How Comey got it right

Trump has had a spectacularly bad week, what with the weird, weird optics of things like the Puerto Rico paper towel throwing, his utterly tone deaf attempts at a pep talk to officials there, the self promotion evident in his tweeted videos of his visit to Las Vegas, and his now disclosed fury at Tillerson not denying calling him a moron. 

It's been so obviously bad to all but cult followers like Steve Kates (honestly, how can any economics student at RMIT take him seriously?) that I haven't been bothered posting about each individual incident.

However, I thought this story from CNN about what was happening earlier this year when the FBI and intelligence agencies were looking into the Steele dossier was very instructive - it shows how government officials can reliably predict that Trump will be defensive and seek revenge if they present anything to him that he thinks hurts his image:

In the weeks before the US intelligence community published a January report detailing Russian meddling efforts in the 2016 election, top officials at the FBI, CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence discussed including parts of the Steele dossier in the official intelligence document, sources tell CNN.

The debate came in part because the FBI was concerned about being alone in shouldering the responsibility of briefing the incoming President about the allegations. FBI officials hopes that including the dossier allegations in the intelligence report would show the entire intelligence community speaking in one voice.

Then-FBI Director James Comey expressed concerns to his counterparts that if the FBI alone presented the dossier allegations, then the President-elect would view the information as an attempt by the FBI to hold leverage over him.

But the intelligence community had bigger concerns, sources tell CNN. The classified version of the report would be disseminated beyond then-President Barack Obama and the President-elect to other officials including members of Congress. And if that report included the dossier allegations, the intelligence community would have to say which parts it had corroborated and how. That would compromise sources and methods, including information shared by foreign intelligence services, intelligence officials believed.

In the end, the decision was made that the FBI and Comey personally would brief the incoming President on the allegations. That briefing occurred January 6 in a one-on-one conversation following a broader intelligence briefing on Russian meddling provided to then-President-elect Trump and his key staff.

Trump later told The New York Times in July that he took Comey's briefing on the dossier to be an attempt to hold it as leverage over the new President.

"In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there," Trump said.

Exactly what Comey feared had come to pass.

Any intensely defensive, narcissistic ego at the top makes for extremely dysfunctional government - and to some extent I am put in mind of Kevin Rudd's nightmare of a government for the Ministers and public servants who had to work for him.  

A case could probably be made that Trump is like what you would get if you started with Rudd, but dropped the intelligence by 80% and cranked up the sexism and racism by 200%.    (OK, perhaps drop the empathy down 70%, too.)