Tim Weiner

And the present person...

who is overseeing American intelligence services and the Five Eyes liaisons is a crackpot, a conspiracy theorist named Toffee Gabbard.

And she recently decided that intelligence on the Russians would not be shared with the Five Eyes.

This is madness.

The people who Trump has appointed, like Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, like a fellow named John Radcliffe who's running CIA, Ash Patel, who's running the FBI, and Pete Exit, former Fox News host, as Secretary of Defense.

These people are amateurs, and they are crackpots, and they are fools.

and they are in charge of American national security, and that is a very dangerous thing by content.

The danger of Trump placing them in charge of American national security is that it increases the risk of another catastrophic intelligence failure.

And the people I talk to at CIA think that failure is coming.

And they think it likely that it would not be a catastrophic, cataclysmic mass casualty attack like 9-11, but a series of successful political warfare operations by the Russians and the Chinese and other enemies of democracy could further weaken

the American body politic, to further weaken our democratic tradition and to push the president of the United States farther and farther toward the destruction of not only the architectures of national security that the United States and its allies set up after World War II, in large part to protect the world from Russian imperialism,

but through these acts of political warfare, sabotage, subversion, espionage, to actually destroy our democratic system.

I fear that if indeed the United States were struck again, at home or abroad, by a lethal terrorist attack, the President of the United States could well declare martial law and cancel the next election.

And that is the great fear that I'm hearing from the people I talk to in the American intelligence community.

The Kiwi intelligence service punches far above its weight.

It is particularly adept against the Chinese target as assessing the intensity and capability of the Chinese military and the Chinese spa services.

And it is a vital part of the Five Eyes system, which is essentially an intelligence sharing system.

in which signals intelligence, that is electronic eavesdropping and espionage, primarily is shared among the five nations in the compact.

And the CIA depends on its liaison with foreign intelligence services to understand what is going on in the world.

The CIA is only about 22,000 people strong.