If we take it at face value (leaving aside whether that’s proper), the Flynn intercept reveals a president-elect apparently worried that his foreign policy would be undermined by his own government’s intelligence agencies. It would be easier to dismiss that fear as yet another fit of Trumpian paranoia if it didn’t seem like we were learning about that conversation from wiretaps.
Progressives who’ve recently learned to stop worrying and love the surveillance state should think hard about the precedent such leaks set — and the implicit message they send to political actors — even if any particular instance can be justified as serving the public interest. The leaks may not be, as conservative media would have it, the only real scandal, but nobody should be too enthusiastic about the prospect of living in a country where officials who antagonize spy agencies find their telephone conversations quoted in news headlines.
Trump fans, meanwhile, should not make the mistake of thinking that the only reason to worry about the deep state is that it remains Barack Obama’s deep state. The most effective bulwark against abuse of the intelligence community’s power is not the bodies charged with overseeing the spy agencies — all ultimately depend on candor and disclosure from the agencies themselves — but the fragile culture of restraint that fitfully emerged in the aftermath of the scandals of the 1960s and ’70s. Whatever remains of that culture 16 years into the war on terrorism, hollowing out the intelligence bureaucracy to make room for appointees selected for their personal loyalty to Trump would probably finish it off.
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