Trump represents.
They would never reveal that information unless they thought removing Trump from power was a higher priority and that this information could lead to that outcome.