One hundred years ago, Vladimir Lenin cynically referred to his western followers as “useful idiots.” One hundred years later, Vladimir Putin has been gifted with the ultimate useful idiot.
Putin is free to whack American soldiers in Afghanistan – by offering bounty money to the Taliban – and his useful idiot has no idea what’s going on. Or knows what’s going on but prefers not to know. It’s hard right now to gauge the extent of Donald Trump’s willful weakness, but we’re getting more information by the day. The plot predictably thickens. And sickens.
Yesterday, propaganda minister Kayleigh McEnany tried to spin the bombshell news that the impotent Trump regime has long known that Putin’s military intelligence arm has been financing hits on American soldiers. McEnany, who has the worst job in America, said of Trump, “He was not personally briefed on the matter. That is all I can share with you today.”
Clever wording. He was not orally told that the Russians were eating his lunch. But then we learned last night, courtesy of fresh leaks to the free and independent press, that “American officials provided a written briefing in late February to President Trump.” The U.S. intelligence community sounded the alarm in the President’s Daily Brief document on Feb. 27. Two problems, however: (1) Trump reportedly doesn’t bother to read the Daily Brief, and (2) If he did read what the Russians were doing, he said and did nothing about it. Predictably, he stayed on Putin’s leash.
(By the way, here’s an oldie but goodie. On Sept. 30, 2014, back when Trump was a C-list celebrity game show host, he tweeted this: “Obama does not read his intelligence briefings…Too busy I guess!”)
Seeking to clean up Trump’s mess yesterday, Kayleigh McEnany tried another tack that exposed her dearth of government experience. She said that Trump was never personally briefed about the Russian bounties because “there was not a consensus among the intelligence community. There were dissenting opinions, and it would not be elevated to the president until it was verified.”
That’s not the way things are supposed to work. Last night, The Times reported:
(P)revious presidents received assessments on issues of potentially vital importance even if they had dissents from some analysts or agencies. The dissents, they said, were highlighted for the president to help them understand uncertainties and the analytic process…David Priess, a former CIA daily intelligence briefer and the author of “The President’s Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America’s Presidents,” said: “Many intelligence judgments in history have not had the consensus of every analyst who worked on it. That’s the nature of intelligence. It’s inherently dealing with uncertainty.”
And the Associated Press reported last night: “It is rare for intelligence to be confirmed without a shadow of a doubt before it is presented to top officials.” Actually, the AP went much further than that. Fasten your seat belts:
Top officials in the White House were aware in early 2019 of classified intelligence indicating Russia was secretly offering bounties to the Taliban for the deaths of Americans, a full year earlier than has been previously reported, according to U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the intelligence. The assessment was included in at least one of President Donald Trump’s written daily intelligence briefings at the time, according to the officials. Then-national security adviser John Bolton also told colleagues he briefed Trump on the intelligence assessment in March 2019...The administration’s early awareness raises additional questions about why Trump did not take any punitive action against Moscow for efforts that put the lives of American servicemembers at risk.
Even some of the normally supine Capitol Hill Republicans appear to be rousing themselves to some semblance of outrage – perhaps emboldened by all the polls that show Trump in free fall. Senator Ben Sasse, a member of the chamber’s Intelligence Committee, said yesterday: “I have heard from a lot of Nebraskan military families this weekend, and they’re livid. They have a right to be livid…This is a time to focus on two things Congress should be asking and looking at. Number 1, who knew what, when, and did the commander-in-chief know? And if not, how the hell not?”
How the hell not? Have Sasse and the other Republican enablers not been paying attention these last three and a half endless years? Did they not see what happened during the Helsinki summit when Putin’s pet was asked whether Russia invaded the ’16 election on his behalf…and he sided with Putin over our own intelligence agencies?
Indeed, most Republicans are still making excuses for the weak incompetent they voted to keep in office. Senator John Cornyn came up with this one yesterday: “Well, I think the president can’t single-handedly remember everything, I’m sure, that he’s briefed on.” Rest assured that if President Barack Obama had failed to “remember” Russian bounties on American soldiers, Cornyn and his cronies would’ve denounced him as a clear and present danger to our national security.
And they would’ve been right.
We’re only at the beginning of this bounty story. As Trump likes to say, when he doesn’t know what else to say, “We’ll see what happens.”
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Update: It keeps getting worse.
Trump’s spinners told House Republicans yesterday that maybe the whole bounty story is fake, that it has not been verified, blah blah. But today, citing intelligence sources (who at this point are burying the shiv in Trump’s back), The Times is now reporting that the Trump team somehow failed to tell House Republicans that the Russia-Taliban bounty connection has been solidly confirmed by electronic evidence:
American officials intercepted electronic data showing large financial transfers from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account, which was among the evidence that supported their conclusion that Russia covertly offered bounties for killing U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan.