Out to get Trump via the Stormy Daniels route

The New Neo Posted on by

I didn’t watch the 60 Minutes interview with Stormy Daniels, but I listened to most of it, and I’ve read some of the commentary. My take is similar to that of Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:

The Stormy Daniels story is not about Stormy Daniels. It’s about removing Trump from office in one of two ways:

(a) getting Trump under oath in the hope that he will lie, providing a basis for impeachment should Democrats regain control of the House and Senate, or prosecution.

(b) providing material for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to use to try to pressure Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen into turning on Trump.

Point “a” is something like what happened to Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones deposition, which you may recall is how the Lewinsky affair came out in the first place as well as the basis for the charges that he perjured himself. The approach described by Professor Jacobson that the anti-Trump forces are hoping will play out comes under the general umbrella of “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup.”

Another approach is based on two questions mentioned at Vox as being “the two most interesting questions posed by this imbroglio”:

How many other sexual partners has Trump paid hush money to?
How many foreign intelligence services know about one or more of those women?

My personal opinion is that none of this will sink Trump, but I think the points raised by Professor Jacobson have a somewhat greater likelihood of doing so than those listed at Vox.

But virtually any of Trump’s acts could be an impeachable offense if power shifts in Congress and the forces opposing Trump gain ascendance. And I think Mueller is determined to uncover some impeachable or prosecutable offense as well. If not this one, then another, and he and his crew won’t rest till they find one.

Trump is uniquely vulnerable to this sort of thing because of the life he’s led. And he’s uniquely impervious to it as well, because of the life he’s led. It’s a strange paradox that no doubt is frustrating (so far) and yet tempting to the people who would dearly love to remove him. One day they may strike pay dirt, but so far they haven’t succeeded.

Three swans: Part III

The New Neo Posted on by

I bet you’ve all been waiting with bated breath for Part III since the series first appeared back in 2012 (here are Part I and Part II).

No? Well, here’s Part III anyway.

Just to recap—“Swan Lake” is popular for a reason; actually for many reasons. There’s the glorious music by Tchaikovsky. Not to mention the incredibly beautiful choreography, particularly of the second (“white”) act. Audiences also enjoy the fanciful story involving bewitchment, true love, and tragic betrayal. The idea of a swan-woman (Odette is not a swan, although she is turned into one by day; she is a woman who retains some swannish characteristics) is particularly fitting for the soaring, curving, powerful yet delicate lines of ballet.

The rest of this post features videos of a single fairly brief passage from the ballet’s second act, as performed by three different dancers and their partners. The men don’t have a lot of dancing to do in these clips, yet they’re extremely important both as physical partners and as emotional ones.

What’s happening here is that the Prince, who is already in love with Odette, has finally allayed her shyness and understandable fear (after all, he tried to kill her at first sight, because when he first saw her she was in swan form). The clips begin with the moment Odette surrenders to the power of love, marked by her walking away in fear but then walking back towards him of her own free will. She has made her decision. She knows their love may be doomed—that’s why this isn’t a light and happy pas de deux—but she has come to trust him.

All three dancers are very very different, although all three are Russian. I will begin with the most recent one, Polina Semionova, who is only 33 years old now and who is still dancing. I believe this video is from nine years ago, although I’m not certain. She is ectomorphic and known for her long lean lyric line, which is surpassingly beautiful and extreme in a modern way that no dancer was when I was growing up. Her tempo is very slow, which is also a modern trend.

In all three videos, please note what I call the “rocking” parts, or the “leans,” where the man cradles the woman, comforts and even at times rocks her slightly, and she leans into him. Semionova is the most passive of the three in that section, which for me decreases its emotional impact.

Semionova:

Now we go back about 40-50 years ago to the great Maya Plisetskaya. I saw her perform in person several times, and I’ve written quite a few posts about her. Plisetskaya’s body type is very different—she’s much more of a mesomorph—and the tempo is much faster, which means she can’t draw out the extensions the way Semionova could. She also doesn’t have as gymnastically pliant a body, and in this somewhat blurry clip (during the 60s?) she is no longer in her prime. But the emotion is there, and in her time she was a revelation. A great many recent dancers emphasize the swan-creature aspects of Odette, and although in her arms and upper back Plisetskaya is very much the swan-creature, she creates more of a balance between the woman and the swan. And when she leans into him, she really gives herself over to it:

Natalia Makarova is another dancer I’ve seen in person many times. This clip is from 1976, when she was still going strong. She uses a slow tempo, too, like Semionova—or it might be more correct to say that Semionova uses a slow tempo, like Makarova, since Makarova was her predecessor.

I love the interpretations of all three dancers, but if I had to choose among them my favorite would be Makarova. She balances everything: the woman with the swan, the emotional with the physical, and the love with the fear, in a fluid tour de force of expressive movement (and some nice leans, too). Some of the credit should go to her partner Ivan Nagy as well, who is attentive and present, expressing his love and caring in every detail of how he moves with her and looks at her. You can see it, despite the mild blurriness. Never calling attention to himself, he helps to make the two of them a seamless whole:

Update on the new blog

The New Neo Posted on by

Get on with it already!!, you may be thinking.

But after the Big Crash of this site a few days ago—which remains undiagnosed, but which everyone is virtually 100% sure had nothing to do with my efforts at creating a new one—I’ve become more nervous about the transfer of the old content to the new site. For various reasons too tedious to mention, that appears to be the best approach, however. So I’m planning to hire someone to do the task for me instead of tackling it myself. But so far I haven’t succeeded in finding a competent taker.

So there will be a little pause in the Grand Opening of the new site. I’ll be announcing it, of course, before that opening occurs. In the meantime, the new site is currently open for your exploration although for now I’m posting my new work here. But if anything should happen to this old site in the meantime (knock, knock), please go to the new one for updates and for new posts.

The URL of the new site is easy to remember, I think, because it’s descriptive: http://thenewneo.com .

The hysterical news

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t mean “hysterical” as in “ha-ha.” I mean “hysterical” as in hyper, frenzied, almost-deranged.

I have gotten to the point where I often don’t want to even look at the news. That’s a bit difficult for a blogger, although I suppose it’s actually somewhat of an occupational hazard for those who immerse themselves in news on a daily—and sometimes an hourly—basis.

It means that I don’t necessarily write about the story du jour, and it means I’m tired of reading how chaotic the Trump White House is, or about Stormy Daniels, or about how Trump (and now Bolton) is evil and/or will cause the world to end. And just to balance it off, I don’t even want to read about how awful Hillary is, or her latest fall.

I’ve heard it all, over and over and over again. And I say that as a person who (a) was fervently against Trump during the primaries, and (b) can’t stand Hillary Clinton and am glad she’s not president. I’m just not the least bit hysterical about either thing at this point.

Hillary still isn’t president, and almost certainly never will be.

Trump is. He’s a difficult-to-predict, volatile, crass, bold, iconoclastic, infuriating, shoot-from-the-hip (in the metaphoric sense), unconventional, person whose White House is going to feature a lot of the Chief Executive saying “you’re fired!” to a procession of figures who will drive the left crazy.

And a certain proportion of the right, too.

This play sounds interesting

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s called “Admissions,” and it’s by Joshua Harmon, and I’m surprised it was ever even produced, given the current political climate:

It’s a relentless, often very funny exposé of the hypocrisies and self-contradictions of the diversity craze that defines virtually every elite campus in America…

The New York City theater scene is so insular ”” virtually everyone on both sides of the curtain is of the Left ”” that it paradoxically offers far more space for self-questioning than you’d expect. Because it’s simply assumed that no Republicans are listening in, ever, progressives in theater fall into animated quarrels among themselves about the defects in their own moral reasoning. Admissions is what happens when they’re forced to work through the injustices created by their social-justice obsession. Late at night. After a couple of glasses of pinot noir.

I can’t say I have my pulse on the finger of the New York City theater scene. In fact, I’m not even acquainted with it at this point; the last time I went to the theater in New York was several years ago, and before that it was several years earlier.

You have to take out a mortgage to be able to go to the theater these days, anyway.

But my impression is that “self-questioning” on the left—through the mechanism of theater, or otherwise—is vanishingly small. I’ve certainly spent a lot of time among New Yorkers of the liberal/left sort, and I see few to no “quarrels [animated or calm] among themselves about the defects in their own moral reasoning.” That’s why “Admissions” sounds like a very interesting evening in the theater.

An evening a bit like one I spent a few years ago in a more local New England venue, attending a revival of a play that had been produced in New York in 2005 [*see below], entitled “Third” and written by Wendy Wasserstein, a Tony and Pulitzer-winning playwright whose work was often celebrated by feminists.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the play. Here’s a description of it (in an obituary for Wasserstein, who died in 2006):

The heroine is a campus feminist crusader growing weary of a battle in which the victories don’t seem to get beyond the ivy walls. Snarling at the Iraq war on the television, the character comes to question the worth of the struggle–and even arrives at a tender rapprochement with a young, conservative student. Some critics read it as a kind of submission.

…[T]he play’s main theme is how a feminist writer of a certain age finds that her longtime political struggle is ultimately eclipsed by the spiritual and personal demands of confronting the mortality of those she loves, and of herself.

But that doesn’t really describe the play as I saw it. Actually, it was very funny—at least, I laughed uproariously many times as I watched it. But I was often the only one in the theater laughing, as I couldn’t help but notice when my laugh rang out load and clear and lonely throughout the large theater. Many of the laughs came at the expense of that “heroine” (main character), a professor whose relentless progressivism and resultant anger at anyone even close to being on the right results in narrow-mindedness combined with self-righteousness, and leads to a false accusation towards a conservative student.

Progressives don’t come out well at all in the play. It was almost shocking at the time to see it, so used had I become to the trashing of conservatives and the elevation of liberals in any play I saw, even plays that didn’t have a political theme at all.

This new play, “Admissions,” sounds as though it might be in that same vein.

[* “Third” was produced in New York by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and “Admissions” is also at Lincoln Center.]

[NOTE: In this post from 2005 I wrote about the ubiquity of gratuitous anti-conservative political digs in artistic efforts. My general impression is that the problem’s only gotten worse since then.]

Trump’s tariff gamble

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been widespread condemnation of Trump’s tariffs and his trade war with China, and the stock market doesn’t seem to like the policy one bit—at least, so far:

The threat of a global trade war continued to hang over the stock market Friday, a day after plunging in a broad selloff that analysts pinned largely on President Donald Trump’s announcement that he would impose tariffs on billions of dollars of Chinese imports.

For investors, it might inspire déjé  vu after the administration’s decision in early March to institute tariffs on steel and aluminum imports provoked a steep selloff, only to see most of the decline reclaimed in subsequent weeks.

I’m no expert on economics—far from it—but it occurs to me that, in this as in so many others, Trump is uninterested in what the experts say and is willing to go his own way in a bold and risky move.

The question is whether that’s what we want in a president. What’s the correct balance of boldness and caution in a chief executive? How do we know ahead of time if a president’s judgment is sound, especially if the president has no track record in making decisions on government and foreign policy? The stakes are incredibly high when we’re talking about a prsident.

Trump’s loose cannon qualities put me off during the 2016 campaign, and it’s one of the main reasons I spoke so strongly against him. Now that’s he’s president, I’ve given him a chance, and so far he’s surprised me by having better judgment than I had thought he would, and many of his risks have seemed worth it.

But that doesn’t mean that will always be the case. Trump’s liberal critics are predisposed to hate everything he does, for many reasons both personal and political. But Trump’s conservative critics are also put off by is his propensity to go his own way in making decisions that seem fraught with risks of a heavy-duty nature.

That’s true of this move. Will his luck, and/or his judgment, hold out? Or will this move have dangerous repercussions?

I cannot say. Most of the experts think that they can say, and that the answer to that last question will be “yes, the move will have dangerous repercussions.”

But one thing I can say is that I see no particular reason to trust their judgment. I’ve not been impressed by their evaluations and predictions so far. So I am anxious but agnostic on this.

Most of you who are more conversant with finance and economics than I am probably have much stronger opinions on it. Feel free to go at it in the comments.

The “dangerous” Bolton replaces McMaster

The New Neo Posted on by

The appointment of John Bolton as Trump’s National Security Advisor was bound to cause controversy and criticism, and so it has.

I have always felt that Bolton is smart and tough, and much (not all) of the time I have agreed with him. Is he too much an advocate of war? To be honest, I’m not certain, and it’s hard to get a straight story on it because the media doesn’t do straight stories. I’ve just spent the last hour and a half trying to sort that aspect out, and it would take a lot more time than that to come to a firm conclusion.

Bolton does seem to have a history of alienating subordinates because of his harsh treatment of them. On a personal note—for what it’s worth, and it’s probably not worth much—about two and a half years ago I went to a public speech of his at what turned out to be a very small venue, to a very small crowd. That meant it was a pretty intimate setting, and he seemed calm and thoughtful and not at all inflammatory in his rhetoric. Afterward, I spoke to him for about 20 minutes at least (that’s how small the crowd was), and he was completely pleasant and reasonable, even self-effacing. Maybe I caught him in an uncharacteristic moment, however.

Bolton is widely hated not just on the left but even by some on the right as too truculent, and the meme is going out now that he dangerous.

Our friends at the NY Times are leading the way in today’s editorial entitled “Yes, John Bolton Really Is That Dangerous”:

There are few people more likely than Mr. Bolton is to lead the country into war. His selection is a decision that is as alarming as any Mr. Trump has made so far.

Coupled with his nomination of the hard-line C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, as secretary of state, Mr. Trump is indulging his worst nationalistic instincts. Mr. Bolton, in particular, believes the United States can do what it wants without regard to international law, treaties or the political commitments of previous administrations.

Somehow the nation survived Bolton’s previous stints in international relations, including his advocating that we pull out of the International Criminal Court, and his ambassadorship to the UN:

The Economist called Bolton “the most controversial ambassador ever sent by America to the United Nations.” Some colleagues in the UN appreciated the goals Bolton was trying to achieve, but not his abrasive style. The New York Times, in its editorial The Shame of the United Nations, praised Bolton’s stance on “reforming the disgraceful United Nations Human Rights Commission”, saying “John Bolton, is right; Secretary-General Kofi Annan is wrong.” The Times also said that the commission at that time was composed of “some of the world’s most abusive regimes” who used their membership as cover to continue their abusiveness.

Bolton also opposed the proposed replacement for the Human Rights Commission, the UN Human Rights Council, as not going far enough for reform, saying: “We want a butterfly. We don’t intend to put lipstick on a caterpillar and call it a success.”

Bolton doesn’t talk like a diplomat, but that’s only one of the reasons so many people despise him. In Slate, you can see more of the way the rhetoric on Bolton is going to go:

It’s Time to Panic Now: John Bolton’s appointment as national security adviser puts us on a path to war.

John Bolton’s appointment as national security adviser””a post that requires no Senate confirmation””puts the United States on a path to war. And it’s fair to say President Donald Trump wants us on that path.

After all, Trump gave Bolton the job after the two held several conversations (despite White House chief of staff John Kelly’s orders barring Bolton from the building). And there was this remark that Trump made after firing Rex Tillerson and nominating the more hawkish Mike Pompeo to take his place: “We’re getting very close to having the Cabinet and other things I want.”

Bolton has repeatedly called for launching a first strike on North Korea, scuttling the nuclear arms deal with Iran, and then bombing that country too. He says and writes these things not as part of some clever “madman theory” to bring Kim Jong-un and the mullahs of Tehran to the bargaining table, but rather because he simply wants to destroy them and America’s other enemies too.

As far as I can tell, Bolton’s “call for launching a first strike on North Korea” amounts to saying that we should retain the option of pre-emptively destroying nuclear facilities if necessary, just as Israel did:

Israel has already twice struck nuclear-weapons programs in hostile states: destroying the Osirak reactor outside Baghdad in 1981 and a Syrian reactor being built by North Koreans in 2007.

This is how we should think today about the threat of nuclear warheads delivered by ballistic missiles.

I’m really not sure what’s so very controversial about that. Has any American president, even Obama, actually said that’s not an option? Is it just that Bolton speaks about it a bit more enthusiastically and/or emphatically and/or clearly?

Here, for example, is Obama on the subject of a pre-emptive strike in Iran:

Mr. Obama’s remarks built on his vow in the State of the Union address that the United States would “take no options off the table” in preventing Iran, which says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, from acquiring a weapon. But he was more concrete in saying that those options include a “military component,” although after other steps, including diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions.

That was in 2012; we all know that the Iran deal was what happened instead. But although Obama’s rhetoric about pre-emptive strikes was certainly calmer than Bolton’s, the threat of such a strike was there.

Maybe it’s just that the world believes Bolton and never believed Obama.

As for North Korea, here’s what was going on during Bill Clinton’s administration in 1994:

At the office of the secretary of Defense in the Pentagon, a plan for a preemptive military attack on North Korea was being presented to “a small, grim group.”

“The plan was impressive,” recalled an official who was at the presentation by US military strategists. “It could be executed with only a few days’ alert, and it would entail little or no risk of US casualties during the attack.”…

And this was Obama in 2010 [emphasis mine]:

The Obama administration will release a new national nuclear-weapons strategy Tuesday that makes only modest changes to U.S. nuclear forces, leaving intact the longstanding U.S. threat to use nuclear weapons first, even against non-nuclear nations.

The post of National Security Advisor does not need confirmation, so whether or not Bolton could be confirmed (I bet he couldn’t) is not an issue.

The Omnibus spending bill…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is explained here.

Nobody’s especially happy with it, many people on both sides are angry with it, and it will probably pass.

The misgivings are bipartisan. House Democrats are reportedly threatening to not vote for the rule bringing the legislation to the floor; if they and House conservatives together defeat the rule, that would stop the underlying legislation in its tracks.

Most likely, though, the legislation will pass, and a number of important changes in policy and funding levels for everything from immigration to gun research will take effect…

The whole point of omnibus legislation is that it’s kind of a cobbled-together mishmash of provisions and priorities…

…even if all goes according to plan, expect to have very a similar fight in six months, and then again in a year.

That’s the way the federal government “works” these days.

Biden vs. Trump, the Dozens, and Inuit song duels

The New Neo Posted on by

What do these three things have in common: the recent Biden vs. Trump war of threatening words, the Dozens, and Inuit song duels? They’re all ways that people (especially men) threaten each other in an almost-comical way, in which the real competition is about who is being the wittiest and boldest in speech. They are all substitutes for an actual physical fight, and are also popular spectator sports.

So that’s the way I see this:

The two, who have long engaged in schoolboy-style taunts, have taken it to a new level recently, with Biden boasting about how he would “beat the hell” out of Trump “behind the gym,” and Trump responding Thursday that if the two fought, Biden “would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.”

“Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy,” the president tweeted Thursday. “Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don’t threaten people Joe!”

Earlier this week, Biden ”“ who has not ruled out a 2020 run for president ”“ taunted Trump by telling University of Miami College Democrats that he could have taken the president in a high school fight.

“They asked me if I’d like to debate this gentleman, and I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him,'” Biden said.

Trump is 71. Biden is 75.

Speakng of schoolyard taunts, Trump could say, “He started it!” That’s the stance he takes at the beginning of his tweet, pointing out that Biden has threatened him physically more than once. But then he can’t resist bragging that if such a fight were to happen, Biden would be the loser.

I’ll pass on the opportunity to predict the outcome of that particular bout if it were to really get physical; let’s just say it’s good we’ll never have to witness the spectacle of two old guys duking it out.

It all reminds me a bit of the what’s known (or what used to be known; I’m not necessarily up-to-date on this) as the Dozens:

The first academic treatment of the Dozens was made in 1939 by Yale-based psychologist and social theorist John Dollard, who described the importance of the game among African-American males, and how it is generally played. Dollard’s description is considered pioneering and accurate. The Dozens is a “pattern of interactive insult” evident among all classes of African Americans, among males and females, children and adults.

Usually two participants engage in banter, but always in front of others, who instigate the participants to continue the game by making the insults worse. Frequently used topics among players who “play the Dozens” or are “put in the Dozens” are one’s opponent’s lack of intelligence, ugliness, alleged homosexuality, alleged incest, cowardice, poor hygiene, and exaggerations of physical defects, such as crossed eyes…

Participants in the Dozens are required to exhibit mental acuity and proficiency with words.

If you read the whole Wiki article, you probably can see the connection between The Dozens and rap music, which is a much later manifestation of a related impulse.

And then there’s the Inuit song duel tradition, one I learned about long ago in anthropology class:

Instead of fighting, two people who were angry with one another came before an audience and took turns singing songs that pointed out the others’ faults and weaknesses.

Encouraged by the hoots and hollers of the crowd, the singers tried to outdo one another by making the funniest insults.

Unfortunately, neither Trump nor Biden were all that witty in this particular exchange.

This sort of thing is why long-time liberal Alan Dershowitz is no longer invited to liberal dinner parties

The New Neo Posted on by

He says that Trump was right that no special counsel should have been appointed, since there was no probable cause for one. And he’s been saying that from the start:

First of all, the president’s 100% right. There never should have been an appointment of special counsel here. There was no probable cause at that point to believe that crimes had been committed. I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that crimes have been committed by the president.

As I’ve said from day one, there should have been a special investigative commission, non-partisan appointed by Congress, with subpoena power to look into the role of Russia and trying to influence American elections and do something about preventing it in the future. Instead of starting out with finger-pointing and trying to criminalize political difference behind the closed doors of a grand jury.

By taking this position, Dershowitz is in agreement with another stellar legal mind, Andrew C. McCarthy. Of course, the big difference is that Dershowitz is a liberal and McCarthy is on the right. So McCarthy never got invited to those parties in the first place.

Here is a clip that fascinates me. It’s of Dershowitz and CNN’s legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin talking about Dershowitz’s position on this issue, as well as other issues connected with Trump. It is worth watching the whole thing, but it is the last minute (which I highlight here) in which Dershowitz particularly shines. This isn’t just about Derhsowitz and Toobin, either. It’s about old-school liberals vs. new. It’s generational, because (as is revealed in the clip) Toobin was once a student of Dershowitz’s:

The statue of Justice carries balancing scales, but she is also blindfolded. The blindfold is one of the most important elements in justice, and it doesn’t mean that justice is unable to see. It means justice is impartial and is applied in the same manner to all, or at least that’s the goal. That’s what Dershowitz is saying here, and he is adding that he has been consistent about that and implies that someone like Toobin looks at justice with a political bias.

I’m not making it up about Dershowitz’s lack of invitations to liberal parties, either. Dershowitz is quoted in this article as having said the following [hat tip: Althouse]:

“None of my liberal friends invite me to dinner anymore,” [Dershowitz] said. “Thanks to Donald Trump, I’ve lost seven pounds. I call it the Donald Trump diet.”

That’s obviously a joke; Dershowitz is trying to laugh at the situation and to make us laugh too. But it veils something quite sinister, which is the universal social ostracization on the part of the left towards a former colleague who has done nothing more than be consistent on a point of legal policy, which puts him in agreement with Trump (and some on the right) about something. That his liberal former dinner hosts/friends happen to disagree with him is something they see as reason to break old bonds and treat him like a social pariah.

Whether it’s literally true about the drying up of the dinner party invitations (and I suspect it is), it is no surprise at all that this has happened even to an old liberal warhourse like Dershowitz. Anyone who is a liberal (or former liberal) and takes a stand that puts him/her in tune with the right finds out soon enough that many liberals will self-righteously—and with the idea that it is their minds that are open and tolerant—go the shunning route and/or the insult route.

[NOTE: I’m curious to know whether Dershowitz is now invited to conservative dinner parties. Now, that would make for some lively discussions, if he decided to go. But if he’s going to conservative dinner parties, why has he lost weight? Is the food less plentiful? Less caloric? Or are the dinner parties fewer in number?]

Who’s the leaker at the National Security Council?

The New Neo Posted on by

Someone (almost certainly from the NSC) has leaked news of Trump’s phone call to Putin, and it’s not the first time a similar type of leak has occurred:

…only a handful of people at the White House…would have access to the notecards, according to two U.S. government officials and a former senior official familiar with the process.

Trump, along with other senior White House staff, believe it was an inside leak and suspect it was coming from National Security Council staff, sources with knowledge stated…

White House officials will investigate the leaks and a senior White House Official told this reporter in a statement, “If this story is accurate, that means someone leaked the President’s briefing papers. Leaking such information is a fireable offense and likely illegal.”

There’s a reason for that, and it really doesn’t matter whether you approve of Trump or his call to Putin, or not.

Here’s someone, for example, who disapproves heartily of Trump and writes about that quite often, and yet is worried about leaks like these.

More and more these days I get an Orwellian vibe from the names of our government institutions coupled with the exploits of those employed within them.