Epstein Secrets

earlier, and HealthCare.gov, a Web site that was undertested and overmatched, was a gift to them. There were other beribboned boxes under the tree: Edward Snowden's revelations about the National Security Agency; the failure to get anything passed on gun control or immigration reform; the unseemly waffling over

are most about are what's being reported on, and that we're not on any given day chasing after fifteen story lines." Then Obama insisted that what Snowden did was "not akin to Watergate or some scandal in which there were coverups involved." The leaks, he said, had "put people at risk" but revealed no

elatively modest executive orders on gun control and some stronger ones on climate change, he has issued the fewest of any modern President, except George H. W. Bush. "Wait, wait, wait," Obama said. "Before everybody starts clapping, that's not how it works. We've got this Constitution, we've got this whole thin

ence community’s unambiguous assessment of Edward Snowden as a betrayer of national secrets rather than a w

their horror of Donald Trump. Much of the left—which had resoundingly and scathingly rejected the intelligence community’s unambiguous assessment of Edward Snowden as a betrayer of national secrets rather than a well-intentioned whistle-blower—now suddenly embraced the intelligence community’s authority in its s

ixon’s H. R. Haldeman and Alexander Haig; Gerald Ford’s Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney; Jimmy Carter’s Hamilton Jordan; Ronald Reagan’s James Baker; George H. W. Bush’s return of James Baker; Bill Clinton’s Leon Panetta, Erskine Bowles, and John Podesta; George W. Bush’s Andrew Card; and Barack Obama’s Rahm Emanuel a

entation of more sophisticated secu- rity procedures, such as the polygraph examination and extensive background checks. In 1995, eleven years before Snowden joined it, the CIA’s inspector general completed a study of the KGB’s use of false defectors to mislead the U.S. government from the end of the Cold

sses of a nation’s potential adversaries. The most impor- tant of these in peacetime is communication intercepts. It was just such state secrets that Edward Snowden took from the NSA in the spring of 2013. Before that breach, America’s paramount advantage in this subterranean competition was its undisputed domina

oscow had been incorporated into reports (which had a distinctive blue stripe to signify their impor- tance) that had been provided to Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Even more shocking, in tracing the path of this disinformation, the inspector general found that the “senior CIA @ officers respo