Give Me Secrecy & Give Me Death: An Interview with Lincoln's Bible

Putin's POTUS is intentionally bungling the pandemic response. What price will the IC pay to preserve confidentiality?

This is the third of a three-part series I’ve written in cooperation with the researcher known as Lincoln’s Bible. In the first, “Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Trump,” we explored Donald John Trump’s relationship to organized crime and his career as a Confidential Informant. The second, “From Trump to tRUmp,” discussed the transfer of ownership of Trump from the stateside mob to Vladimir Putin.

What you are about to read is a Q&A, in which we focus on the questions unanswered by the first two pieces—and I mostly get out of the way and let her speak.

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Greg Olear: A lot of readers have asked some variation of this question, so let’s start here: if the FBI and the CIA and the intelligence community (IC) in general knew about Trump’s past as a Confidential Informant and Russian mob asset, why did they allow him to take office in the first place?

Lincoln’s Bible: This is just a huge question that requires a lot of clarification. So, first, let’s make sure everyone knows who we are. Writers. Not spies. Not persons with a security clearance. Not professional analysts (at least, not in terms of being paid by an intelligence agency to be so). We’re writers.

As for me, I’m also a mother, wife, daughter, niece, sister, aunt, cousin. Somewhere in that relation mix, I have a connection to the “intelligence community.” I put quotes there, because that can be a very loose term. In my case, the connection is a 35+ year career professional in one of what I call the “big 3”: FBI, NSA, CIA.

So, what does that mean—in terms of what I know, personally? Pretty much jack shit. However, I am a little more versed than your average citizen (and learning more every day), and I’ve had some pretty unique interactions, especially over the past four years. I have a flagpole to run things up, as it were. And when I do, in reply, I often get…jack shit.

GO: The first rule of Fight Club is don’t talk about Fight Club.

LB: Ha! Yes, I suppose so. No matter how hard one tries.

Here’s how it works with family: poker faces and distraction. For decades, when I’d try and prod for answers, or any reaction, on an international issue or domestic scandal (writers are annoyingly curious), I’d somehow end up on an errand to the grocery store, or playing Pictionary—only to realize days later that I never got an answer to my question or theory.

So, after all those years, when I suddenly get an eyebrow raise to, “He’s a career money-launderer for organized crime. From the Genovese to the Russian mob…”—that’s a big fucking deal. You can raise your own eyebrow at that statement, but it is a big deal. It just is. And I’ll go as far to say that I’ve not only received raised eyebrows, but some concentrated silence, several laughs, the oh-so-rare “Interesting…,” and with the money-laundering research (including Firtash, Epstein, and Mogilevich), a solid run of “That’s good. What else do you have?”

All of the above is a long way of saying that there’s no way I can speak for the intelligence community, nor would I. But here’s the point: I don’t need to. When you boil it all down, they answer to me. And you. WE are the republic, for which it stands. Remember?

GO: The Trumpists are trying so hard to make us forget.

LB: Put a pin in that. We’ll come back to it.

Moving on to how things work…

When it comes to knowledge about donald, the intelligence community as a whole—and the Department of Justice—does not all have the same level of information about his career as a money-launderer for organized crime, or how that career served him up as property to certain foreign intelligence services. These are big, big agencies with many moving parts.

GO: They are not monoliths, in other words. They are complex organisms.

LB: The idea that the bureaucracies of our intelligence community work like a spy novel is horseshit. It’s mostly nerds at desks. And although intel and Justice nerds are far superior to mobsters, they’re horrendously compartmentalized. Please get this, readers. See them in your mind’s eye. It will help pierce the Jack Bauer fantasy that Greg wrote about earlier.

GO: I know, you didn’t like my 24 piece. You were concerned that it made the whole thing seem unbelievable. But back to the IC and DOJ…who did know about Trump’s activities?

LB: Handfuls of select individuals, across specific agencies, over several decades. Let’s game them out.

First, who would know at the Department of Justice/ FBI?

A: Anyone who used donald as a Confidential Informant. [Note: Not a typo. LB never capitalizes Trump’s first name]. This would include those who had an investigation/case that overlapped with prior information that donald provided and were made privy to his name as a CI (which may or may not be necessary).

Here, it’s important to remind everyone how donald became a CI—because his propaganda trolls have already tried to spin it as his altruism for the rule of law.

donald is a filthy criminal, just like his father. And it isn’t just tax laws he breaks. As early as the 1980s, donald faced indictments for laundering blood money from organized crime syndicates through his development projects and casinos (at the very least). This is a well-reported and exhaustively sourced statement of fact. And there were RICO and organized crime investigations around his business partners—on his projects—in the late 70s. As Greg stated in a prior article, there is no universe in which donald was not used as a CI in these investigations. To think otherwise, you would have to believe the FBI Organized Crime/Criminal Investigative Division to be a bungling gaggle of nincompoops.

GO: Voiceover: The FBI Organized Crime/Criminal Investigative Division is not a bungling gaggle of nincompoops.

LB: So, to get out of the indictment noose, donald ratted on the mobsters who owned him. The evidence of this is that he was never indicted (or, an indictment against him was never unsealed). Considering the largess of the known organized crime bosses that donald worked with/for—Roy Cohn, Tony Salerno, John Cody and Paul Castellano, Nicky Scarfo, Vyacheslav Ivankov, Mogilevich—it’s safe to assume that donald was a top echelon informant.

So, back to your question: Why did they [DOJ/FBI] allow him to become President?

“Allow” is a tricky word. If they “allowed” him to become President, that implies that they could have stopped him. Since I don’t believe any retired or active individual at the DOJ/FBI can stop a Presidential election, I assume that the plethora of folks who ask Greg and me this question (non-stop, BTW) mean, “Why didn’t the DOJ/FBI expose who and what donald really is to the American public before the election?” Or maybe, “Why didn’t they tell donald that if he ran, they would expose him?” In short, what stopped them from stopping him?

Well, what are the rules that these individuals must follow, when it comes to: 1) having knowledge of prior DOJ/FBI investigations into donald’s crimes; and 2) having damning evidence around his associations with bigger criminals?

Answer: SECRECY.

That’s it, basically. For individuals to have that knowledge, it means they have to keep their mouths shut. Or they wouldn’t have the knowledge in the first place.

SECRECY.

GO: To be fair, there are good reasons to maintain secrecy. Protection of sources and methods, to put it as blandly as possible. Even if your IC relation had blinked three times at one of your theories, there might have been unintended consequences. Once a secret is told, it can’t be untold.

LB: Yes, sources and methods and other things we have IC jargon for, which brought us to this moment of peril. We’ll get to the natural arc of secrecy in a minute. First, there’s another, very-uncomfortable-to-talk-about-without-sounding-villainous reason that the Justice Department keeps TE CIs like donald a secret.

Culpability.

The subject of culpability gets Justice and IC people either super defensive or dismissive. But, at this point, I’d argue they’re only hurting themselves by failing to own it. When you get in bed with fucking mobsters and their fronts, your culpability in an informant’s continued criminality is part of the game. (A discussion on whether it would be more effective to “Moneyball” a crime syndicate—putting away all the easily-caught fishes, instead of spreading your legs with them to try and catch the high-ticket players—is for another time).

Here’s a decent write-up by Patrick Radden Keefe on Whitey Bulger, underscoring the perils of culpability:

For John Connolly, Bulger and Flemmi represented a lesser evil: the chief priority for the F.B.I. was to eradicate the Italian Mafia, and, Connolly claimed, his informants were indispensable in that effort. Years later, he described the bargain in terms of return on investment. “We got forty-two stone criminals by giving up two stone criminals,” he says in the biography “Whitey Bulger.” “Show me a businessman who wouldn’t do that.” But, as Connolly and his colleagues were dismantling La Cosa Nostra, Bulger and Flemmi were quietly consolidating control of Boston’s criminal landscape. The F.B.I. never brought cases against them, and when other agencies, like the Massachusetts State Police, tried to target them, the gangsters always seemed to get tipped off. In one terrifying sequence of events that is depicted in the film “Black Mass,” Bulger and his gang were dismayed when World Jai Alai, a sports betting operation, appointed a new C.E.O., Roger Wheeler. Several Bulger cronies were employed by World Jai Alai, and they regularly skimmed money from its huge gambling revenues. But Wheeler wanted to audit the books. In the film, when Whitey is told that Wheeler cannot be persuaded to sell the company, he announces his intentions with a question: “Would his widow sell?”

To execute Wheeler, Bulger dispatched a schlubby assassin named John Martorano. As Wheeler finished a round of golf at his country club, in Tulsa, Martorano approached his car and shot him in the face. The hit was coördinated with the assistance of World Jai Alai’s head of security—H. Paul Rico, Barboza’s former handler, who had retired from the F.B.I. so that he could devote more time to criminality.

After the murder, a junior member of Bulger’s gang, Brian Halloran, approached the F.B.I. in Boston and said that he had information about the execution of Roger Wheeler: it had been ordered by Whitey Bulger. The bureau responded by questioning Halloran’s credibility. Fearing for his life, Halloran insisted that the authorities place him in witness protection. They refused. Instead, John Connolly informed Bulger that Halloran had betrayed him, and Bulger tracked Halloran down at a waterfront bar and shot him to death in the parking lot.

GO: The risks of disclosure are unfathomably high. It’s much safer to keep it all hush-hush.

LB: Up to a point. Then, it becomes navel gazing. SECRECY is not only part of the procedure for securing and running a CI, it’s self-preservation. Especially when that CI is as dangerous a criminal as Bulger. Do you really believe the DOJ/FBI wanted it known that Bulger was “our guy”?

And when one considers that donald launders for Mogilevich, sheltered Ivankov, and mixed it up with Epstein…do you think the investigators and prosecutors who used him are itching to tell us that not only do they know what a filthy criminal donald is, but they used him because of his filth and let him keep laundering blood money on a global scale? Or that donald further exploited the fuck out of their rule of secrecy to promote a fake identity, become a reality TV star, and run for President? No wonder he believes he can get deals like no one else can!

Telling the world that donald is “our guy” is a mirror no one wants.

Then, consider all the highly-weaponized disinformation spewing out of the rightwing propaganda outlets and operatives. If you were one of the few individuals at the DOJ/FBI with knowledge of who and what donald really is, would you have seen a way to expose him and still protect your institution and self? No. Clearly, if we want to believe in the good guys, that’s the answer. It sucks. But we either believe there are good people in these positions of knowledge, or the whole thing is corrupt. I refuse to believe the latter.

For the good guys, SECRECY was the only game to keep the machine working and have any hope of finding a way to “stop him.”

Enter: the Special Counsel investigation, led by “Bobby Three Sticks”—a former DOJ prosecutor and FBI Director who once hunted Mogilevich and the operatives in his global crime empire.

GO: The “three sticks” being the “III” at the end of his full name: Robert Swan Mueller III. Bobby Three Sticks is such a mob name, it just occurs to me. Wonderfully ironic.

LB: I wish I could claim credit for it.

Remember the expressed elation of Comey and other former officials when Mueller was appointed? Remember ours—folks who also knew who and what donald is? And despite what the people who couldn’t be bothered to read the SC report would have you believe, the report delivers the goods. Even the redacted version. And the unredacted report WILL happen.

GO: I remember reading the Mueller Report, and my first thought was, “Well, he can’t run again. This is damning.” Shows how much I know.

LB: No. You, like me, just miscalculated the ruthless effectiveness of the bad guys. They’re pretty good at being bad guys. The investigation into the crimes of the campaign, which in fact uncovered crimes by the campaign and donald himself, was more than enough to “stop him”. Enter: BILL fucking BARR.

GO: The most dangerous man in America.

LB: You didn’t think that the global criminals behind donald were just gonna sit on their hands and let him be exposed—thereby exposing them—did you?

It’s clear to every former prosecutor that Barr is enabling donald’s flagrant abuses of power and war against the rule of law. Stop and think about that. The Attorney General is enabling a corrupt President to wage war against the rule of law. The second he thwarted the Special Counsel investigation and lied under oath (to the Senate), Barr should have been impeached and removed. Instead, the Attorney General is enabling a corrupt President to wage war against the rule of law (yes, it’s worth repeating that).

GO: It is. Barr cockblocked the Mueller Report and stymied the investigations. He’s a traitor of the highest order. It’s impossible to overstate how much damage that deranged fuck has done to our country.

LB: And if you have knowledge of Trump’s CI files, isn’t corruption of this magnitude a “break the glass” moment? What good is all the secrecy around donald’s history as a CI doing for the DOJ now? What is the secrecy actually protecting, if maintaining it means the rule of law itself is being destroyed?

Put a pin in that line of thought too. We’re gonna connect it once we finally talk about donald’s other “CI” file. The Counter-Intelligence one.

Laundering money for Mogilevich (and others) led to donald being owned property of a hostile foreign power(s). There is no realm where the NSA and CIA don’t know this. And since the FBI is in the intelligence game too (a post-9/11 shift), and donald was their guy to begin with, there is no realm where donald doesn’t have a counter-intelligence file a mile long. We’ve covered this in a prior piece.

When dealing with known money launderers for transnational organized crime—especially businessmen who launder for the Mogilevich syndicate—a counter-intelligence file is immediate. And likely, very fat. And if that launderer is also a Confidential Informant? The two CI files overlap completely.

In Russia (and other terror-funding states), the mafia and intelligence services are one and the same. Now, some of our intel folks will say that the mafia is a branch of Russian intelligence—as if there is an operation above the mob that is run by officers who aren’t mobsters. No. Fuck that. Putin was installed by the mafia. He’s their guy. He admits to doing “illegal intelligence” (aka, mob shit), when he was a KGB agent in Dresden. He’s long been connected to Mogilevich (by valid sources), and was likely placed by Mogilevich at the head of the FSB. Mogilevich absolutely helped elevate Putin to President. And then, Putin became a boss. His mafia and his intelligence services are a single operation. No fucking difference.

GO: You say tomato, I say whatever the Russian word for “tomato” is.

LB: помидор.

donald is owned.

GO: A friend of mine asked me over the weekend—via Zoom, of course—why we bother with Russia, when it has a smaller GDP than the state of Texas. And I said, You’re not considering the profits generated by transnational organized crime. That’s a huge number, unknowably vast, and that’s what we’re up against. It’s very, very powerful.

LB: If you’re laundering money for the Russian mafia—for Mogilevich—then you’re the property of the Kremlin. Full stop. I don’t care when it happened, or if Mogilevich is still as powerful as he once was. Once the Kremlin owns you, they own you for life. Even if our guys are running you, too. Even if our guys ran you first. You belong to the Kremlin. No matter how small your balls are, Putin has them in his pocket. And there’s no way that you don’t know he owns you. No fucking way. If Helsinki wasn’t enough to demonstrate this truth, then just stop reading.

What’s more? There’s no way our intelligence agencies don’t know this about donald. There is no universe in which they don’t have intercepts, evidence collected by human intelligence, shared intel from our allies, and probably even donald’s own recordings and paper (just like Mr. Sater).

Still shaking your head? Let’s pose it as inquiry, to break through that dissonance:

Do you really think our intelligence agencies are so inept that they wouldn’t be monitoring a known money launderer for Mogilevich and other Kremlin-connected criminals?

Do you actually think that our intelligence agencies are such bungling fools, that they would not use a man who was already a TE Confidential Informant and swimming in social circles with the KGB and Mossad spy Robert Maxwell? Think they wouldn’t use him? That he wouldn’t be top of the list? Really?

Do you really believe that the placement of another Confidential Informant, Felix Sater, in Trump Tower (to launder money, no less, through BayRock) was random? Just a coinky-dink? Just happens like that, who knew?

Do you think, for one fucking second, that our allies—who are not constrained against signal collections of U.S. citizens—were not collecting intelligence on the world’s most dangerous criminals known to be in business with donald? Do you think they didn’t pick up donald’s name, or even his voice, on any of donald’s “deals?”

Can a famous reality TV personality and “businessman” with a global brand launder money for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and NOT be tracked by FiveEye intelligence services? What about our ally, Israel? No collection there? No? They are so terrible at spying that they didn’t know about donald laundering for Mogilevich and the Iranians (among others)?

Do you believe that before donald’s Presidency, none of our allies shared this intelligence with us?

Get real. I could ask ten more questions just like this. And for those former CIA/NSA folks with Twitter accounts, who like to jump on my timeline and pooh-pooh me: you can’t have it both ways. You can’t rightfully promote the skill and scope of your agencies and play dumb about donald. You might not have been on a desk that was aware of his fat fucking file, but you can’t stare at all that’s in the public domain and pretend he wouldn’t have been a tool in your agency’s box. You can’t play smart and dumb. Choose.

Back to the interview question: Why did they [our intelligence agencies] allow him to become President?

Well, unfortunately, the answer is the same. SECRECY.

And at this point, they’re choosing their secrecy over our lives. Literally.

GO: What are the risks involved with a senior law enforcement individual coming forward?

LB: To them personally, I imagine prison is the big risk. But I’ll leave that to lawyers/prosecutors to weigh in.

I want to point out again that there have been some attempts to inform us of who and what donald is, from some high-profile individuals. On donald’s organized crime file, both Comey and McCabe dropped some serious hints. The “Sammy The Bull” reference by Comey was pretty damning to those of us who know both the specific history between donald and Sammy, and that Mueller is the one who flipped Sammy against Gotti. Still, there weren’t many of us who could interpret what Comey was implying. Most of the press just thought it was cute.

McCabe wrote that he began his career as a street agent, investigating Russian organized crime. He dropped that gem after being fired—in the opening sentence of his letter to the press. It wasn’t cute. It was a shot across the bow, and nearly everyone missed it.

And then there’s this shot, from the former Company Director:

John O. Brennan @JohnBrennan

When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you. https://t.co/uKppoDbduj

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI - A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!

There’s nothing “implied” in that 2018 tweet. He outright says that he knows horrible shit that the public does not. That means there’s a big, fat file. Still…

It’s not enough. It’s not. donald is the President. The scope and weight of that position requires an exposure of equal scope and weight. The “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” tactic is flaccid.

If those who can expose donald fail to do so, the risks involved to our lives, our republic, and their own institutions are catastrophic. There is no surviving this secret.

Maybe before the pandemic, we could have gotten past this Presidency, learned all the horrible truths, and been angry about what our intelligence community cost us by keeping us in the dark. But not now. Not after mass death.

Because it will come out. That’s just the physics of secrecy. It’s part of the arc.

The world will know, without any doubt, who and what donald was before he became President. And they’ll be raging with that question: “Why he wasn’t stopped?”

Americans will forever blame the institutions who chose to protect themselves and their precious secrecy over both the rule of law and the lives of tens of thousands of innocent civilians.

GO: Robert Mueller knew better than anyone what Trump was. When Trump found out that Mueller was the SC, he said, “I’m fucked.” We’ve already discussed that the release of the report was cockblocked by Bill Barr, but why was Mueller so uninspiring and lame during his hearing? Like, why can’t he just SAY that Barr fucked him?

LB: Other than what I already outlined in my lengthy diatribe above? I don’t know. I would have exposed Barr. I think others would have too. Maybe Mueller is too much of a Boy Scout?

I can’t disparage the man. I do truly admire and appreciate him. And the work of the Special Counsel was incredible—if thwarted. I believe it will still have a future impact, that benefits us. I may be alone on that island, though.

GO: I agree about the Report and the work—and that it will have a future impact. But given all of that labor, and what was at stake, the public interface was such a disappointment. Mueller was the one guy who could have commented on this, who was tasked with exposing Trump’s crimes. A few good sound bytes is all we needed. Instead, he chose to give an American public that doesn’t have the attention span to watch full episodes of bad TV shows (fuck Quibi) a freakin’ book report. But I digress…

What would “release the files” actually look like? I envision a press conference attended by a gaggle of senior people, with a damning prepared statement, and receipts to prove it.

LB: That’s what I envision too. It’s too late for the press to be trusted with a confidential dump. I don’t mean because there isn’t a trustworthy journalist. There certainly are many. But that it’s too late to go to them. donald was given too much time to fuck with both the legitimacy of the press and the news cycle itself. The Presidency gave him way too much power to damage the Fourth Estate. So, I can’t see anything short of a live press conference with receipts (the kind of evidence in the CI files enough to burst any bubble, even a MAGA’s).

This was done once in Russia, by the organized crime division within the FSB. But by the time the whistleblowers got around to holding a press conference, the agency—and the larger Russian state—had been fully taken over by the mafia (with Putin at the helm). Now, we have the privilege of hindsight to see that that press conference was too late.

Once the corruption is complete, there’s no getting the rule of law back. I’ve been tweeting “remember Litvinenko” for three years, for this very reason. Don’t wait until it’s too late. donald must be exposed and removed immediately.

GO: In this regard, Obama failed miserably, in my view. He allowed McConnell to steal the Merrick Garland SCOTUS seat, and he didn’t sound the alarm when he knew about Russian interference—I think that was in June or July 2016. Even after Trump won the election, Obama had a few months where he could have named a Special Counsel but did not do so. And of course he’s been AWOL for the last three years. What do you make of him?

LB: Other than liking him as a President, I don’t consider my political opinions of much value, no matter how many of them I may have. The machinations of Washington are not my wheelhouse.

BUT, as a President who was battling transnational organized crime, Obama was much more successful than most people realize. A jaunt through the Justice and Treasury Departments archives will show you that. On his response to Russian interference in the election? I think he was trapped in a very unusual spot, where there was no prior history to look at for guidance. A fucking Russian mafia-owned, Kremlin puppet was running for President—and the entire Republican party was down with it. What the ass fuck?

But here’s where I think he failed—and where all of our politicians fail us, and our intelligence chiefs fail us. Regularly.

We’re not your fucking children. We’re your boss.

Now, I had a bunch of “motherfuckers” in my first-response rant to your questions. I was going to leave them in. But then I saw that drunken judge on Fox News do her own version of a “YOU WORK FOR US” rant, and remembered I wasn’t a drunken judge.

I’m not sure how to best get the following across—how to pierce the navel gazing and reach the would-be hero whistleblowers that we’ve been lamenting. I know they’re out there. I know of at least two who sometimes catch what I write. So, I’m just going to beg.

Please. We need you to step outside the procedures you’re clinging to. We need you to stop collapsing your methods with love for your agencies. We need you to ask yourself why you love those agencies. Is it for their tactic of secrecy, or because they serve a higher purpose? Is it for yourselves, or for us?

We deserve the truth about matters of our national security—no matter how hard it is to stomach. No matter how bad it makes you look. Because it’s not about you.

I know you know this. I know you’re selfless in your duty. I just have to say it. Because…

YOU ALSO KNOW WHO AND WHAT HE IS. This asshole works for the Kremlin. And if we’re going to keep pretending that this Kremlin-controlled fool is a legitimate President, can we please remember who the President works for? Us (motherfuckers)!

If a career mob money-launderer is running for President, tell us. And if you tried, but a corporate-owned press fucks up their role because they’re foaming for ratings, subscriptions, and ad buys over the sanctity of our republic? Then tell us that too.

Again, intel chiefs can’t play smart and dumb. Any entry-level analyst could see in 2015-2016 that the press was failing to properly cover donald’s mafia history—which could be found in their own damn archives. The press didn’t vet him. At all. And our intel chiefs knew it at the time.

So, we end up at those two thoughts that I asked your readers to pin. They both come down to this: the SECRECY is now the thing that endangers us all. It has evolved from the ultimate tool for protecting our republic to the singular vehicle of our destruction.

GO: That is the key line in this entire interview, so let me restate it: Secrecy has evolved from the ultimate tool for protecting our republic to the singular vehicle of our destruction.

LB: Just think about why our Justice Department and intelligence agencies use it. What is the secrecy employed to do?

Keep us safe.

Safe from what? I’m talking beyond protecting “sources and methods” and “ongoing investigations.” Go macro. What’s the big, over-arching thing—the ultimate reason why we even have these agencies? To protect our citizens and the republic itself, right? But…protect from what? 

From falling into the hands of a hostile foreign power, that seeks our annihilation?

YEP. That’s it.

Is there anything bigger?

NOPE. Nothing’s bigger than that. Nothing’s bigger than our own demise. Except, maybe…

GO: Mass death?

LB: Tens of thousands of innocent civilian lives—taken by the president’s intentional, failed response to a pandemic. Dead grandmothers, nurses, doctors, first responders, fathers, sons, daughters, wives…

Is that big enough? Is there anyone in intelligence that’s willing to argue anything bigger than those two things: our republic and our very lives?

Come on, now’s your chance. Come and get some. If I didn’t reach you with the earnest begging, maybe I can get to you by begging for a fight.

Come and argue for the survival of your institutions over those two things because, rest assured, they’re at odds. You can no longer say that we need your secrecy to survive, when your institutions are gonna die right along with the republic.

If the pandemic doesn’t get you first.

No? No argument, now? Nothing?

I hope so.

You see, the secrecy failed us the second Trump got into office. Clinging to it now will only ensure the very thing it was meant to protect us against: the destruction of our republic and the wholesale slaughter of innocent Americans.

This is the full arc of secrecy. No matter how much a secret protects in the beginning, in the end, it will only destroy.

Break the secret, or the secret breaks you.

GO: One of my readers had a comment on this that we both loved: “If Mueller and his ilk are more boy scout than cowboy, ‘boy scout’ just becomes a euphemism for a ‘coward.’ If the intelligence community aspires to its moniker, it ought to be able to figure out a way to reveal Trump’s mobster background without blowing up the system.”

LB: If the Justice department, NSA, CIA still can’t fathom that their collective job is to stop both mobsters and agents of hostile foreign powers from committing crimes against the republic and killing innocent civilians on American soil (in their own goddamn homes, no less), we are lost.

The defense up to now has been that the DOJ and intelligence communities don’t play politics. Well, this isn’t playing politics. It’s not about holding a President accountable. It’s mobsters and spies. The two things those agencies were created and charged to investigate and root out. It’s fully in their wheelhouse. In fact, there is no other wheelhouse. No other institutions were created to find and stop mobsters and spies. Not even the press.

Trump must be exposed.

Release his CI files.

Both of them.

Now.

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Photo credit: Lorie Shaull, “Spies in DC.”