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US Spies 'Live in Fear' of Trump’s Next Tweet (frantically subscribing to @realDonaldTrump alerts)
Newsweek/The Daily Beast ^ | 03.10.17 12:13 ET | Kim Dozier

Posted on 03/10/2017 1:06:44 PM PST by drewh

INCOMING

U.S. Spies Live in Fear of Trump’s Next Tweet

Washington’s national security professionals are bracing for the president’s next Twitter storm, and frantically subscribing to @realDonaldTrump alerts so they can manage the fallout from his latest rage tweets.

Kimberly Dozier Kimberly Dozier 03.10.17 12:13 ET

As Friday evening draws to a close around Washington, D.C., the city’s tight-knit and secretive national security clan goes to sleep with a new unease. It’s not Syria or Iran or even North Korea they’re most worried about. They’re uncertain just what President Donald Trump may tweet in the wee hours before they wake, and what they’ll have to do to manage the fallout.

“It’s accurate that we don’t always know what’s coming,” one senior U.S. official said with a shrug, as the weekend approached. “We are making sure we are following the president’s tweets because it’s often the first place we hear things.”

In a community that once shunned social media for fear it would damage careers or threaten security clearances, spooks, spies, and special operators are now are signing up for Twitter accounts and setting up @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS alerts so they can find out the inner thinking of their commander in chief, and protect their own bosses from fallout.

“The tweet thing is more immediately affecting the White House staff, and cabinet members who get blindsided every weekend with tweets,” another U.S. official said. The officials interviewed for this story spoke anonymously to discuss the near constant anxiety experienced by senior U.S. national security officials.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer gamely pushed back on the notion that his team was braced for the impact of another weekend tweetstorm, after surviving last weekend’s tsunami when Trump accused President Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower. Spicer’s team took a day to embrace the tweets, before releasing a statement and sending Spicer’s deputy Sarah Sanders into the maw of a feisty Martha Raddatz interview to back the charges, and call for Congress to investigate.

“The president says what he wants, when he wants, and we’ll support him,” Spicer told The Daily Beast Thursday.

But ask military, intelligence, or law enforcement officers charged with defending the nation’s security what they think of Trump’s out-of-the-blue weekend tweets, and you get grimaces, shakes of the head, and even physical cringing. Verbal responses range from “I wish he would just stop,” to “Not helping. Just… not… helping.”

Multiple national security professionals interviewed—both in the administration or in uniform—said they are also concerned over what they perceive as a lack of emotional and intellectual discipline they believe is behind the tweet rage.

“National security professionals value orderly process for decision making,” said Bruce Riedel, director of the Brookings Intelligence Project, and a former CIA officer. “They abhor unpredictable and rash impulses. Twitter temper tantrums undermine process and create wasteful distractions at best and unnecessary wars at worst.”

What Trump tweets is also the kind of information foreign intelligence agencies devote legions of spies to uncover. Now, there’s almost no need. Sign up for Twitter, and any user has a view into what the president is thinking, and feeling about an issue—that which is often hardest to gauge for an intelligence officer.

The new riddles spies ask include: How will Trump’s White House staff justify the latest tweet storm? How will his cabinet react? Will the emotional outrage become policy, or will someone within the walls of power be able to pacify him and redirect the rage?

Others believe Trump’s tweets are so often at odds with what ultimately becomes policy that they’re taking on a certain “cry wolf” quality.

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“On the military side, I believe there’s a certain amount of tone-deafness,” said just-retired Marine Gen. John M. Paxton Jr., speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. “There are enough crises in the world between North Korean nukes… ISIS… that they are trying to monitor that risk… and have options on the table,” he said in answer to a Daily Beast question.

“After so many weekends… where there’s a Twitterstorm of some sort, and then there’s a rolling back, my sense is it will tamp down,” added former Obama Undersecretary for the Navy Janine Davidson at the same event. “Below those turbulent waves, people are just doing their job and waiting for the retraction, on Monday or Tuesday,” she added.

“Increasingly, when I talk to people, they just stopped listening to the noise and tuned that stuff out,” said former Trump transition adviser James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation. “Its strategic impact is starting to taper off,” he added.

Essentially, people are learning that Trump flares with anger, and then—usually—retreats into more coherent policy, such as when the tweet feud with the Mexican president over who would pay for the border wall evolved from a diplomatic incident into allegedly business-like phone discussions between the two men.

“I treat them as rhetoric,” said Carafano, who instead watches the formal announcements out of the White House, or from other members of cabinet. “Trying to literally translate them into policy is stupid.”


TOPICS: Editorial; Government; Politics/Elections; US: District of Columbia
KEYWORDS: espionage; spies; trump; tweet
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To: Ken H

It’s not “Steven Segal”, so I’m thinking maybe Trump is messing with the Deep State’s mind. Right now their all looking for an American dude named “Robert Seagal” in Moscow. Unfortunately for them, he doesn’t exist.


21 posted on 03/10/2017 2:48:26 PM PST by Roger Kaputnik (Just because I'm paranoid doesn't prove that they aren't out to get me.)
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To: A CA Guy

They fear they’ll be first on the list when he gets fed up and starts naming names.


22 posted on 03/10/2017 3:13:18 PM PST by bgill (From the CDC site, "We don't know how people are infected with Ebola")
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To: drewh; All
---should be obvious that after Manning, (a corporal) , Snowden (a contract employee, with a poor record with the CIA and now the Wikileaks material that we really have no "secrets"---and that "security clearance" meant nothing--

--time to start over from the beginning on national security as far as "national security" ia concerned------

23 posted on 03/10/2017 3:23:05 PM PST by rellimpank (--don't believe anything the media or government says about firearms or explosives--)
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To: Ken H

Just made up a name. Funny, but it does sound familiar.


24 posted on 03/10/2017 3:38:17 PM PST by moovova
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To: moovova

A remembrance from the not-so-distant past.

NEWS FLASH!! Russians to order TEN THOUSAND typewriters.

That’s how ya do it. Type it, send it, read it, then EAT IT!
Leaves nothing for the NSA or anyone else, for that matter.


25 posted on 03/10/2017 3:57:01 PM PST by Flintlock (The ballot box STOLEN, our soapbox taken away--the BULLET BOX is left to us.)
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To: Flintlock

“...TEN THOUSAND typewriters.”

I remember that...funny.


26 posted on 03/10/2017 5:23:24 PM PST by moovova
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To: drewh

Maybe they should stop leaking to push their Domestic Political Agenda?


27 posted on 03/10/2017 5:59:04 PM PST by Paladin2 (No spellcheck. It's too much work to undo the auto wrong word substitution on mobile devices.)
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To: drewh
But ask military, intelligence, or law enforcement officers charged with defending the nation’s security what they think of Trump’s out-of-the-blue weekend tweets, and you get grimaces, shakes of the head, and even physical cringing. Verbal responses range from “I wish he would just stop,” to “Not helping. Just… not… helping.”

BS!

The only people who are pooping their pants over Trump's tweets are traitors, Obama thugs, communists, Islamic fascists, villains, and liars.

28 posted on 03/10/2017 6:52:53 PM PST by SkyPilot ("I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." John 14:6)
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To: drewh

...as if Obama never, one single time, said something stupid and damaging to national security. Mhm.

I still can’t get over the fact that Trump is our president. It’s amazing!


29 posted on 03/10/2017 7:47:20 PM PST by exDemMom (Current visual of the hole the US continues to dig itself into: http://www.usdebtclock.org/)
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To: drewh

The Daily Beast? Who the heck reads the Daily Beast? Isn’t that an alt- left website?


30 posted on 03/11/2017 12:13:21 AM PST by HollyB
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