Showdown

President Donald Trump’s declassification order Thursday night has set up a showdown between his own Justice Department and the intelligence community that could trigger resignations and threaten the CIA’s ability to conduct its core business — managing secret intelligence and sources.

Trump’s order directed intelligence agencies to fully comply with Attorney General William Barr’s look at “surveillance activities” during the 2016 election — a probe that Trump’s allies see as a necessary check on government overreach but that critics lambaste as an attempt to create the impression of scandal. Numerous former intelligence officials called the move “unprecedented,” saying it grants the attorney general sweeping powers over the nation’s secrets, subverts the intelligence community and raises troubling legal questions.

  Politico

I have no proble with the CIA being put on a short leash. But it won't happen via the Trump administration without something even more lawless taking its place. Something likely involving Erik Prince.

Under the National Security Act, a post-World War II overhaul of the country’s military and intelligence structure, intelligence agencies are legally required to protect the unauthorized declassification of their secretive sources and information-gathering tactics. But Trump’s directive seemingly gave the attorney general the power to determine what should be declassified, potentially upending decades of precedent.

[...]

While the order includes a caveat that the directive should not impair “the authority granted by law” to agency heads on classification, it also notes that Barr has to consult these agency heads only “to the extent he deems it practicable” about declassification decisions.

[...]

Trump on Friday defended his decision as a pro-transparency move that will give the public insight into nefarious government activity. And he praised Barr as the ideal person to judge what should be released.

Barr is “a great gentleman and a highly respected man, so everything that they need is declassified and they’ll able to see how the hoax or witch hunt started and why it started,” Trump told reporters before leaving for a trip to Japan. “It was an attempted coup, an attempted takedown of the president of the United States.”

He only likes transparency if it makes him look good. And Barr is his personal henchman, who is not so highly respected. In fact, he may be even less respected than Trump.

“I can’t remember a time when a non-IC officer was given declassification authority over intelligence information,” said Michael Morell, the former acting director of the CIA under Obama and the host of the Intelligence Matters podcast.

Things have changed.

The Wall:


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He'll be giving Barr the medal of freedom, or some such soon enough.


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...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.