Not much to add to this. The whole case is laid out as a “Gosh, think how it must have looked to Trump when we all shat on him and endorsed his opponent.” Reasonable enough, if understated.
From the Daily Caller: He concluded: “So, I think there was a significant downside to those of us who became political in that moment. So, if I could have thought of that, would I have ended up in a different place? I don’t know. But it’s something I didn’t think about.”
I’m grateful to this guy for stating the obvious, as the obvious does not constitute a useful fact — only statements on the record are facts where it really counts. This is an admission against interest if you consider it coming from the Intel community currently engaged in the Foggy Coup.
These guys knew exactly what they were doing. The only reason it all went south is because Trump won. Undoubtedly, Langley and Foggy Bottom figured Hillary was a shoo-in. So they guessed wrong and now they have to pay the price. Boo hoo.
It’s of a piece with all their other wrong predictions. The intelligence community got almost everything wrong during the Cold War. They’ve done a pretty lousy job since also. Our humint is weak. Signint and imint are a different matter but that’s a different bunch.
Thanks for this post. The Daily Caller article you linked cites this long interview with Michael Morell, former Deputy Director of the CIA. He was one of the ones who went political and endorsed Hillary. The interview is excellent, and shows him defending the Agency for the way they blew the call on Putin by accepting the Obama/Clinton narrative that said with Peacenik Democrats in power and those crazy belligerent Republicans out of office, that the Russians and everyone else would suddenly love America.
It all shows how Romney was right about the Russians, Obama and Hillary were wrong, and the country is much much better off with Trump, as opposed to Hillary, in the Oval Office.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/11/the-full-transcript-michael-morell-216061?platform=hootsuite
The intelligence agencies largely failed to see the problems in the Soviet Union. The Austrian economists did see them. Under Obama, politics ruled everything and the agencies became more worthless.
There’s a book that chronicles all the CIA errors starting with the post-WWII era and on to the fall of the Wall. It leans heavily on information available after the fall of the Soviet Union. What one concludes from this book is that pretty much EVERY MAJOR ASSESSMENT of the CIA was … wrong. One could almost look at the CIA conclusion and then act exactly the opposite and be right.
Legacy of Ashes?
The same could be said for the State Department, with a handful of shining exceptions.