RedFromMI wrote: ↑Thu Sep 26, 2019 1:55 pm
tech37 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 26, 2019 12:10 pm
a fan wrote: ↑Thu Sep 26, 2019 11:38 am
I'm left shaking my head. Maguire comes across as an honest, non partisan man.
He's just not all that bright.
In what world is the President not a member of our Intel community? He is this man's BOSS,FFS.
Seriously a fan?... who's playing dumb now? Maguire was answering in a technical sense.
And he strikes me as someone who is unwilling to stick his neck out here and override the desires of either DOJ or the White House. I don't think it is fear in the sense that he is a coward about this, given that he is a former Seal, but rather a calculation that doing so in the current corrupt White House he would be effectively "crucified" for doing so.
That may be accurate, but he doesn't strike me as a coward either...my sense is that he's an honorable guy, but one who is very concerned with rules (not a bad thing!) and he was very concerned with running afoul of conflicting rules, so he tried to work through it.
It appears that he understood just how sticky the wicket was, the hedge of thorns he needed to work his way through successfully.
He recognized the inherent issues of a WB blowing the whistle on the President, truly outside of any regular set of circumstances. "unprecedented" and thus running directly into possible executive privilege issues. At the same time, he understood darn well how egregious the conduct was and that it couldn't be ignored, much less the obligation, whether legal, moral or ethical to bring the complaint forward.
Ultimately that effort was successful. But not without an enormous amount of resistance by the WH and DOJ.
If I'd been managing the Dems I'd have quickly embraced his explanation for his own conundrum in such a way that made clear that while his actions may have been honorable and careful, the net result risked an ongoing cover-up of wrongdoing...an issue that perhaps Congress should explicitly fix for going forward, so that there would never be such a question again.
Schiff eventually got there, and steered the others there, but IMO, there was too much attention to whether the DNI had acted incorrectly (allowing the R's to charge that the Dems were calling into question his integrity). I thought that making clear that there's obvious huge conflicts when the deciders of whether to bring the issue to Congress are the subject of the complaint and the AG who is part and parcel of the wrongdoing creates an untenable problem. But that could have been done with more emphasis that such situation wasn't the DNI's fault, but rather it was the President and AG's fault.
Bottomline, however, I thought the DNI walked out with the respect of the Dems, if not their agreement as to his actions, and a bit to the horror of the R's, who for the most part (excluding toady Nunes and a couple of others) appeared to recognize, painfully, that the DNI found the situation to be an egregious abuse of power as well, albeit he wasn't going to say anything so direct. But his support for the integrity of the IG and his support for the WB were unshakable, so the Trumpists really didn't find anything the DNI said to be helpful for their claims of 'witch hunt'.