7/17/2018

CIA/INTELLIGENCE/RUSSIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “John O. Brennan spent a career in the Central Intelligence Agency defending the United States against its enemies. For decades, that meant terrorists, rogue regimes or the Russians. For him now, it means the president of the United States. When Mr. Brennan accused President Trump of treason following Monday’s [7-17-18] meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, it opened a floodgate. The New York Daily News used the banner headline ‘OPEN TREASON’ on its cover. Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel called it treason on their late-night shows. In a presidency without precedent, mark another moment for the history books. While the T-word has been thrown around on the fringes of the political debate about other presidents or politicians from time to time, never in the modern era has it become part of the national conversation in such a prominent way. Never in anyone’s lifetime has a president engendered such a wave of discussion about whether his real loyalty was to a foreign power over his own country. To the president’s defenders, this all sounds like a sign of what they often call Trump Derangement Syndrome. That he drives his critics to such extremes, they argue, says more about them than it does about Mr. Trump. But the president has had fewer such defenders in the last 24 hours, with prominent Republicans and even some of Mr. Trump’s traditional allies lambasting his performance and distancing themselves from him.”

-Peter Baker, “Critics of Trump Have a New Word in Their Vocabulary: Treason,” The New York Times online, July 17, 2018