“By oath, intelligence officials’ first duty is to ‘defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,’ “ Evan McMullin, the former C.I.A. operative and Republican congressional aide, who ran for President last year as an independent, pointed out on Twitter. In the cases of Flynn and the Trump campaign aides who reportedly were intercepted speaking numerous times with Russian intelligence agents, a case can be made that the leaks were driven primarily by alarm about the possible infiltration and subversion of the U.S. political system. In other words, the leakers were motivated by patriotism, not politics. To quote another of McMullin’s tweets: “So, the real scandal isn’t that the President of the United States of America appears to have been co-opted by America’s greatest adversary?”
From a constitutional and moral perspective, the country now faces a momentous question: How far did the Russian penetration of Trump’s campaign go, and what is the real basis of his desire to team up with Putin? From a political perspective, the urgent issue is a more prosaic one: How many Republicans on Capitol Hill will break with the White House and demand a proper independent investigation of the entire Russia/Trump imbroglio, either by a specially formed select committee or, even better, a 9/11-style commission?
John Cassidy: Donald Trump Versus the World – The New Yorker
