Monday night, as the rest of America settled in for the evening, Donald Trump was just catching up on news that the rest of us had seen three days ago. Former CIA and FBI counterterrorism expert Phil Mudd appeared on a CNN panel with Trump supporter Paris Dennard over the weekend, there to discuss the President’s decision to begin revoking the security clearances of former intelligence officials who have questioned him in public.
The revocations by Trump are clearly, overtly politically motivated, and Trump himself has admitted as much. He said that John Brennan, the former CIA Director whose clearance was the first to go, had made “a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations — wild outbursts on the internet and television — about this Administration.” Trump’s supporting staff, however, including apologists like Dennard, insist that former officials are making unseemly profits off their clearances long after they’ve left government.
In the CNN segment, Dennard accused Mudd, a veteran of more of the intelligence field since before Dennard was in grade school, of profiting from his security clearance, after Mudd decried the President’s moves as political. Mudd rightly began to shout at the young man as he repeatedly called him a liar until finally he said to the host, then Dennard, “We’re done. Get out! Twenty-five years in the service and this is the shit I get? Get out.”
Apparently, it takes Donald Trump three days to see the fallout from his capricious decisions, because tonight was the first he had mentioned it. Upon seeing the segment, Trump tweeted a threat to revoke Mudd’s clearance as well, calling him “unglued and weird” and stating Mudd was in “no mental condition” to retain a security clearance:
Just watched former Intelligence Official Phillip Mudd become totally unglued and weird while debating wonderful @PARISDENNARD over Brennan’s Security Clearance. Dennard destroyed him but Mudd is in no mental condition to have such a Clearance. Should be REVOKED? @seanhannity
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 21, 2018
Mudd has yet to respond at the time of this writing, but there’s little doubt that the President will be actively seeking any excuse to carry out his vengeful agenda against those who have criticized him. His insecurity about the Russia probe is causing his own mental faculties to falter, and soon we’ll see the Trump version of Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.”
Watch the CNN segment here:
Featured image via screen capture
