Kushner’s clearance trophy
Star boy Jared Kushner received his top secret security clearance not because he earned it, but because is father-in-law, the president, overruled security advisers and ordered them to let Kushner have it.
Kushner warms the bench on the White House team, so he gets a trophy.
Remember, this is the guy who “forgot” multiple foreign contacts and business interests and possible conflicts of interests when filing and refiling and refiling the refilings of his ethics forms.
This also is the guy who tried to set up a secret communications back channel between the Trump transition and the Russians to circumvent American’s intelligence agencies. And he’s the guy who, with his and Kushner family international deals to secure financing for their struggling real-estate ventures, repeatedly made us wonder which country he really serves. Is it America or Russia, Saudi Arabia, China, Qater, Israel, the United Arab Emirates – depending on the deal du jour?
But he also is the guy Trump calls “a senior adviser.”
The New York Times last week reported that Trump’s decision in May to insist on Kushner’s clearance so troubled senior administration officials that at least one, then-White House chief John F. Kelly, wrote a contemporaneous internal memo about how he had been “ordered” to give Kushner the top-secret clearance.
Similarly, then-White House counsel Don McGahn wrote an internal memo outlining concerns raised about Kushner. Those concerns included some from the CIA and McGahn himself, who had recommended Kushner not receive a top-secret clearance.
Some news agencies are making a lot of hay about the fact that Trump said he did not interfere in the standard process of getting Kushner’s clearance. Now it seems apparent the president lied. But, really – what else is new? It’s harder to name something Trump hasn’t lied about than it is to tally the lies.
House Democrats are beginning an investigation into how several Trump administration officials obtained clearances, including Kushner. On Friday, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said the “radio silence” he’s gotten with requests for interviews and documents is unacceptable, and it may become necessary “to compel compliance.”
Bring on the subpoenas.
Just walk away, Donnie
“Sometimes you have to walk,” the president said about his failed second summit meeting with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un.
Trump said Kim had offered to dismantle the North’s most important nuclear facility if the United States lifted the harsh sanctions imposed on his nation – but would not commit to do the same for other elements of its weapons program.
But North Korea’s foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, said the North had asked only for some sanctions to be lifted in exchange for “permanently and completely” dismantling the main facility in the presence of American experts.
Whatever the truth, we’re glad Trump walked. It was a better outcome than giving away the store.
Take the vets’ advice
“At a moment when the country has never seemed angrier, two political commentators from opposite sides of the divide concurred last week on one point, nearly unthinkable until recently: The country is on the verge of ‘civil war.'”
So begins a Friday story from The Washington Post. Examples follow.
Former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, a Fox News regular and ally of President Trump said it first. “We are in a civil war,” diGenova said. “The suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future is over . It’s going to be total war.”
The next day, Nicolle Wallace, an MSNBC commentator, Trump critic and former Republican White House official, played a clip of diGenova’s comment and agreed with him. But she turned it back on Trump, who she said “greenlit a war in this country around race. And if you think about the most dangerous thing he’s done, that might be it.”
The Post posits: “With the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III reportedly nearly complete, impeachment talk in the air and the 2020 presidential election ramping up, fears that once existed only in fiction or the fevered dreams of conspiracy theorists have become a regular part of the political debate.”
Indeed, former Trump fixer-turned-Mueller-informant Michael Cohen finished up his public testimony to Congress last week with a similarly dark note: “Given my experience working for President Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power. This is why I agreed to appear before you today. I pray the country doesn’t make the same mistakes that I have made [in blindly following Trump].”
Experts who evaluate the strength of governments around the world, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, in early 2017 demoted the United States from “full democracy” to “flawed democracy,” citing a big drop in Americans’ trust for their political institutions.
But it was diGenova’s comments, which included his provocative statement that he votes and buys guns, that drew what the Post called “an exasperated response from VoteVets,” a veterans advocacy group whose members have fought in actual civil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Amazing we have to say this but: 1. We are NOT in civil war. 2. Do NOT buy guns (or any weapons) to use against your fellow Americans,” tweeted Jon Soltz, the group’s chairman. “Trust us, we have seen war.”
Let us hope they do not see it again.