Over the past decades, I developed a carefully cultivated contempt for what is giddily called "the intelligence community," particularly the Yale alumni glee club over in Langley. I had good reason for this. I'd watched as revelation after revelation demonstrated how badly the activities of what was originally supposed to be an information-gathering system turned into a covert-operating, coup-engineering, assassination-arranging, Constitution-shredding, self-perpetuating behemoth. (I consider Daniel Patrick Moynihan one of the more overrated political figures of the last century, but he was right about the CIA.) Most recently, I watched as the intelligence community threw itself into the previous Republican administration's torture regime like toddlers at snack time, and then proceeded to do what it always does: shred, burn, and otherwise conceal what it was doing from the suckers (us) who pay all the bills.

So along comes El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, who knows nothing about anything, but whose bomb-in-a-china-shop approach to his job has left rubble to all points of the compass, and all of a sudden, I find myself on the same side as all those spooks and black-op bureaucrats that have done so much damage around the world their own selves, largely because they seem to be the only people in our government with the nerve to push back against the craziness emanating from Camp Runamuck. (And we'll leave the dangers of our spies as a check-and-balance on elected leaders for another day.) From CNN:



A person directly involved in the discussions said that the removal of the Russian was driven, in part, by concerns that President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy. The decision to carry out the extraction occurred soon after a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump discussed highly classified intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. The intelligence, concerning ISIS in Syria, had been provided by Israel. The disclosure to the Russians by the President, though not about the Russian spy specifically, prompted intelligence officials to renew earlier discussions about the potential risk of exposure, according to the source directly involved in the matter.



My guess is that the leak of this remarkable story came from somewhere in the bowels of the intelligence community, that some gray person at a secure cubicle sent up yet another flare warning us that the President* of the United States cannot be trusted not to sell off the country piecemeal to a former KGB thug who is presiding over a basket-case kleptocracy. These events transpired in the first six months of this administration*, and the concerns about the operative's safety dated back to the concerns about Russian ratfcking in the election that were ringing the alarm bells throughout the 2016 campaign.

Trump is not our most tight-lipped president.

(One of Barack Obama's capital mistakes, I will always believe, was not telling Mitch McConnell to stuff it, and then alerting the American people to the fact the Russians were actively backing the Republican nominee for president. Screw the optics. This was Pearl Harbor.)

The intelligence community is engaged in a cold war of information against the elected political leadership of the country, and a lot of us are finding ourselves on its side. This is neither healthy nor sustainable. If we're going to have a constitutional crisis, then let's by god have one according to the Constitution. It's time to take the internal conflict ignited by this ignoramus out of the shadows and into the open. It's time for congresscritters, one and all, to saddle up. I hope the person in question here is safe now. I hope the country is, too.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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