It’s sometimes lost amid Donald Trump’s endless affronts to the Republic, but the undermining of U.S. intelligence capabilities is one of the overarching stories of his administration.
So CNN’s scoop Monday about the exfiltration of a top U.S. intelligence asset in Russia is, like so much in the Trump era, both staggering and not at all surprising. According to CNN, in a secret mission in 2017, America “extracted from Russia one of its highest-level covert sources inside the Russian government,” partly because of worries that Trump’s cavalier handling of intelligence information could expose the person. On Monday evening, The New York Times added to the story, reporting that the source was a Russian official whose job provided “access to the highest level of the Kremlin.