Stripping away the illusion: Trump has no backstop
By Jennifer Rubin May 30 at 10:31 AM
For more than four months, Republicans and Democrats anxious about President Trump’s inexperience, rotten judgment and defective temperament could tell themselves, “Well there are people around him to prevent disasters.” What the latest — and most jaw-dropping — of all the mini-scandals within the larger scandal involving Trump’s team and Russia has told us is that the supposed steady hands on the tiller are either part of the problem or utterly useless when the chips are down.
News that the princeling with a massive portfolio, Jared Kushner, while President Barack Obama was still in office, allegedly sought a “back channel” to Russia, using Russian communication systems, confirmed what Trump critics have long suspected: Kushner is a 30-something billionaire with zero government experience who is either laughably naive, mixed up in Russian shenanigans or both. He’s a focus of the special investigator’s inquiry and was, we have learned, one of those rooting to fire FBI Director James B. Comey. In short, if he were anyone but the president’s son-in-law, he’d be thrown under the bus, and rightly so. He defied common sense and every protocol in trying to run his own secret Russia channel — secret from the U.S. government. As former CIA and NSA director Michael V. Hayden said, “This is off the map. I know of no other experience like this in our history, certainly within my life experience. . . . What manner of ignorance, chaos, hubris, suspicion, contempt would you have to have to think that doing this with the Russian ambassador was a good or an appropriate idea?”
In other words, Kushner may prove to be a serious liability for the president, not a helpful sounding board in a White House under siege. Even if cleared of any wrongdoing, Kushner has shown himself to be witless, if not corrupt. We therefore can take no solace in knowing he is there to talk sense to the president. He’s among Trump’s weakest links (even when one considers how totally unprepared he is to carry out a list of tasks so enormous they’d sink the most esteemed White House veteran.) But the generals, we still have the generals! Right? Eh, not so much. Once again we have seen generals debase themselves by lending their considerable credibility to the president.
Just as he did in vouching for the president on conveying code-word classified information to the Russians — first denying it, and then insisting it was no big deal (“wholly appropriate”) — national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster once again came out to defend ludicrously inappropriate conduct. On one hand he said Kushner’s Russia outreach was not anything he was involved in (because Kushner was seeking to cut out the Defense Department!), and then he sought to dampen the outrage. “We have back-channel communications with a number of countries. So, generally speaking, about back-channel communications, what that allows you to do is to communicate in a discreet manner,” said McMaster. This is weak bit of misdirection given that the sort of back-channel communication he had in mind is conducted by the U.S. government (not a president-elect) and is not conducted using Russian communication channels (thereby giving Russia, but not the United States, a record of a call that can be leaked, distorted or manipulated). McMaster continued, “No, I would not be concerned about it.” Without ever really blessing this conduct, McMaster once again used his own considerable prestige to defend something, the contours of which he may not even know. Inexplicably, he puts in the role of two-bit political flack.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/05/30/stripping-away-the-illusion-trump-has-no-backstop/
= new reply since forum marked as read
