Mattis, Pompeo, Kelly, Bolton, Coats: Resign Now

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump (Wikimedia Commons)

by Diana Ohlbaum

Every elected and appointed U.S. official, other than the president, must take the following oath:

I, ____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

It is no longer possible for any senior official in the Trump administration to uphold that obligation.

There is no question that Russia attacked the most sacred institution of American democracy: the system of free and fair elections. In 2017 the intelligence community issued, with “high confidence,” its unified assessment that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election” in order “to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.” Such activities “demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.”

Earlier this month the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Republican Senator Richard Burr, affirmed that the intelligence community’s findings were “accurate and on point” and that “Russian cyber operations were more extensive than the hack of the Democratic National Committee and continued well through the 2016 election.”

On July 13, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers, acting in their official capacity, for engaging in “large-scale cyber operations to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

In many ways, this attack is far more serious than the type of military aggression the United States has spent trillions of dollars over the past 70 years to deter and repel. Rather than seizing U.S. territory, Russia has stolen the integrity of the constitutional system that our soldiers and diplomats risk their lives to protect.

Yet President Trump has not condemned the ongoing assault or punished the man who directed it. Instead, he held a friendly meeting with Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin, announcing afterwards that he believes Putin’s denials over the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies. Trump not only declined to confront Putin over Russia’s cyber invasion of America, but blamed the special counsel, not Russian meddling, for keeping the two countries apart.

There is nothing wrong with holding talks with an adversary. There is nothing wrong with critically assessing the judgments of U.S. intelligence agencies. And there is nothing wrong with acknowledging that the United States, too, has a long history of secretly interfering in democratic elections (see: Chile, Congo, Guatemala, Iran).

Where Trump crosses the line is in failing to perform his sworn duty to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States. By acquiescing to the Russian attack—whether or not he and his campaign actually had a hand in its direction and execution—he is now, in effect, the agent of a foreign power.

Americans of all political persuasions have hoped or assumed that senior national security officials would keep the president from acting on his worst instincts, as former Secretary of State Tillerson and former National Security Advisor McMaster did when Trump proposed invading Venezuela. But none of them was in the room with Trump and Putin.

Since the secretary of defense, secretary of state, White House chief of staff, national security advisor, and director of national intelligence have been unwilling or unable to convince President Trump to faithfully defend the interests of the United States, they are in violation of their own oaths. It is time for them all to resign.

Diana Ohlbaum

Diana Ohlbaum is senior strategist and legislative director for foreign policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and chairs the board of the Center for International Policy. She previously served for nearly 20 years as a senior professional staff member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Dr. Ohlbaum holds a Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. in Russian studies from Amherst College. Follow her on Twitter: @dohlbaum

SHOW 8 COMMENTS

8 Comments

  1. “In 2017 the intelligence community issued, with “high confidence,” its unified assessment that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election”…”

    The author links to the Intelligence assessment released in January 2017. As anyone can read for themselves: it is not a “unified assessment”, it represents the views of a few hand-picked analysts from just three agencies; the “high confidence” which these analysts refer is qualified in Annex B (p 13) “High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty, such judgments might be wrong.”

    The constant repetition that the Intelligence community as a whole established a “fact” of Russian meddling is false information, yet it has become “common wisdom”. Has the author actually read this document?

  2. This article is a stupendously partisan document filled with falsehoods.

    “In 2017 the intelligence community issued, with “high confidence,” its unified assessment”….

    That statement is untrue. The assessment was a product of hand-picked analysts chosen by Clapper from only 3 of the 17 member organizations of the US intelligence community.

    It was in no way, shape or form a “unified” assessment.

    …”Republican Senator Richard Burr, affirmed that the intelligence community’s findings”…

    Your prejudices are showing. The “assessment” has now become a “finding” by some mysterious sleight-of-hand, one that you carried out hoping that nobody would notice.

    And we are meant to accept that Burr agreement with the allegations contained within that assessment is in some way an “affirmation”? Really?

    I am seeing an edifice created by piling affirmation upon assessment without, you know, much effort to bind that together with anything so tawdry as “evidence”.

    …”On July 13, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers,”….

    Again, an indictment is not “evidence”. It is a statement of allegations put forward by the prosecutor, nothing more and no less.

    Honestly, this article is an object lesson in everything that is wrong with politics in America.

    The author believes these allegations to be true, which is her right.
    Just as it is my right to believe that those allegations are unlikely to be true.

    Because that’s the thing about allegations: they are not at all the same thing as “evidence”, much less are they in-and-of-themselves “proof” of anything.

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