The Russia watchHelsinki summit: intel personnel’s quandary; standards for impeachment; tracing Guccifer 2.0, and more
• Why American spies worry when Trump meets Putin
• Trump’s appeasement summit with Putin
• Helsinki summit: A time for choosing—three observations by former senior CIA officer
• Standards for impeachment: Trump’s defense of Putin in the face of Russia’s electoral attacks
• Intel chiefs won’t say if they’ll resign over Trump’s betrayal
• What do you do now, U.S. national security leaders?
• Russia-NRA arrest: This is as close as it gets to collusion
• Tracing Guccifer 2.0’s many tentacles in the 2016 election
• Mueller probe: Russian hackers stole half a million voters’ information in 2016
Why American spies worry when Trump meets Putin (John Sipher, Defense One)
Just as the Russian leader has unleashed his intelligence and security services, the American president has kneecapped and undermined his own.
Trump’s appeasement summit with Putin (Robin Wright, New Yorker)
In Helsinki, despite the Justice Department’s recent indictment of twelve Russian intelligence agents, Trump fully embraced Putin’s bare-faced denial of U.S. election meddling.
Helsinki summit: A time for choosing—three observations by former senior CIA officer (Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Just Security)
In his stops in Brussels, London and Helsinki, President Donald Trump demonstrated that he is as much an advocate for Russia’s interests than if he were indeed recruited by Russian intelligence and formally responding to Russian tasking. In fact, his handlers would probably exercise a greater degree of subtlety and discretion to ensure he did not go too far in revealing himself as an agent for Russian policies and interests. If there is a silver lining in this disastrous trip, surely NATO, as well as leaders in Germany and the United Kingdom, must now realize that they cannot trust what the US President says, appears to do, or promises. This lesson will be useful for our allies in forging a more independent pathway moving forward, until this American nightmare is over.
But Trump did go too far in revealing his true colors. The US intelligence community can no longer trust the President’s judgment after he clearly sided with Russia in the Mueller investigation and the underlying intelligence information that formed the basis of the indictments of twelve Russian military intelligence officers.
