Remember that wave of relief when you saw the credentials of the guy Trump picked to take over Flynn’s job? Looks like he felt a different kind of wave.
President Donald Trump’s choice for national security adviser, retired Vice Admiral Robert Harward, has turned down the offer, a senior White House official said on Thursday.
A friend of Harward's says he was reluctant to take NSA job bc the WH seems so chaotic; says Harward called the offer a "shit sandwich."
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) February 17, 2017
The lucky winner of this job will get to split his time between a demented, sadistic three year old and an intelligence community who hates the guy even more than I do. Whee.
BTW I think the intelligence community basically decided to do to Trump exactly what Russia did to Hillary. If you leak the incriminating evidence all at once the story will flare up and burns out. It’s survivable. If you leak the details out in a thousand small releases spaced out over weeks to months, the story never ends. Each day’s release gives Trump a chance to deny something without knowing whether the next day’s release will prove him a liar. If I am right then the folks coordinating the internal resistance have already gamed out where this is all going.
Now we go nuclear. IC war going to new levels. Just got an EM fm senior IC friend, it began: "He will die in jail."https://t.co/e6FxCclVqT
— John Schindler (@20committee) February 15, 2017
Look at this a different way. Where is the internal pushback? Imagine the alternative scenario I have heard right wingers toss around, a small faction of intelligence operatives went rogue to undermine the President. That would rightly horrify their levelheaded colleagues. I mean, the stereotypical CIA employee is a conservative, white, ex-military security expert. In other words, a Republican. Langley is full of folks who should be on the phone with the Wall Street Journal in under a millisecond pushing back on this craziness. Not only are many of these guys sentimentally aligned with Trump (in theory), they stand to be rewarded lavishly for exposing a treasonous plot. The fact that nobody has, yet, suggests that the feeling about Trump is pretty damn widespread.
I can’t wait to find out what kind of person would willingly take that job. I hear John Bolton is free.
***Update***
BTW Alex Acosta, Trump’s labor pick, is basically GENERIC REPUBLICAN FIXER in human form. He helped gut the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division under Bush and then organized GOP voter caging in Ohio in 2004. I think we can safely expect him to keep his head down, make as few waves as possible, and quietly string dynamite around the foundation of unions in America.