Tag: David Rothkopf

U.S. military commanders don’t know what strategy to pursue, Administration officials told TIME. “The back and forth is painful.” Trump’s latest pronouncement, Monday on Twitter, suggested that the U.S. military mission in the war-torn country was open-ended. “We will be leaving at a proper pace while at the same time continuing to fight ISIS and doing all else that is prudent and necessary!” he wrote. “The timetable flows from the policy decisions that we need to implement.” Trump’s initial impromptu decision, hastily made during a Dec. 14 phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has become the latest example of Trump’s reliably inconsistent presidency. It was a decision made contrary to the advice of top U.S. generals and national security advisers. We won,” he said in a video posted on Twitter. In May 2017, Trump revealed classified intelligence when he again went off-script and invited Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then-Ambassador Sergey Kislyak into the Oval Office, according to a Post report. In March 2018, Trump called Russian President Vladimir Putin to congratulate him on his re-election, despite being specifically warned not to do so by national security adviserd. That same month, the White House suspended the long-held practice of publishing public summaries of the President’s phone calls with world leaders. Trump may not entirely subscribe to past U.S. presidents’ tendency toward strategic predictability, but it’s his prerogative whether or not to heed the advice of advisers, said David Priess, a former CIA analyst and author of “The President’s Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America’s Presidents.” “We elect a president, not a bureaucracy, to execute policy,” he said.

Michael Cohen made a secret audio recording of then-candidate Trump discussing payments to bury a story about an alleged affair with a Playboy playmate. Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle explain why timing is everything. Weighing in: Audio expert Paul Ginsberg,…