{"id":41369,"date":"2020-08-06T02:55:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-05T23:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/spying-charges-against-trump-couldnt-be-more-absurd\/"},"modified":"2020-08-06T02:55:00","modified_gmt":"2020-08-05T23:55:00","slug":"spying-charges-against-trump-couldnt-be-more-absurd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/spying-charges-against-trump-couldnt-be-more-absurd\/","title":{"rendered":"#\u2018Spying\u2019 charges against Trump couldn\u2019t be more absurd"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#\u2018Spying\u2019 charges against Trump couldn\u2019t be more absurd<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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August 5, 2020 |<\/span> 7:55pm <\/p>\n

\n President Trump\u2019s rise drove a subset of American conservatives to sheer derangement. Symptoms have included unaccountable reversals of political positions and a burning desire to defeat every single sitting GOP officeholder.<\/p>\n

Now we can add new symptoms to the list: paranoia about state persecution. Benjamin Wittes recently succumbed to this malady. He \u00adbizarrely claims that Team Trump spied on him by \u2026\u2002circulating his tweets inside government.<\/p>\n

Wittes, the editor of a national-security blog popular with elites, is mostly famous for repeatedly predicting Trump\u2019s downfall over the past three years. \u201cBoom!\u201d he\u2019d tweet at every leak and pseudo-revelation from the Mueller probe, often with an image of a cannon going off, as if to suggest that this bombshell would finally take down Trump; none did.<\/p>\n

The \u201ccollusion\u201d scandal having failed to achieve Wittes\u2019 aim, the consummate Washingtonian \u00adinvented his own.<\/p>\n

Last week, Washington Post \u00adintelligence correspondent Shane Harris published a report about the big, nasty Trump regime persecuting Wittes. The blue-check Twitter<\/a>ati couldn\u2019t resist it. It seemed to confirm all their fantasies about Trump killing democracy in America \u2014 not to mention their own delusion that their tweets make them the equivalent of anti-Nazi heroes and whistleblowers like Jan Karski or Raoul Wallenberg.<\/p>\n

What had the evil Trumpian \u00adregime done? The Department of Homeland Security\u2019s Office of \u00adIntelligence and Analysis had disseminated three open-source-intelligence reports that summarized tweets written by Wittes and New York Times reporter Mike Baker. The internal communiques also mentioned the publication of leaked DHS documents by Wittes (warning officers against leaking) and Baker (suggesting that DHS didn\u2019t have a full grasp of the insurrection in Portland). That\u2019s it.<\/p>\n

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf quickly directed the discontinuation of \u201cinformation involving members of the press,\u201d according to Harris\u2019 own reporting. The department\u2019s intel chief was reassigned. (Harris, by the way, cohosts a podcast with Wittes, a glaring conflict of interest that app<\/a>arently didn\u2019t rankle his editors at The Washington Post.)<\/p>\n

The DHS action didn\u2019t satisfy Harris\u2019 friend Wittes, who favorably quoted a critic excoriating DHS\u2019s purported \u201cunlawful surveillance.\u201d This was, Wittes said, nothing less than intelligence \u201ccollection .\u2009.\u2009. based on purely First Amendment-protected activity.\u201d<\/p>\n

This week, Wittes followed up with a lengthy blog in which he fleshed out his belief that his mere inclusion in the open-source-intelligence reports meant he was being surveilled by the feds.<\/p>\n

That is a leap that would make Evel Knievel proud.<\/p>\n

At the risk of stating what would otherwise be obvious in non-deranged times: Public officials internally circulate public statements and writings from writers, scholars and intellectuals. They do it all the time. Such readily foreseeable and, indeed, desirable, actions don\u2019t in any way \u201cchill\u201d journalism or amount to, in Wittes\u2019 terms, a nefarious \u201cmonitoring\u201d of \u201cFirst Amendment-protected activity.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the contrary, it\u2019s an obvious goal of reporters and opinion columnists to do precisely that: to have their work cross the desks of government officials and to meaningfully impact the government debates. When public officials pay close attention to what the media say \u2014 that\u2019s a good thing.<\/p>\n

Does anyone even remember Hillary Clinton\u2019s divulged e-mails that showed her circulating and \u00adeffusively praising the work of Max Blumenthal \u2014 the son of longtime Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal and a virulently anti-Israel author \u2014 as \u201csmart,\u201d \u201cso good\u201d and \u201cpowerful and touching?\u201d<\/p>\n

Is it Wittes\u2019 serious contention that Team Obama eerily \u201csurveilled\u201d Max Blumenthal because the then-secretary of state fawned over his pro-Hamas drivel in electronic correspondence?<\/p>\n

In the Trump era, ideologically driven civil libertarians have an incentive to play the roles of victim and martyr as never before. When our elites universally accept that the president is a fascist, that his administration is committed to quashing out all civil liberties, then it is cheap political fare to \u201cmartyr\u201d oneself for the adoring leftist masses.<\/p>\n

By any measure, we are living in intellectually unserious times. One symptom of our doldrums, personified by Benjamin Wittes, is vainglorious play-acting and attention-seeking. The US Department Homeland Security is no Gestapo, and Wittes is no Karski.<\/p>\n

Josh Hammer is opinion editor at News<\/a>week. Twitter: @Josh_Hammer<\/em>\n <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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