You're caught up in personal politics. Do I even have to say this? If the CIA were keeping secrets from a different President--pick your favorite--would you still be in favor of it? Lots of people love the CIA. They used to be Foxers. Now the Foxers, CNNers, and MSNBCers ALL love the CIA and the FBI. "Liberal" MSNBC has been blowing the FBI nightly for two years. All three of the f'ing channels openly employ former CIA and FBI employees to give the CIA and FBI perspective right on live TV. Fine. Just don't pretend the FBI/CIA blowfest is some kind of liberal position. It's the Establishment and it's ultra-conservative. Which is fine. Just know thyself. And turn off the TV.
Of course you don't want the CIA keeping secrets from any competent president. That's not really what we are talking about here.
If Trump was specifically under investigation by Congress at this point, I can see keeping secrets from him, but I do agree with you that no official should be keeping secrets from the president at this point...especially something that gives us the capability of attacking a foreign power like this. The bigger problem is why are Pentagon officials telling a member of the media this. That’s a huge no-no and should result in that person(s) losing their jobs and/or their clearances. Having worked with and in the intel community a couple decades ago, the rules are clear on what you can and can’t tell the media. This is also the problem with anonymous sources.
Gotta agree with sirbaihu here. You can't intentionally keep stuff that sensitive from the president. I don't blame the CIA for shielding stuff from this president, they probably shouldn't trust him. But, it's absolutely not allowed to take such a provocative action and keep the president in the dark about it. They should be punished for getting caught.
Purely for the sake of conversation, if the IC has become convinced the president is a national security risk, I can see not sharing critical info with him. I would want them to share with the House and Senate Intelligence Committee personnel the pertinents, though.
Wait, I'm sorry: edit. "National security risk"? As RayRay10 noted, the "IC" itself created the "national security risk," by exposing the thing they supposedly wanted to hide. Why? Our good ol' "IC" buddies: "We don't want Trump to expose our hacking of the Russian power grid, so we'd better tell the NYT we're hacking the Russian power grid."
Mentioning electing Obama is particularly rich considering turtle's only legislative goal during his first term was to see him not get re-elected.
Your hardly at work president (after a busy day going to his campaign rally yesterday), spending a busy day attending a "roundtable discussion" that costs participants a quarter million to attend... the presidency, bought and paid for...
Out of curiosity, I'd like to see past President's public schedules. I'm not a defender of our President, but I assume public means only those times he is interacting in a public setting.
Regardless, Trump doesn't do a whole lot of work. In fact, he seems good at undoing a lot of work by other people.
