Red
Well-Known Member
Well, at least by posting that, it's nice to know you have at least come around to acknowledge that Putin did interfere in the 2016 election to help Trump. Nice of you to finally admit you understand what happened in the 2016 election. Haha.....
BTW, of course State has to deny the report. What choice do they really have? The still ongoing NOAA revelations have proven that the Glorious Leader's fragile ego must be protected at all costs, at all times.
https://www.vox.com/2019/9/9/20856915/cnn-trump-russia-spy-putin-cia
In May 2017, Trump disclosed classified information in an Oval Office meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. That information, given to the US by Israel, concerned information about an ISIS plot to bomb airplanes using laptops. At the time, there was genuine concern that Israel’s covert source might’ve been burned by Trump’s revelation.
Two months later, Trump met with Putin at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany. It’s still unclear what exactly they talked about because Trump took away the interpreter’s notes. That’s not a common move — usually, the interpreter gives the written play-by-play to other US officials to help inform other parts of the government, including the intelligence community.
Those actions — along with Trump’s general distrust of spies — would certainly raise alarm bells inside the CIA and elsewhere. In one case Trump openly gave classified information, and in the other case, it’s completely possible he told state secrets behind closed doors to an adversary.
The question, though, is if concerns about Trump’s handling of intelligence led the CIA to want to bring the Russian asset to safety. That’s what CNN initially reported Monday.
But sources denied to the New York Times and the Washington Post that the CIA weighed Trump’s actions when deciding whether to extract the spy from Russia. Instead, they pointed to a January 2017 report from parts of the US intelligence community that said Russia’s attack on the 2016 presidential election was ordered by Putin. Many of the details in the report, including that one, were so specific — and media scrutiny so intense — that US officials feared it would become obvious they had a significant source of intelligence placed inside Russia.
“That’s a pretty remarkable intelligence community product — much more specific than what you normally see,” a US official told the Washington Post on Monday. “It’s very expected that potential US intelligence assets in Russia would be under a higher level of scrutiny by their own intelligence services.”
And so a mixture of what the US spy revealed and Trump’s behavior may explain why some felt the asset had to be removed. But how much each of those issues weighed on the decision is unknown.
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