In a promo she does for the MSNBC channel on Sirius-XM, Rachel Maddow claims she delivers the news "without fear or favor" -- but she sure provides useful cover to guests if they share her liberal politics.
Such was the case Tuesday night when one of Maddow's guests was former CIA analyst Edward Price, who just quit the agency in a highly public way, accompanied by an op-ed in the Washington Post that laid out the alleged rationale for his departure.
Conspicuously unmentioned during the interview was the fact that Price donated a total of $5,000 last year to Hillary's Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democrat party, an omission difficult to envision with a conservative guest on MSNBC under similar circumstances.
In speaking with Maddow, Price claimed he couldn't imagine a scenario that is actually easy to envision as Trump's opponents refuse to accept that he is president and do everything in their power to destroy him --
MADDOW: Ned, I know that you can't obviously speak to anything that you're not supposed to talk about publicly and I'm not asking you to go into stuff that you shouldn't be able to go into in a public forum, but we have had some sort of weird leaks and some contested leaks concerning the CIA and concerning the way that intelligence is handled by this new administration and there was a disputed report in the Wall Street Journal last week, disputed by the White House ultimately. But what the Wall Street Journal reported, on the basis of anonymous leaks, was that US intelligence officials have basically been withholding sensitive intelligence information from the White House, keeping stuff from the president because they don't trust him, because they're concerned that letting him in on sources and methods, on particularly sensitive stuff might be leaked or compromised to other countries. Obviously it's leaked information, there's no names associated with the stuff, the White House is disputing it. But can I just ask your opinion about how we should view a leak like that and whether that's even, whether that's feasible, whether that's hyperbole, whether that seems like it's something we really should be concerned about.
PRICE: Rachel, I sure hope it's hyperbole. The president of the United States is considered the first customer by the intelligence community. The morning intelligence briefing, the President's Daily Brief, contains the most sensitive information available to the United States government. It's something that I had the great honor of helping to compile when I was at CIA and the president should be privy to everything at our disposal that will help him make policy and make better policy to protect the American people. I cannot imagine a scenario in which intelligence professionals would judge that the commander in chief is not, it is not safe to share a piece of information with the commander in chief. I can't speak to the accuracy of that report, but as I said, I sure hope it's not true.
"Cannot imagine" that scenario? Imagine, if you will, our intelligence agencies heavily populated with appointees and hires from the Obama and Clinton administrations which held power for 16 of the last 24 years, well over half of the last generation. Now imagine, difficult though this is for some people, that Obama and Clinton devotees working in intelligence fully expected to toil once again under a second Clinton administration. This has obviously come to naught. Imagine those same, now-embittered people realizing that one of the ways they can discredit Trump is to claim, anonymously of course to receptive reporters, that he can't be trusted with the nation's most sensitive intelligence. Is all of this beyond imagination -- or all too plausible?
In his Washington Post op-ed, headlined "I Didn't Think I'd Ever Quit the CIA. But Because of Trump, I Quit," Price wrote that "despite working proudly for Republican and Democratic presidents, I reluctantly concluded that I cannot in good faith serve this administration as an intelligence professional."
After detailing his differences with Trump, many extending back to the campaign, Price wrote this --
To be clear, my decision had nothing to do with politics (emphasis added throughout), and I would have been proud to work again under a Republican administration open to intelligence analysis. I served with conviction under President George W. Bush, some of whose policies I also found troubling, and I took part in programs that the Obama administration criticized and ended. As intelligence officials, we're taught to tune out politics. The river separating CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., from Washington might as well be a political moat. But this administration has flipped that dynamic on its head: The politicians are the ones tuning out the intelligence professionals.
Begs the question -- did the five grand that Price forked over to Clinton and the Democrats have anything to do with politics, or did he consider it a pragmatic investment toward potential employment in a Clinton administration?
After Price's op-ed was published, the Washington Post added a "clarification" that the paper (to its credit) placed above the column, not beneath it where so many clarifications and corrections are consigned. This is how it read --
This column should have included a disclosure of donations made by author Edward Price in support of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. In August, Price gave a total of $5,000 to the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party.
It was a disclosure that Maddow should have made, and predictably didn't. Doing so risked implying that what Price did was somehow political and not admirably principled, as both Maddow and Price would prefer you believe.
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