Friday, January 20, 2017

Trump's bungling cripples his national security team right out of the gate

Rss@dailykos.com (kerry Eleveld) · Wednesday, January 18, 2017, 6:01 pm

Remember when counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke described "hair on fire" moments at the beginning of W's presidency as his CIA director tried to get the president focused on a potential terrorist attack in the lead up to 9/11? Yeah, well, Obama's national security officials have been diligently prepping for the transition to the next national security team since last summer, producing some 275 briefing documents and 1,000 pages of classified material and, writes Mark Landler:

Nobody in the current administration knows whether anyone in the next has read any of it.

Really, Trump has made such a big show of whom he was going to pick for certain cabinet posts that he just hasn't had time to get the national security team in place—not to mention someone who isn't a purveyor of fake news and conspiracy theories to lead it. But lead it retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn will, and in an apparent information vacuum, according to outgoing national security adviser, Susan Rice.

“We really wanted to make sure there was nothing a new team needed to know that we hadn’t told them,” Ms. Rice said in an interview. “It took them more time than we expected for them to be ready to engage with us.” Now, she added, “we’re racing to make up lost time.”

Rice's team has reportedly been scrambling to make unclassified versions of their original reports because, true to Trump's stellar management skills, most of the National Security Council (NSC) personnel he installed to run the transition didn't have security clearances. Perfect. Let’s remember that none of the NSC positions require Senate confirmation, so the slow start represents nothing less than sheer incompetence.

Source
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/2JTlKVrrzL0/-Trump-s-bungling-cripples-his-national-security-team-right-out-of-the-gate

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