Media damns itself with reports about Trump leaking classified information

Digging into the known facts about Trump’s alleged leak of classified information, shows media bias and hints that the Deep State is spying on Trump.

I always wait 24 hours before commenting on the Left’s latest bout of hysteria because, since Trump became president, those hysterical outbursts are invariably wrong. In the case of Trump’s alleged spillage of classified information to the Russians, everything reported has been wrong or is highly suspect in that it shows a concerted inside effort to destroy the presidency. Here’s my take on what happened:

President Trump, General McMaster, and Secretary of State Tillerson met in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The Oval Office is supposed to be a secured room, but that’s becoming doubtful.

During the meeting, which covered the two country’s shared concerns about ISIS and other Islamic radicals, Trump told the Russians that there was information on the ground that was favorable to us. Both McMaster and Tillerson, who were present at the meeting, strenuously contend that Trump did not relay any highly classified information.

However, even if Trump had chosen to report classified information, that would have been within his purview as the Chief Executive Officer in charge of America’s intelligence apparatus. That is, the President, not the intelligence agencies (and not a certain former Secretary of State), gets to decide what’s classified information and what’s not.

Within a short time of the meeting’s conclusion, and right in time for the Washington Post’s 5:00 afternoon deadline, people who were not present at the meeting got in touch with the WaPo. These unnamed people are allegedly former intelligence officers, which means that they worked for Obama and probably do not hold current security clearance, and current intelligence officers, who almost certainly were hired during the Obama era and whose status regarding classified material is unknown.

According to the WaPo’s own reporting, these unnamed alleged intelligence officers told the WaPo, which has no security clearance, all of the “sensitive” classified information that Trump allegedly spilled. No fooling. The WaPo admits this (emphasis mine):

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

[snip]

Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States learned only through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence-gathering method, but he described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.

The Post is withholding most plot details, including the name of the city, at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.

To recap that point, the material is “so sensitive” that allies and American employees with limited security clearance don’t even know it — but the WaPo knows it.

This deserves repeating: The same alleged officials who contend that Trump dangerously spilled highly classified information to the Russians, information that nobody but those with the highest security clearance in America should be able to touch . . . simply handed that information over to the WaPo.

Both McMaster and Tillerson, who were in the room at the time, assiduously deny that Trump released any classified information. Trump himself has said that, to the extent he released information to the Russians, classified or otherwise, he did so in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, Chief Executive of America’s security apparatus, and Chief Executive for handling America’s former affairs. After all, he is trying to work with an ally, just as was the case when FDR spilled info to Churchill or when other Presidents have shared information with allies. In that role, he has a great deal of discretion.

It’s at this point that any sane person would realize that, once again, we’re looking at fake news. The problem with our media and commentariat is that those who oppose Trump (and I include the #NeverTrump conservative cadre in this category) long ago abandoned sanity. No wonder they ate up the WaPo’s narrative, hook, line, and sinker.

As noted above, it’s apparent that none of those infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome wondered for even a second about the WaPo boast that it had complete access to such allegedly sensitive information. It also never occurred to them to ask how “former” officials had access to this same information nor even how “current” officials could either , given the confidential information’s alleged sensitivity. Keep in mind as you ponder that question that the President spoke in a closed meeting in a secured area.

You know how Trump has claimed that the Obama administration spied on him? One cannot help wondering whether the Obama’s administrations spying systems, once put in place, continue to operate.

Trump did the unthinkable in Washington when he fired the head of the FBI (and in a tactless and public way, too). With systems already in place to spy on Trump, there’s absolutely nothing to stop those anti-Trumpers who still hold their jobs in Washington (and there must be thousands of them) from abusing those systems to destroy a president they despise.

Keep in mind, too, that the people in the swamp who despise Trump don’t do so just because they’re Democrats (as we know must of these unionized government employees are). They do so for an even deeper reason: Trump threatens their job security.

Trump promised on the campaign trail to shrink the bureaucracy and the bureaucrats have seen in the last few months that he means it. There is nothing more vicious than a bureaucrat trying to preserve his job. In at least one case, rat-like, low-level British bureaucrats in the 1920s seeded a war that still goes on and affects much of the world’s stability.

Whatever was said in that meeting between Trump, Tillerson, McMaster, and the Russians is and should be completely private. The real scandal here is either that (1) people are out-and-out lying without any idea what happened in that meeting or, worse, (2) the Swamp is spying on the President and releasing highly classified information to the media.