A classic illustration of the acting president’s upside-down and backwards logic leapt out of the Twitter machine this morning:
Well, yes, of course:
— SEARCHING FOR LEAKERS … THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION has opened an internal investigation to try to uncover who leaked intelligence about Russians paying the Taliban bounties to kill American soldiers. The administration maintains the story is overcooked and the leaks cherry-picked despite a steady stream of follow-ups from media outlets across the globe.
THE ADMINISTRATION has interviewed people with access to the intelligence, and believes it has narrowed down the universe of suspects to fewer than 10 people.
THE ADMINISTRATION has said it would search for leakers in its ranks on many occasions. Notably, they vowed to find out who wrote an anonymous op-ed in the NYT almost two years ago. They said they’d find who leaked the president’s calendars in February 2019. Most of these probes fizzled out or faded away.
BUT, THE ADMINISTRATION seems a bit more worked up about these leaks, due to the highly classified nature of the intelligence.
How classified was it? The intelligence was so classified that multiple news outlets rapidly “confirmed” the unconfirmed initial New York Times report sourced from anonymous officials with more anonymous officials. So classified that after the initial report the National Intelligence Council rapidly produced a two-and-a-half page document acknowledging “that intelligence officials had assessed months ago that Russia had offered bounties, but the White House had yet to authorize a response,” the Times reported July 3:
The memo said that the C.I.A. and the National Counterterrorism Center had assessed with medium confidence — meaning credibly sourced and plausible, but falling short of near certainty — that a unit of the Russian military intelligence service, known as the G.R.U., offered the bounties, according to two of the officials briefed on its contents.
That would have been after the acting president accused the report of being another media hoax. Now the White House wants to punish whoever leaked the information Donald Trump said the media “made up” and that his team subsequently acknowledged exists.
Reviewing the reporting through Sunday, Just Security concluded:
Our intelligence community has assessed that Russia is acting in a way that threatens American lives in Afghanistan. Yes, there are nuances and varying degrees of confidence in that conclusion. That’s normal. But there should not be any kind of debate about whether this conclusion should have been presented to senior policymakers and the President for their review and action—nor any doubt that they should have responded, urgently. In any other time, that would be a given. There might be a policy conversation to be had about what exactly to do in response, but no reasonable conversation can be had about whether to put this conclusion on the table at the level of the President and his National Security Council for discussion about what actions to take.
On Saturday, the Washington Post observed, “In the days since the reports became public, Trump has declined to criticize Putin or Russia, and senior administration officials say the White House isn’t planning a response.”
Except to try to hunt down the internal source of the report. “For Trump’s critics,” the Post adds, “the silence on Putin is part of a disconcerting trend.” And perhaps for more reasons than “all roads lead to Putin.”
The acting president presently is too busy defending statues of dead Confederates to defend live Americans in Afghanistan or at home.
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.