"The system isn’t designed to deal when a hazard may come from the president himself. T here is an important principle at stake: Congress is supposed to have oversight, through confidential hearings. of complaints like this. The #1 task of America’s intelligence & law-enforcement communities is to identify & deal with threats to national security. There’s a solid case to be made that the plain language of the law is being ignored! It’s worth making two observations: first, that the intelligence community’s watchdog, not some disgruntled denizen of the “deep state,” but a man appointed by Trump, was alarmed enough that he thought it necessary to inform Congress. The problem, is that Mr. Trump’s behavior has repeatedly revealed “the extent to which our constitutional system assumes and relies on a president with a modicum of national fidelity, and decent judgment and reasonableness.”
At www.nytimes.com
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