Intelligence Community Keeping Hottest Gossip From Trump, Because He Can't Be Trusted

Not so much.

Here's another story about how America is weird and messed up now, and everything is terrible and horrible. Former NSA analyst (and other things too, he is A Expert) John Schindler has a piece out in the Observer about how, according to his sources, our U.S. American intelligence community is actually withholding some of the good shit from Donald Trump, intelligence-wise, because they simply don't trust him. Yes, they don't trust the American president, because he's untrustworthy and the people around him are untrustworthy:

Our Intelligence Community is so worried by the unprecedented problems of the Trump administration—not only do senior officials possess troubling ties to the Kremlin, there are nagging questions about basic competence regarding Team Trump—that it is beginning to withhold intelligence from a White House which our spies do not trust.

Schindler goes on to detail all the reasons, including how National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has weird ties with Russia, how he lied about speaking to the Russian ambassador about lifting sanctions, and how it was our own intelligence people who caught Flynn in the lie, because presto chango, what a surprise, we use signals intelligence (SIGINT) to surveil the Russian embassy! And everybody who knows anything knows this, including the Russian embassy!

Ambassador Kislyak surely knew his conversations with Flynn were being intercepted, and it’s incomprehensible that a career military intelligence officer who once headed a major intelligence agency didn’t realize the same. Whether Flynn is monumentally stupid or monumentally arrogant is the big question that hangs over this increasingly strange affair.

Oh, can it not be BOTH?

But, of course, it's not just Flynn. As Schindler notes, the intelligence community has now confirmed parts of the Steele Dossier -- you know, that 35-page document full of all kinds of unverified goodies about the Trump world's weird collusion with Russia during the election, and also pee hookers. Low information Trump supporters may be under the impression that if the pee hookers thing isn't true, then none of the dossier is, which is not how raw intelligence works. That things in the dossier ARE now being verified is damning indeed, and Schindler explains that this verification is coming from the same SIGINT that caught Michael Flynn mouth-hugging the Russian ambassador's dick.

Combine that stuff with how Trump has treated the intelligence community -- for instance, how Press Secretary Sean "Melissa McCarthy" Spicer responded to the IC's verification of parts of the Steele dossier by yelling at CNN about fake news and Trump's little Twitter war against the IC before the inauguration -- and what you got are some career spies who are pissed . Also, they love America, and they're really not in the mood to hand it to President Steve Bannon and his furry orange puppet.

Other tidbits include how the IC is angry that Trump ignores his Presidential Daily Briefing, how the CIA denied security clearance for one of Mike Flynn's National Security Council boys (where things are a SHITSHOW right now), and if you want to know how bad things really are, this quote should get you going on a Monday morning:

Since NSA provides something like 80 percent of the actionable intelligence in our government, what’s being kept from the White House may be very significant indeed. However, such concerns are widely shared across the IC, and NSA doesn’t appear to be the only agency withholding intelligence from the administration out of security fears.

What’s going on was explained lucidly by a senior Pentagon intelligence official, who stated that “since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM,” meaning the White House Situation Room, the 5,500 square-foot conference room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings. “There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point,” the official added in wry frustration.

Ha! Ha ha! AMERICA!

Of course, this builds on what's already been happening in the intelligence world, in America and abroad, in response to the Trump presidency. You might remember that over there in Israel, the intelligence community is worried about sharing stuff with OUR OWN INTELLIGENCE PEOPLE, because they're worried it will leak from Trump to Russia to Iran. TOTALLY NORMAL.

And it can't have been any comfort to our IC this weekend to see how, in response to North Korea launching an intermediate-range ballistic missile, Trump yip-yapped on his cell phone about what was going on in the middle of the dining room at Mar-a-Lago, next to the Japanese prime minister, as they all ate iceberg wedge salads, because tacky people like Donald Trump think wedge salads are fancy. For fuck's sake:

As Mar-a-Lago's wealthy members looked on from their tables, and with a keyboard player crooning in the background, Trump and Abe's evening meal quickly morphed into a strategy session, the decision-making on full view to fellow diners, who described it in detail to CNN.

GRRRRRRRRRRR FUCKING IDIOT. Good thing he doesn't really know our deepest secrets, otherwise he might have spilled them on the phone in front of his party guests when this picture was taken:

He still has the nuclear codes though.

[ The Observer / CNN ]