When did the CIA—an agency that makes the DMV look like a model of efficiency—lose its reputation for secrecy and stop its agents from selling state secrets? When did it cease to leak data—and prevent work-related deaths—so its headquarters would not become the Deepwater Horizon of the federal government? How did an agency too big to fail fail to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War? Why is this institutional relic, with its classified budgets and its record of incompetence, with its disastrous landing at the Bay of Pigs and its botched attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, with its violations of its own charter and its acts of domestic surveillance, with its slam-dunk assertions about Iraqi WMDs and its accusations that the famine state of North Korea hacked the foremost technology from the nation of Japan: When did the CIA become a symbol of constitutionality and the conscience of America?
Is the Left so eager to impeach President Trump that it now reveres an agency it once reviled? Is context the latest casualty in a war not of bullets but bullet points, in which the president must publicly concede what he knows—and his predecessors knew—privately: that Russia spies on the United States, as we do on Russia, and a press conference with Vladimir Putin is neither the time nor the place to confess as much?
Putin is essentially a fascist. He has had his opponents imprisoned, murdered, or exiled. He has had journalists killed, while he has killed any semblance of justice.
Or, as the secretary of state responsible for our infamous “reset” with Russia might say, regarding these facts about Putin: What difference at this point does it make?
The difference seems to be that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.