Twitter Questions 6.0

I know MD passed a tax requirement for any presidential run. And I know why there wasn’t a law before, but why don’t they have to pass background checks for top secret clearances? Do you think they should?

The initial vetting process is *supposed* to be undertaken by the electorate, but this election showed that that’s not exactly a foolproof idea. I do believe any prospective candidate for POTUS should be required to prove that they’re able to obtain, at minimum, a top secret clearance, but the idea is complicated. The primary criticism to this is that career professionals would be able to effectively decide who was allowed to run for President — a *literal* ‘Deep State’

I think there are ways around this. For the most part, the Intelligence Community (IC) is apolitical and I believe they would do this work honestly, but there would have to be oversight. If it were up to me, there would be a bipartisan committee of 4-6 career pros who were vetted and nominated for this position. Before the respective Conventions, the top 2-3 candidates for each party would submit their information to be vetted by these pros. The public should get no information other than PASS/FAIL and it would go from there. It’s completely asinine to me that we *don’t* require the person who has access to *all* of our secrets to be vetted by anyone but voters.

What happens after Trump is ousted and knows all of our top secrets? What stops him from capitalizing on that?

Short answer? Nothing.

Long answer? He’ll probably be in prison, but on the off-chance that he isn’t, this is what scares the crap out of me. You all know I’m a big supporter of the media, and journalism in general, but they won’t be able to resist the ratings. I honestly have nightmares of Trump sitting on CNN and/or Fox News telling the world about Air Force One’s tremendous bigly yuge capabilities, revealing clandestine operations, etc. This doesn’t even take into consideration the things he would tell our rivals to make a few bucks in his business endeavors.

30 bogus security clearances? How do we prevent these putz from revealing/selling USG vulnerabilities after Trump’s out of office?

This ties in with the last question, and it scares the crap out of me too, but not *as* bad as POTUS. Everyone pushed through for a bogus clearance by Kline is bound by the same rules as everyone else who has a TS clearance. They’ll spend a long, long time in jail if they’re caught leaking secrets, particularly secrets with National Security ramifications. POTUS has unilateral declassification authority, so it’s way more complicated in Trump’s case.

What’s the chronology and timeline of the steps for the end-game?

This answer is 100% speculation, but I see it playing out one of three ways:

• Mueller indicts Jr. or Ivanka. Trump goes nuts and has him fired. House immediately drafts articles of impeachment and votes to impeach. Public Senate whip-count makes clear the votes are there for conviction. Trump resigns.
• Mueller releases final report (as it relates to Trump) somewhere around April-May. I believe his work will continue beyond that. He has a lot of crime to unpack. Final report is incredibly damaging, House immediately drafts articles of impeachment and votes to impeach. Public Senate whip-counts make clear the votes are there for conviction. Trump resigns.
• In a rare moment of cognizance, Trump realizes there’s no way out of this. Uses “medical emergency” as reason to resign.

I know many people are skeptical that the Senate will vote to convict, but I’m not. They’re going to be in self-preservation mode big time, and they’re already starting to publicly break with Trump and his agenda. You saw that this week with the Syria/Afghanistan rebuke, and last week with more Senators voting for the Democrats plan than Trump’s. The optics for them are awful, and he isn’t doing them any favors politically. I firmly believe they’ll dump him at the first opportunity that presents itself, as long as it gives them a reasonable ‘out’ with their constituents. Treason is a pretty reasonable out. So is obstruction of Justice.

EDIT: Not going to publish a Daily News Dump today, since not a *whole* lot happened. I’ll combine today’s news with tomorrow’s and have one up tomorrow evening.