He’s a big fan of intelligence

This is the president telling people to “make up their own minds about the truth” which is more than a little bit unusual. Generally a president likes the people to take him at his word. People often don’t, of course, but it’s a little bit strange for a president to take a post-modern stance and say he’s just throwing out stuff and you can take it or leave it.

I’m not sure how well that’s going to work out for him. If there’s a terrorist attack and Trump is known as the guy who rejects intelligence analysis, it will be very bad for him. He seems not to understand just how bad. 

I have zero interest in what Julian Assange says at this point since he seems to be playing out his own melodrama. And I have no idea what Trump’s relationships with Russia might be. I suspect they are financial in nature. There’s a reason he refused to release his tax returns and is so opaque about his business. 

But on the intelligence issue, this sounds more and more like Mike “Ripper” Flynn acting on his personal grudges against the intelligence community than anything else to me.  They fired Flynn from his intelligence post because he’s incompetent and he’s nuts. (And this is not debatable. You can think the intelligence agencies are all evil bastards but you still have to recognize that Michael Flynn is crazy.) He is Trump’s only window into this issue and he’s leading his man into a very dangerous place for him politically.

Unfortunately, it’s also leading the country into a very dangerous place period. The history of the intelligence agencies is very complex and fraught with conflicts and difficulty. There’s always good reason to maintain skepticism when it comes to his stuff. But we’re not talking about skepticism here. We’re talking about petty revenge in the hands of a crazy person and a corrupt, narcissistic moron who is completely clueless about how the government works. That is not the formula for
“reform” of the intelligence community. 

This is not going to end well. Let’s just hope the ending isn’t a catastrophic one for innocent people.