President Trump campaigned, in part, by playing on the instinctual fears of the conservative base. You’d think that, regardless of how he plans to campaign in the future, he’d take steps to safeguard the nation in the future in honor of that campaign tactic. In this, though, you’d be committing the sin of thinking he’s an intellectually curious man who compulsively learns as much as he can about each issue that comes up.
Instead, he sits around and watches Fox News.
Why do I bring this up? Because Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey are utterly outraged on Lawfare concerning the FISA vote. If you’ve never heard of FISA, it authorizes the surveillance of foreign nationals on foreign turf, and must be periodically reauthorized. It’s somewhat controversial for privacy advocates, but virtually everyone agrees it’s a critical tool for preventing national security catastrophes. So what happened when it came up for a reauthorization vote today?
When the history of President Donald Trump’s use of Twitter is written, there will be a stiff competition for his most destructive, most irresponsible tweet. A strong contender for that less-than-august honor came Thursday morning, when the president of the United States tweeted this:
“House votes on controversial FISA ACT today.” This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?
[I just copied the text of the tweet, because actual tweets don’t migrate easily into WordPress.]
For present purposes, the much more urgent matter is that the president here seemed to be at least implicitly opposing reauthorization of 702—and doing so on the day the House of Representatives is to vote on the matter and when the outcome of that vote is uncertain.
Let’s not mince words here: The lapse of Section 702 surveillance capabilities, even for a short time, would constitute a full-fledged national security emergency. The National Security Agency is on record as saying that “collection under FAA Section 702 is the most significant tool in the NSA collection arsenal for the detection, identification, and disruption of terrorist threats to the U.S. and around the world.”
And then even more interestingly:
Perhaps following an early-morning staff intervention, Trump seemed to recognize his error and tried to undo some of the damage, tweeting:
With that being said, I have personally directed the fix to the unmasking process since taking office and today’s vote is about foreign surveillance of foreign bad guys on foreign land. We need it! Get smart!
And then came this:
This is a sufficiently high legislative priority that the White House rushed out a Statement of Administration Policy late Wednesday night:
The Administration supports House passage of the House Amendment to S. 139, the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 provides authorities to collect critical intelligence on terrorist organizations, weapons proliferators, and other foreign adversaries that is vital to keeping the Nation safe. Reauthorizing these authorities before they expire on January 19, 2018, in a manner that preserves their effectiveness, is a top priority of the Administration.
I’ve omitted the balance of the White House statement, as it’s not germane to the point I’ll be making. So why my remark about television? I’ve seen quite a few posts recently concerning Trump’s TV habits, and Benjamin and Susan also point at a specific correlation:
But the president’s tweet followed this clip that aired on “Fox & Friends”—which Trump is known to watch. This clip also ran this morning [clip omitted, I could not view it – Hue] …
In other words, President Trump tweeted lies against his own intelligence community in the course of signaling opposition to a legislative priority of his own administration on a crucial national security priority at an especially delicate moment in time. Then he tried to take it back.
Regardless of your opinion on FISA, the larger picture has to deeply concern every citizen, Trump supporter or not, because it’s increasingly clear that President Trump simply blows with the wind. This point is being made by many commentators, but it’s worth repeating over and over. He doesn’t get his information from the best intel operation in the world, or from academics who’ve studied these subjects for decades, or from anyone at all who might have some qualifications.
Instead, he consults one of the objectively worst news sources on the planet, Fox News, and pretends that it represents some sort of deep analysis.
This time it appears total disaster has been averted, if we’re to believe Benjamin and Susan. But what happens next time the President decides to pervert an important piece of legislation, or an Executive Order, or anything under his control – say, the reputation of the FBI – in order to further one of his personal paranoid fantasies – or in response to something he’s seen on Fox News?
I ask my conservative readers, how does this make any sense at all?
