by Doctor Science
This is not a drill, and I am not speaking rhetorically. I think the evidence shows that, at the White House level, the United States has *no* functioning national security, as the national security and intelligence communities understand it.
Most of the talk, as in the previous post, about the growing conflict between Trump and NS/IC is about Trump and his associates’ ties to Russia, and the extent to which they may be acting as Russian assets.
This is obviously a very serious charge that has to be investigated, post-haste. But a lot of us have been screaming our fool heads off about this for *months* without NS/IC going this far, so why now? What took them this long?
I wonder if the reason this has broken out now was the apparent use of the Mar-a-Lago terrace as a Situation Room. At Mar-a-Lago Trump and his staff showed themselves incapable of acting as part of a national security system. The whole intelligence community, the national security apparatus, and the military now saw, publicly, that classified or sensitive material given to the Trump White House will not be treated as such. It’s not as specific as “this particular person is compromised by Russia”, it’s a general failure to acknowledge that national security issues have special significance.
I’m cutting here because this post is long and has embedded tweets and other slow-down factors.