Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
When it comes to fiction, my favorite genre tends to be fantasy, but I’ve been known to enjoy the occasional international spy thriller story now and again as well; and right now a great one can be found on CNN’s website.
The plot is kind of thin and full of holes, but at least the characters are familiar, if not compelling; and the writers do a masterful job of bringing together spurious incidents and seeming coincidences and spinning them into a narrative full of intrigue upon which the fate of the entire world, maybe even the universe, hangs.
See, last week Donald Trump said something, nobody knows what, to the Russians; and, whatever it was, it was probably secret information we didn’t want the Russians to have. So, they probably already had it.
“The White House scrambled to respond to the report Monday night, issuing several statements before sending H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser who participated in the meeting, out to speak with White House reporters.
‘At no time were intelligence sources or methods discussed and the President did not disclose any military operations that weren’t already publicly known,’ he said. ‘I was in the room. It didn’t happen,’” CNN reported.
The very next line in the story is “The many paths from Trump to Russia,” and is really just a hyperlink to more of CNN’s desperate attempts to link Russia to Trump in some substantive way. Embedded within the article is a short video where CNN’s Fareed Zakaria speculates as to why Trump is so “nice” to Russia.
“’During President Trump’s meeting with Foreign Minister Lavrov a broad range of subjects were discussed among which were common efforts and threats regarding counter-terrorism. During that exchange the nature of specific threats were discussed, but they did not discuss sources, methods or military operations,’ Tillerson, who was in the meeting, said in a statement provided by White House press secretary Sean Spicer,” CNN reported.
The article goes on to speculate as to what Trump might have told the Russians and why and even draws a connection to the fact that the Oval Office meeting with Russian officials happened the day after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. And, of course in this version of reality, Comey was just about to uncover exactly how Russia “hacked” the U.S. presidential election. Because the Russians did. They had to have. And, damn it, CNN will find the proof of it even if they have to make it up themselves.
Over at Yahoo News, their Chief Washington Correspondent, Oliver Knox, decided to look into some historical context as opposed to CNN’s focus on hysterical content.
“Yahoo News spoke to David Priess, the author of ‘The President’s Book of Secrets,’ in the wake of bombshell reports that President Trump disclosed highly sensitive information to Russian officials in the Oval Office last week,” Knox’s article begins.
According to Priess, presidents are rarely given the classification level of the information they’re getting in a Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB), but rather the entire briefing is assumed to be top secret. However, Trump was correct in his assertion that he has an “absolute right” to disclose classified information.
“’I don’t know anyone who disputes that,’ Priess said. Classification authority isn’t granted by Congress; ‘it’s a constitutional right of the presidency, derived from their authority as commander in chief,’ he added. ‘So the president is the supreme classification authority and the supreme de-classification authority.’
But Trump appears not to have followed the usual path for providing secrets to foreign officials, according to Priess. ‘Normally what happens is there is an extensive process for sharing info with foreign governments,’ in which senior officials carefully assess the risks of sharing versus the benefits. ‘By the president’s tweets this morning, he seems to say that process was not followed, and instead information was shared on a whim,’ Priess said. ‘That’s what is disturbing the intelligence community,’” Yahoo reported.
A good portion of Knox’s piece explains how previous presidents went about sharing intel with foreign leaders when they felt it appropriate. George W. Bush even once had Vladimir Putin sit in on one of his Presidential Daily Briefings, although the content of it was first made safe for Russian ears by the president’s advisors.
At the close of the article, Knox asks how bad the latest disclosure to Russia by Trump was.
“’It’s impossible to tell, actually,’ because the Washington Post, which broke the story, withheld what it described as the most sensitive information, Priess said. ‘We may never know,’” the article concludes.
According to CNN, however, it’s bad. Real bad.
“The President did not directly reveal the source of the information, but intelligence officials told CNN that there is concern that Russia will be able to figure out the highly sensitive source,” CNN reported in an article updated at 12:22 EDT yesterday. At 17:12 EDT yesterday, CNN reported that Israel was the source of some of the intel that Trump gave to Russia. So, apparently that concern just sort of went away in fewer than five hours.
It appears then that there never was any real danger in Trump’s disclosure of whatever it was to the Russians, and had that meeting been between Trump and dignitaries from any other nation on the planet, CNN wouldn’t have bothered covering it at all unless Trump’s fly happened to be down the whole time, or he got more ice cream than anyone else.
But, this was Russia, and Russia is the co-antagonist in the international thriller CNN and the Left insist on telling themselves over and over. Russia has to be the villain that cost Hillary Clinton the election she so rightfully should have won. Anything else would require the Left to admit how totally out-of-touch with reality, and therefore most humans, it is. Worse yet, if it’s not Russia’s, or someone else’s fault, then the Left would have to acknowledge that Hillary was the worst candidate in U.S. political history, which is why she lost handily to the second-worst one ever. The Left, however, has a deep and abiding aversion to truth in general, uncomfortable ones particularly; so, expect this laughable farce to continue for the duration of Trump’s presidency.
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