The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago is a coda to the years of tumult between an erratic president and the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
From Mr. Trump’s frequent rants against a “deep state” bent on undermining his presidency to his cavalier attitude toward highly classified information that he viewed as his personal property, it was a never-ending prime-time television soap opera.
Without a doubt, the relationship between the keepers of American secrets and the erratic president they served was the most poisoned of the modern era.
In April 2020, U.S. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, published an op-ed in the Washington Post outlining his growing concern about the politicization of the intelligence community by then-president Donald Trump.
Warner wrote: “Efforts by this president to intimidate … U.S. intelligence services may be politically advantageous in the short term, but over time the consequences for our country will be disastrous.”
From the very creation of the U.S. intelligence community after World War II, intelligence analysts have been trained in presenting objective analysis that is fact-based, and objective.
This means that conclusions must be objective and not colored by politics or political persuasion. And every president from the inception of the intelligence agencies supported this doctrine… except Donald Trump.
Trump was known to repeatedly pressure the intrelligence commuinity to present analytic judgments consistent with his views, rather than those of its expert analysts.
According to the New York Times, Mr. Trump’s behavior led to such mistrust within intelligence agencies that officials who gave him classified briefings occasionally erred on the side of withholding some sensitive details from him.
Actually, if you got right down to it, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) considered Trump somewhat of a security risk. “We certainly took into account ‘what damage could he do if he blurts this out?’” said Douglas London, who served as a top C.I.A. counterterrorism official during the Trump administration, and wrote a book about his time in the agency called “The Recruiter.”
During an Oval Office meeting with top Russian officials just months into his presidency, Mr. Trump revealed highly classified information about an Islamic State plot that the government of Israel had provided to the United States, which put Israeli sources at risk and angered American intelligence officials.
Months later, the C.I.A. decided to pull a highly placed Kremlin agent it had cultivated over the years out of Moscow, in part out of concerns that the Trump White House was a leaky ship.
In August 2019, Trump received a briefing about an explosion at a space launch facility in Iran. He was so enthralled by a classified satellite photo of the explosion that he wanted to post it on Twitter immediately.
Of course, he was told not to because the high resolution photo could give adversaries insight into America’s sophisticated surveillance capabilities, but he posted the image to Twitter anyway,
When asked by reporters whether the photo was once classified, which many analysts believe was the case, Mr. Trump defended its release. “We had a photo and I released it, which I have the absolute right to do,” he said.
So, now, on Friday, the world is waiting for word that ex-president Trump will either OK or contest the unsealing of the warrent issued Mondaqy that started this whole fiasco. This is supposed to occur by 3 p,m, ET.
Regardless, Attorney General Garland is facing an ex-president who is actually very good at playing the lies and inuendo game. But Garland is also trying a strategy that has perpetually failed with Trump – wielding facts and legal norms to shatter his wall of lies and falsehoods.
And I love this morsel from CNN News. They are reporting that Trump allies have already floated another conspiracy theory — that the FBI planted documents in the ex-President’s residence.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
