I don’t really care to say much about yesterday’s anonymous New York Times op-ed about resistance within the Trump Administration other than a few scattered bullet points.
- The op-ed doesn’t really say much that Trump’s opponents haven’t believed all along.
- Short of saying “there’s a Deep State controlling the federal government regardless of who’s president” outright, it’s hard to see what would have confirmed the president’s and his supporters’ claims of the last 18 months
- President Trump is not handling the situation as I would have advised.
Also, don’t ignore David Frum’s opening remarks on the op-ed at Atlantic:
Impeachment is a constitutional mechanism. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a constitutional mechanism. Mass resignations followed by voluntary testimony to congressional committees are a constitutional mechanism. Overt defiance of presidential authority by the president’s own appointees—now that’s a constitutional crisis.
If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand. That duty may be risky to their careers in government or afterward. But on their first day at work, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution—and there were no “riskiness†exemptions in the text of that oath.
The number of people who seem to want a sort of Praetorian Guard that determines who is president and what the federal government does concerns me deeply.
Which brings the question how would you handle such a situation?
I don’t think Trump tweeting treason is advisable. Personally I would order every employee at the whitehouse to have their personal electronic communication checked by the chief of staff. Anyone who refuses gets fired.
Fired and then prosecuted, or the’ll get a book tour and consultant’s position at CNN.
This is really worrying. This anonymous author is acting in a completely unethical way – it’s also curious because by writing this op-ed he/she is undermining his/her own efforts.
It’s basic tradecraft – if boxing the President in and saving him from himself is so important, then announcing that to the world (and the President) is completely counterproductive.
Well, I certainly wouldn’t have fired off an angry tweet. If furious I would have kept it inside. I doubt I would even have put out a press release in rebuttal.
I would have done the following:
1. I would have asked the AG to take three days to produce an opinion whether, assuming there actually was a senior official and the allegations in the op-ed were true, any crime had been committed by the author. If so, I would have gotten a court order for the NYT to produce their source. If they refused, I would make sure the editorial page editor and probably the publisher were jailed until they did produce their source.
2. If it was false in any way, I would pursue a libel suit. There’s plenty of evidence of malice and it might be one of the rare cases in which libel against a public figure is actually actionable.
3. I would have all of the White House staff’s electronics checked.
4. I would have all of the White House personnel (except Mike Pence) take lie detector tests.
Woodward. Suddenly appearing heroic defenders of America against the evil and insane King.
The only question is whether this indicates:
1) the midterms are upon us, or
2) Trump is about to release the classified FISA warrants.
Lets hope and pray Trump releases the unreacted FISA warrants. Not sure why Trump has not done that already. (LOL)
Anyway, how do you feel about whistleblowers? How is this different? I think the right thing to do for most people is to resign. (I will never have much respect for Mattis again, especially since I am betting he actually read Dereliction of Duty.) However, I think you can make the case that whistleblowing is sometimes the right thing to do.
Since no security details were released, what would be illegal? Do we really want to have people jailed cease they say bad things about a president? Hate to go down that path.
Woodward? Everyone on the right believed everything he said in his book when he said bad things about Obama. Now the same guy does the same thing, but says bad things about their team, so now they don’t believe him. Too funny. My take is that Woodward is in a can’t lose niche. He developed a decent reputation and now he can write books about the inside politics of the White House and as long as he has some salacious details he is guaranteed good book sales.
Steve
Woodward’s book is a bit different from the NYT op-ed. For one thing, Woodward doesn’t have a history of animosity towards Trump.
But Woodward has problems of his own. For example, Mattis has explicitly denied having said the things ascribed to him.
It’s not the op-ed. It’s the conduct alleged to have been done in the op-ed. The whistle-blowing doesn’t bother me. Subversion does.
Poor employee performance is not a crime, Dave. There’s absolutely nothing illegal about saying you’re doing a half ass job for the glory of the country. Personally I think it’s probably an intern who wrote this. But I love the idea of Trump reading everything his staff says about him behind his back from their private email accounts.
Manafort, Cohen, Gates, etc denied doing anything illegal, until they confessed or were convicted. I am not especially convinced by denials from Mattis. You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
Steve
‘The number of people who seem to want a sort of Praetorian Guard that determines who is president and what the federal government does concerns me deeply.’
We already have a Praetorian Guard in place, one that defended a President and what the federal government did no matter what. A slang term for them is the MSM.