25 days since the National Day of Patriotic Devotion
(Evening Edition)
“Russia has secretly deployed a new cruise missile despite complaints from American officials that it violates a landmark arms control treaty that helped seal the end of the Cold War … The ground-launched cruise missile … is one that … had been tested in violation of a 1987 treaty that bans American and Russian intermediate-range missiles based on land … the Russians now have two battalions of the prohibited cruise missile. One is still located at Russia’s missile test site at Kapustin Yar in the country’s southeast. The other was shifted in December from that test site to an operational base elsewhere in the country.” The New York Times, 14 February 2017
“[A]cting attorney general [Sally Yates] informed the Trump White House late last month that she believed Michael Flynn had misled senior administration officials about the nature of his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and warned that the national security adviser was potentially vulnerable to Russian blackmail … The message … was prompted by concerns that Flynn, when asked about his calls and texts with the Russian diplomat, had told Vice President-elect Mike Pence and others that he had not discussed the Obama administration sanctions on Russia for its interference in the 2016 election. James R. Clapper Jr., who was the director of national intelligence, and John Brennan, the CIA director at the time, shared Yates’s concerns and concurred with her recommendation to inform the Trump White House. They feared that “Flynn had put himself in a compromising position” and thought that Pence had a right to know that he had been misled.” The Washington Post, 14 February 2017
“The head of the Secret Service [Joseph P. Clancy], a retired presidential detail leader who was given the assignment of shoring up the agency in a period of crisis, is leaving his post, a little more than two years after arriving in one of Washington’s toughest jobs.” The Washington Post, 14 February 2017
This Is Drivel 