America's spies are playing a dangerous game against President Trump
This Week has an article describing the war between American Intel and the media against Trump and his administration.
There are many good reasons for liberals to loathe President Trump. But none of them justify treating extra-legal efforts to bring him down as a cause for celebration. On the contrary, this is a moment of high peril for the republic — and the dangers go far beyond Donald Trump.It is hard to disagree with that conclusion.But so is this: None of these allegations has been independently verified. Every one of them came from anonymous sources within the sprawling federal bureaucracies (16 in total) that go by the reassuringly benign euphemism "the intelligence community." And the flood of leaks to journalists haven't been limited to Russia and the election. Former National Security Agency analyst John Schindler tweeted on Wednesday morning that an anonymous source in the IC told him the time had come to "go nuclear" against the president, who would "die in jail." Later the same day, a Twitter account maintained by the FBI records division randomly released nearly 400 pages of documents related to an investigation of charges of racial discrimination against Trump properties more than four decades ago.
It seems undeniable that large numbers of federal civil servants have declared war on the president of the United States — and that their battle is being waged with the help of journalists who are more than happy to act as stenographers conveying unsubstantiated, anonymous allegations to the public.
All of this is bad — the behavior alleged in the leaks, of course, but also the extent of the leaks themselves, and the willingness of the press to publish them while providing the leakers with a cloak of anonymity. It's part of a pattern that also encompasses FBI Director James Comey's reckless decision to deal what turned out to be a fatal blow to the Hillary Clinton campaign less than two weeks before Election Day — and the reluctance of Congress to take the lead in investigating alarming allegations of wrongdoing by Trump and his senior staff (a reluctance that appears to be emboldening the leakers to go further in their efforts to bring down the president all on their own).
Put it all together and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that we're living through a remarkably comprehensive breakdown in America's democratic institutions.
The article then goes into a history lesson to show how we got to where we are today.
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