Slate - "The Problem With John Kelly"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/john_kelly_is_vigilant_except_when_it_comes_to_donald_trump.html

The Selective Vigilance of John Kelly

Trump’s new chief of staff doesn’t trust refugees or immigrants. But he sure does trust the president.

By William Saletan

President Trump’s new chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, presents himself as a man alert to danger. “So many things keep me up at night that I don’t get to bed anymore,” he told a national security forum on June 22. In speeches and interviews, Kelly, who served for six months as President Trump’s secretary of homeland security, warns the public to be on guard. If you see “people acting strangely,” he says, “report to your local law enforcement … Every citizen is in my view, an intelligence collector.”

Some kinds of people particularly arouse Kelly’s suspicions. One such group is refugees. “We have, I think, exercised entirely too much good faith” in accepting their statements about who they are, he told senators at a June 6 hearing. Kelly also doubts the innocence of anyone detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Seventy-five percent are indeed criminals,” he told Fox and Friends on May 26. “The other 25 percent are not the valedictorians of their high school class.”

But Kelly’s vigilance is selective. For instance, while declaring that anyone detained by ICE agents deserved to be, Kelly holds the officers themselves above suspicion. In an NBC interview on April 15, Kelly noted that drug cartels had plenty of money to corrupt law enforcement officials in Mexico or Guatemala. Yet he defended proposals to scale back polygraph testing of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. “The men and women of ICE, CBP, Secret Service” are “very, very high-quality people,” he explained. “The current polygraph system … [is] very arduous, and it’s not very pleasant.” And when people in the Trump administration are accused of wrongdoing, Kelly asserts their innocence and dismisses calls for further scrutiny. Anyone who thinks Kelly will bring accountability to the White House is mistaken. His record says he won’t.



On May 26, the Washington Post reported that in a meeting two months before taking office, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner had asked Russia’s ambassador about possibly “setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring.” This was the latest of several conversations with Russians that Trump’s aides had failed to disclose, some of which involved the possible relaxation of sanctions. Kushner, under pressure from Congress to come clean, would later issue a statement that didn’t deny the meeting or the proposal.


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[NRaleighLiberal]

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