August 15, 2018

White House Can’t Even Get John Brennan’s Security Clearance Announcement Right

How are they so bad at this?

Ron Sachs/ZUMA

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It’s been nearly three weeks since the White House first announced that President Donald Trump was considering revoking the security clearances for top former officials who have criticized him, including John Brennan, the former CIA director under Barack Obama, who has regularly condemned Trump’s fitness for office both on social media and in television appearances. 

Fast-forward to Wednesday, when Trump followed through on the extraordinary threat and stripped Brennan of his security clearance. Reading from a statement by the president, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders cited Brennan’s “erratic” behavior and “wild outbursts” for the decision, her face not once registering the irony of these accusations considering the source. 

But many questioned the timing of Trump’s decision, which comes amid claims made by former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman that appear to substantiate previous rumors of a secret tape of Trump saying the N-word. A follow-up email to reporters from the White House is fueling speculation that Trump is hoping to distract from those very rumors. Note the timestamp:

Has the White House been saving the Brennan decision for a crisis like the one Manigault Newman has prompted with her new book? Did the July 26 announcement get pushed back in order to deal with Michael Cohen’s claims that Trump knew about the June 2016 meeting inside Trump Tower?

Perhaps the most important question, however, is why is the Trump White House just so bad at this?

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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