WSJ On Intelligence Oversight

Or more accurately, the lack thereof in the US:

… the actual crisis: the Justice Department’s unprecedented contempt for duly elected representatives, and the lasting harm it is doing to law enforcement and to the department’s relationship with Congress.

We are told that Mr. Trump cannot be allowed to have any say over the Justice Department’s actions, since this might make him privy to sensitive details about an investigation into himself. We are also told that Congress—a separate branch of government, a primary duty of which is oversight—cannot be allowed to access Justice Department material. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes can’t be trusted to view classified information—something every intelligence chairman has done—since he might blow a source or method, or tip off the president…

The Constitution set up Congress to act as a check on the executive branch—and it’s got more than enough cause to do some checking here. Yet the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation have spent a year disrespecting Congress—flouting subpoenas, ignoring requests, hiding witnesses, blacking out information, and leaking accusations.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has not been allowed to question a single current or former Justice or FBI official involved in this affair. Not one. He’s also more than a year into his demand for the transcript of former national security adviser Mike Flynn’s infamous call with the Russian ambassador, as well as reports from the FBI agents who interviewed Mr. Flynn. And still nothing.

Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, is being stonewalled on at least three inquiries. The House Judiciary and Oversight committee chairmen required a full-blown summit in April with Justice Department officials to get movement on their own subpoena. The FBI continues to block a fuller release of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia report…

Mr. Grassley this week excoriated the department for its routine practice of redacting key information, and for similarly refusing to provide a “privilege log” that details the legal basis for withholding information… A separate text refers to an investigation that the White House is “running,” but conveniently blacks out which one. The FBI won’t answer Mr. Johnson’s questions about who is doing the redacting.

For now, I assume the stonewalling is as much Trump timing the release of everything to have it all hit at the most opportune time, as it is the Cabal protecting itself.

But lack of oversight and no checks and balances are the real problem. At some point it was decided that intelligence work was too sensitive to be shared with Congress. Once that decision was made, the checks and balances which kept each branch of government separate, and unable to be corrupted without being called to account by another branch, evaporated. Congress had no ability to even know what the Executive branch was doing, let alone critique it. That is very, very dangerous, as we are finding out.

You essentially had one agency, or class of agencies, in the government which answered to nobody. When a foreign entity decided to infiltrate and corrupt the US Government, they had one all powerful entity they needed to corrupt, and from there the rest of the government would be powerless to resist.

Trump is a smart guy. After the Storm there is going to have to be a huge amount of reorganization, and oversight will be among the most important areas that is going to need to be addressed. Unless we restore checks and balances to the government, any fix which restores freedom is only going to be temporary, until the next Cabal sets its sights on our nation.

If we have no freedom, and our government falls to foreign powers at the drop of a hat, all the ability to keep intelligence material secret will be of no use to anybody – except the foreign entities which take over our government.

Tell others about r/K Theory, because true freedom isn’t easy