August 20, 2018

New Yorker: Trump Wanted to End Obama’s Intel Briefings

Ting Shen/Xinhua via ZUMA

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Um, wtf?

A turning point for Brennan was a tweet from the President on March 4, 2017, in which Trump falsely claimed, “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

At the time, some of Trump’s most fervent supporters in the White House saw former Obama Administration officials as powerful enemies who threatened the new President’s rule, and they agitated for punishing them by revoking their security clearances. The idea was rebuffed by the national-security adviser at the time, H. R. McMaster, who signed a memo extending the clearances of his predecessors at the N.S.C., Republicans and Democrats alike. As Trump stepped up his public and private attacks on Obama, some of the new President’s advisers thought that he should take the extraordinary step of denying Obama himself access to intelligence briefings that were made available to all of his living predecessors. Trump was told about the importance of keeping former Presidents, who frequently met with foreign leaders, informed. In the end, Trump decided not to exclude Obama, at the urging of McMaster.

How is it that no matter how much a lowlife I think Trump is, somehow he always manages to find a way to surprise me anyway?

I know this will never happen, but man, what I wouldn’t give for Obama to decide the hell with it and just start whaling away on Trump every day. You want rallies? Obama will have bigger ones. You want insults? Obama will have sharper ones. You want golf? Maybe Obama should buy his own chain of golf courses.

I guess this won’t happen. But a guy can dream.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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