Can we put this issue to rest yet? (Didn’t think so.) Our President Trump did not disclose classified information, nor methods or sources, to Russian officials last week in the Oval Office. (Booo! He committed Treason!) No, he didn’t you lunatics. And if anyone listened to half of the stories dripping out over the past 24 hours, you should be able to understand why.
Alas, no one in the media wants this to be so. No one in Congress either. Last night the Washington Post broke the news, and CNN happily pushed the false narrative bringing us yet another step closer to Impeachment – everyone’s ultimate goal here.
Nothing seemed improper or out of the ordinary to me at the time; and the press had a problem with that. Maybe that was the reason each news outlet started to add little tidbits piece by piece to make the story more nefarious and dastardly as the night went on. By this morning the media was in full attack mode, gleefully clueing in unsuspecting commuters to work who happened to miss the first iteration last night.
The Washington Post initially reported this “Trump Tip” was about the laptops/electronic devices aviation threat. The Post also added a curious quote from a “former official” that this was “codeword information,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.
From this stemmed a myriad of speculation and piling-on. He revealed the highest level of classified information (codeword information – not Top Secret Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Eyes Only No Foreign Distribution information); He revealed a city in the Middle East; He revealed not only the location but the source of the information; He revealed the source’s name and place of birth, his social security number, even!
By midmorning it was as if the president had given up his ATM password. General HR McMaster briefed the press for a second time to reiterate that the whole story was completely false, and nothing of the sort transpired. At this the press just seemed to become angrier, insisting the president was reckless, had put American lives in danger, no foreign intelligence organizations will ever share information with us again, and he just can’t help himself and blurts out classified information every chance he gets.
At the periphery of the story was the fact that terrorists have the ability to disguise explosives in laptops or other electronic devices. CBS News reported that this information was “so secret even close American allies did not know.” Huh?
Funny, I heard about this last year. Recently as March 21st the Trump Administration announced a ban on devices from certain airports and countries, and Britain followed suit with a more expansive ban. Interestingly enough CBS News wrote a story about the laptops and the ban, and the countries and the airports, too. How did this information get to CBS News and the entire US airline-flying population, yet somehow skip our “close American allies?” (Forget about Russia they don’t believe anything we say anyways.)
How did this happen? We heard that there may have been only 5 people in the room, two of the Russians and one was Donald Trump. That leaves just two (2) people to turn on the spigot. If the source wasn’t someone who was in the room at the time, it should be treated as hearsay – take some time to get some background or corroborating evidence. Playing those roles in the Washington Post story was someone close to the administration familiar with the story, and a former US official. Dubious to me, indeed.
My best guess is that, Trump is so mad about purported leaks from his Administration, that he is going to start feeding us “Barium Meals.” That’s an old espionage term for something like the Telephone Game. Tell 10 people ten different things – see which one comes back to the press. You know who you told, ergo, you found the leak.
If Trump decides to use the Barium Meal tactic we’re in for a long Spring; he’s not one for subtlety; we could be getting a bombshell revelation on a daily basis each worse (or more impeachable) than the other.
What the past 24 hours clearly demonstrated is that where there is no story, a story will be provided to you. And that story comes with a cost: The cost of the honor and integrity of the news media, partisan politicians in Congress that jump on the breaking news du jour. With President Trump involved, everything is a story – a big giant headline on the front page of the paper; but with so many competing voices the story changes so quickly that in the end the story isn’t worth the newspaper it’s printed on.
