Trump is quite unlike George W. Bush, another president not entirely shipshape upstairs; Bush understood his limitations.  To his credit, he took care to compensate for them, recruiting capable people to work in his administration, and ceding power to them whenever he could.  Especially at first, he even let a lesser Nixonian figure, Dick Cheney, a respectable enough villain in his own right, operate as if he were a co-president. Trump is something else altogether.  He thinks that he is the smartest person not just in the room but on the planet.  It is therefore no surprise that even minimally competent people don’t last long under his thumb.  More

In late 2017, actor Morgan Freeman announced in a video created by a who’s who of senior U.S. Intelligence officials that Russia had attacked the United States and that ‘we’ were at war. Freeman, whose net worth is said to be about a quarter-billion dollars, claimed that ex-Soviet ‘authoritarian’ Vladimir Putin, bitter about the dissolution of ‘his’ country, was behind the attack. The terms ‘attack’ and ‘war’ were not qualified as metaphors. More

I have joined in a lawsuit with four former federal employees to end the government’s censorship of our writings on national security issues.  The current publications review system of our military and intelligence agencies is dysfunctional, inhibiting our ability to participate in national security debates.  The government has a legitimate interest in protecting bona fide secrets, but the review system is opaque, exceeding legitimate national security boundaries and compromising free speech.    More