Rogue Spooks by Dick Morris

Author:Dick Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2017-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

Seven

And the Leaks Kept Coming . . .

The rogue spooks were far from finished. They had now perfected a domestic American application of the techniques that had proven so effective abroad—anonymous leaks, rumors, disinformation, unconfirmed reports, fake news, phony scandals, ambushes, and then more leaks to show how everybody was turning on the president.

Now it was time for the major leagues: Try it out on the president himself. Their goal: To turn the honeymoon every president gets into a divorce—or at least a separation—for Trump.

Just as Trump was taking office, anonymous sources from within either the intelligence community or the Obama White House leaked a series of stories based on actual transcripts of personal conversations President Trump had with foreign leaders. The purpose of the leak was to further the image of a president who was out of control and out of his league.

After a phone call with the president of Mexico, the Associated Press reported that the president had told his Mexican counterpart: “You have a bunch of bad hombres down there. You aren’t doing enough to stop them. I think your military is scared. Our military isn’t, so I just might send them down to take care of it.”1

Where did AP get the story? It reported that “a person with access to the official transcript of the phone call provided an excerpt to the AP. The person gave it on condition of anonymity because the administration did not make the details of the call public.”2

The media also obtained the transcript of another Trump phone call—this one with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Trump was annoyed by a deal the Obama administration had made to admit 2,500 people from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and Somalia, nations whose refugees Trump was seeking to ban from entry into the United States. On the phone, Trump railed against Obama’s concession, calling it “the worst deal ever” and accusing Australia of seeking to export “the ‘next Boston bombers.’ ”3

How did the texts of these calls end up in the media? Again, through rogue spooks—Obama holdovers—who wanted to embarrass the president.

Bloomberg News explained how texts of presidential contacts with foreign leaders could provide important political information to Trump’s critics: “The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations—primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.”4

The drip-drip-drip of negative stories about Trump, planted in the media by unidentified sources, took its toll. As Trump’s inauguration approached, the New York Times gloated: “Mr. Trump will take office on Friday with less popular support than any new president in modern times, according to an array of surveys, a sign that he has failed to rally Americans behind him, beyond the base that helped him win in November.

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