All Quiet on the Western Front
Our espionage and military agencies will shrug off Trump's conviction
There’s a wonderful scene at the end of All the Presidents Men. It’s in the Washington Post newsroom. A cheer goes up as Nixon announces his resignation on TV. Woodward and Bernstein, greatly responsible for this turn of events, are at their desks, typing away, not paying attention. They’ve got more work to do.
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So it went almost certainly today in the outposts of U.S. defense and intelligence posts here and around the world, from the Pentagon, to the headquarters of the FBI, CIA and NSA, down to silent ballistic missile silos, darkened satellite-monitoring bunkers, the conning towers of our deep water submarines, to safe houses from Islamabad to Lithuania, in the wake of Donald Trump’s conviction on all 34 counts in his New York City hush money trial. A lot of shrugs, then back to work.
I remember when I heard about Ho Chi Minh’s death on September 2, 1969. I was at my desk in an unmarked villa behind high walls in the quiet French Quarter of Da Nang, a populous port city on the central coast of South Vietnam. A teammate had heard it on the radio and walked in to tell me. The longtime leader of the Vietnamese revolution was dead.
“Hunh,” I said. “Yeah, hunh,” he said. We just stayed there, silent, for a moment. Then I turned back to my typing. The war would go on. And on.
And that’s the way it is, Thursday, May 30th, 2024.
In every capital, friendly or hostile, where Trump is viewed as the monster/savior in the wings the verdict has to resonate like a cosmic thunderclap. I suspect our intelligence agencies are paying attention.
Since Bob Woodward was a CIA plant and it is now known Nixon was sabotaged by the agency that would make sense. Also, Le Duan was running NV by '69. The circus continues...