Yesterday General Michael Flynn was forced to resign from his post due to leaked information showing that he lied about the nature of his contacts with the Russian government before the election. This evidence of treason seems to point back to Trump being compromised by the Russians and most speculation on the subject so far has centered around the presumption Trump or someone higher up in Trump’s inner circle was instructing Flynn to make the call. While this is still speculation, it’s not that far fetched.
We don’t know who actually leaked the Flynn phone call or what specific agency they’re attached to, if any. In his final days in office, Barack Obama put rules in place allowing raw data intercepted by the NSA, presumably including the Flynn phone calls and any number of other juicy tidbits, to be shared across the 16 federal intelligence agencies before classification safeguards were put on it. This means that the source of the leak could have been involved in any of these agencies. Leaking signals intelligence is extremely uncommon and technically a felony. The reasons for that are pretty obvious.
I’m going to state the rest of my argument in bullet points.
1) The Trump administration has thus far been a giant dumpster fire and he’s pissed off a lot of the intelligence community.
2) The NSA, per the leaked Snowden documents, has the capacity to and likely does log/record all electronic communications inside the US and between individuals in the US and foreign individuals/agencies.
3) Trump is about as “old man” as it gets with tech and is reportedly still using his unsecured android phone. If Flynn was the go-between for Trump and Russia and the intelligence agencies were able to record his entire phone call, we can presume the security for whatever illegal/treasonous activities weren’t well hidden either. Trump is so unconcerned with security that people at Mar-A-Lago were posting Twitter selfies with the guy holding the nuclear football.
4) The intelligence agencies have more than enough to sink the entire Trump inner circle and are allowing them to stick around only for as long as they’re useful to the intelligence agencies.
5) The intelligence agencies now hold the actual power. This doesn’t really go away with elections. This is a potentially shittier status quo than “President” Trump.
Thoughts on this?
Story’s coming in so fast from so many different directions from so many people with so many different compromised motives I’m confident in saying “I don’t have a clue what’s really going on.”
The left that I grew up with didn’t trust anyone over 30. The CIA and the military-industrial complex was the enemy. Now the new left seems to get in bed with these institutions in order to oppose Trump. Why is the new left so eager to oppose a man who would like to restore some balance to the country, who would like to be friends with the Russians? Why on earth would the new left cheer on people like John McCain, a moderate Republican, a Trump hater, a closet Democrat who wants more and more war?
There is no left in the United States. There are fascists (Trump) and fascists (Clinton) and maybe some liberals like Sanders lurking about on the sidelines. My guess is that the ruling class is getting ready to kill democracy altogether and Trump, just like Lee Harvey Oswald, will make a great patsy.
The disconcerting part of America for me is when I tell my friends that they can best effect change in America through their personal choices – by not watching mainstream media, by not violently heaving their money at the Walt Disney Company, by lowering their consumption of corporate crap like Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts – and I am met with this response: “Oh, nobody will do that. “
Consumer choices can certainly be part of it.