Trump’s ethical squalor is worse than you thought By Jennifer Rubin
President Trump’s
ethical sloth and financial conflicts of interest are unique in American
history. (The Harding and Grant administrations were rife with corruption, but
the presidents did not personally profit. Richard Nixon abused power but did
not use his office to fatten his coffers or receive help from a hostile foreign
power to get elected.) But it keeps getting worse. Ryan
Lizza’s stunning report reveals ample evidence that Trump misused the
intelligence community and manipulated Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) to concoct a
plot meant to distract from the investigation into his Russian ties:
It is now clear that
the scandal was not [former national security adviser Susan] Rice’s normal
review of the intelligence reports but the coordinated effort between the Trump
Administration and Nunes to sift through classified information and
computer logs that recorded Rice’s unmasking requests, and then leak a highly
misleading characterization of those documents, all in an apparent effort to
turn Rice, a longtime target of Republicans, into the face of alleged spying
against Trump. It was a series of lies to manufacture a fake scandal. Last
week, CNN was the first to report that both Democrats and Republicans who
reviewed the Nunes material at the N.S.A. said that the documents provided “no
evidence that Obama Administration officials did anything unusual or illegal.”
I spoke to two
intelligence sources, one who read the entire binder of intercepts and one who
was briefed on their contents. “There’s absolutely nothing there,” one source
said. The Trump names remain masked in the documents, and Rice would not have
been able to know in all cases that she was asking the N.S.A. to unmask the names
of Trump officials.
If true, this would be
a clear abuse of authority - the very type of politicization of intelligence
that the Trump team claims the Obama administration was guilty of. Had
President Barack Obama done anything remotely similar, Republicans would have
drafted articles of impeachment.
Moreover, Trump’s antics have done serious
damage to our national security toolkit:
The fallout from
Trump’s [March 4] tweet could have grave consequences for national security.
The law governing the N.S.A.’s collection of the content of communications of
foreign targets is up for renewal this summer. Known as Section 702, part of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, it is perhaps the most important
intelligence tool that America’s spy agencies have to gather information about
potential terrorist attacks and about the intentions of regimes around the
world. There are legitimate privacy concerns about allowing the N.S.A. to
vacuum up such an enormous amount of communications. … Some American
intelligence officials are now concerned that Trump and Nunes’s wild claims
about intercepts and Rice have made Section 702 look like a rogue program that
can be easily abused for political purposes.
Trump, the individuals
who assisted in this gambit and Nunes have abused the public trust. They
utterly failed to uphold their responsibility for national security, for
maintaining public confidence in our intelligence community and for protecting
legitimate privacy interests. (Rice has a darned good case for defamation, which
of course she won’t pursue.) Former CIA and National Security Agency director
Michael V. Hayden tells me he is concerned that the intelligence was “used by
the White House for political purposes.” He explains: “To the degree people
believe that, the whole legitimacy of American intelligence is undercut. Talk
about collateral damage rather than simply telling the emperor in this case
that he has no clothes. By that, I mean of course, trying to make true a tweet
that was obviously very untrue.”
On the financial side
of the Trump sewer, matters are going from bad to worse. Trump never divested
himself of his business holdings or released his tax returns. The extent of his
conflicts of interest are therefore unknown. He has now amended the trust
(showing how flimsy it is if it can be altered on a whim) to allow him to
withdraw funds and to receive periodic briefings from his son Eric (who “can
do that as chair of the trust’s advisory board, and told Forbes magazine last
month that he plans to give his father big-picture financial briefings every
quarter or so”). All this should underscore how ludicrous it is to claim
separation between Trump and his business operations… read more:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/04/19/trumps-ethical-squalor-is-worse-than-you-thought/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_1_na&utm_term=.203797ec8778
