Wednesday, February 15, 2017

More On The Deep State

What do we know about the Mike Flynn scandal?  He said some things in a phone call that were troubling.  He misled Mike Pence about the content of that conversation.  Mike Pence, (our elected Vice President) found out about being misled through a Washington Post article.  Flynn resigned.

But, how did the Washington Post find out that Flynn had misled the Vice President?  It's simple.  Career intelligence officers leaked the contents of that intercepted conversation to the Post.  Damon Linker talks about it at The Week.
But no matter what Flynn did, it is simply not the role of the deep state to target a man working in one of the political branches of the government by dishing to reporters about information it has gathered clandestinely. It is the role of elected members of Congress to conduct public investigations of alleged wrongdoing by public officials.
I'm not going to try to defend Flynn.  If what they say he did is true, then he should have resigned.  But, when intelligence operatives work to bring down the National Security Adviser, and do so by leaking stories to the press, our democracy is in deep trouble.

If I were the President of the US, I'd tell the head of the CIA that I wanted one of two things by the end of the day.  
1) The leaker identified and charged for leaking sensitive information to the press, or
2) His resignation.

The intellignece community is trusted with too much serious secret information to be leaking it to the press.  Somebody's head needs to roll over this.

1 comment:

JimB said...

I agree completely. These leaks have got to be stopped.