On foreign policy, do we listen to Trump or the Trump administration?

In the days following Donald Trump's meeting with Vladimir Putin last week, Russian officials began talking publicly about implementing some of the "agreements" the two presidents reached. U.S. officials seemed to be caught off-guard -- because Trump hadn't told them anything about what was said at the meeting.

The Washington Post  reported last week that "officials at the most senior levels across the U.S. military" were still scrambling without information two days after the summit in Helsinki. A day later, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said he didn't know what was said at the presidential meeting, either.

Susan Glasser had a striking piece in the New Yorker, explaining that top members of the White House team had "literally zero" information about possible commitments Trump may have agreed to with Putin -- because "unlike Putin, Trump did not brief his own diplomats."

As Glasser put it, "We are witnessing nothing less than the breakdown of American foreign policy.... Even if we don't know the full extent of what was said and done behind closed doors in Helsinki, here's what we already do know as a result of the summit: America's government is divided from its President on Russia; its process for orderly decision-making, or even basic communication, has disintegrated."

The day after that piece ran, Trump's Defense Department announced new plans to provide security support to Ukraine. "Russia should suffer consequences for its aggressive, destabilizing behavior and its illegal occupation of Ukraine," Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in a statement, delivering a message that was in no way similar to his boss' rhetoric.

It's against this backdrop that the New York Times, pointing to assessments from current and former American officials, reported that the "disconnect between the policies aimed at curbing Russia and the president's position has never been wider."

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Team Trump says another Putin meeting 'makes enormous sense' (but it doesn't)

The day after the White House said Donald Trump would host another meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin -- this time at the White House, sometime this fall -- a reporter asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday what the United States has to gain from another meeting between the two leaders.

The Republican's answer was frustratingly vague. "It is incredibly valuable to the people of the United States of America that President Putin and President Trump continue to engage in dialogue to resolve the difficult issues our countries face between each other," Pompeo said. "I think this makes enormous sense."

He never got around to saying precisely what the country has to gain from another Trump-Putin meeting, especially on the heels of the fiasco at last week's summit in Helsinki. Maybe it's because, Pompeo's rhetoric notwithstanding, this doesn't make "enormous sense." A Washington Post analysis called the president's approach "baffling."

Trump's decision to meet with Putin again is baffling from a PR perspective, but it is even more incomprehensible from a counterintelligence perspective. Trump's own spy chief, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, didn't even know Trump had invited Putin. Cameras caught Coats's very candid reaction Thursday when he found out. He did not seem to approve.

Coats had just told NBC News's Andrea Mitchell that he did not think Trump should have met privately with Putin in the first place. "If he had asked me how that ought to be conducted, I would have suggested a different way," he said.

Implicit in that criticism is that a person charged with keeping the country safe thinks what Trump did was unwise. And Trump is going to do it again.

The context to all of this couldn't be more important. Ahead of last week's meeting in Finland, the White House struggled to explain why, exactly, Trump was so eager to have these talks.

Indeed, common sense suggested it makes sense to isolate Putin, not reward him. And yet, Trump agreed to bilateral talks in exchange for nothing.

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After going 'rogue,' top intel official tries to mollify Trump White House

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats appeared last week with NBC News' Andrea Mitchell for an interview at the Aspen Security Forum, and their chat was more lively -- and newsworthy -- than many expected.

As Rachel noted on the show last week, Coats made headlines when he was caught completely off-guard by news, which broke during the interview, that Donald Trump had invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to the White House for a visit this fall. At the same event, Coats expressed some concern about the American president siding with Putin over U.S. intelligence; Coats conceded he was opposed to Trump's insistence on a private one-on-one meeting between the two presidents; and he acknowledged that it wasn't a good idea for Trump to welcome two Russian officials into the Oval Office last year, at a meeting in which Trump leaked sensitive intelligence.

Taken together, it was hard not to get the impression that the nation's chief intelligence official doesn't always see eye-to-eye with his boss. Indeed, the Washington Post reported that White House officials "were in an uproar" over Coats' interview, in part because it seemed at times as if the DNI was "laughing at the president." One said Coats had "gone rogue."

Greg Sargent made a compelling case that Team Trump's perspective was needlessly skewed: the president's aides were bothered by Coats' tone, but what should've concerned them was the substantive disagreements between the DNI's warnings and the administration's actions.

And yet, there was Coats over the weekend, apparently trying to mollify the White House by clarifying his earlier comments.

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New documents shed light on surveillance of former Trump adviser

Donald Trump's congressional allies have invested a considerable amount of time and energy into a curious idea: U.S. surveillance of Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump during his 2016 campaign, was an outrageous abuse. The argument has never really made any sense, but it was nevertheless the motivation behind the laughable "Nunes memo," prepared by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and his team.

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a report on newly available materials that shed new light on the controversy.

The Trump administration disclosed on Saturday a previously top-secret set of documents related to the wiretapping of Carter Page, the onetime Trump campaign adviser who was at the center of highly contentious accusations by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee that the F.B.I. had abused its surveillance powers.

On Saturday evening, those materials -- an October 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap Mr. Page, along with several renewal applications -- were released to The New York Times and other news organizations that had filed Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to obtain them. Mr. Trump had declassified their existence earlier this year.

The president declassified them in order to help advance the since-discredited Nunes memo.

The fact that the FISA application, even in redacted form, is available to the public at all is an extraordinary development unto itself: U.S. officials have traditionally been reluctant to even mention the existence of documents such as these, much less release them. And yet, for the first time since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed 40 years ago, here it is.

The application documents the fact that the FBI considered Page -- by October 2016, a former Trump foreign policy adviser -- someone who'd been "the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government."

The Times' report added, "Visible portions showed that the F.B.I. in stark terms had told the intelligence court that Mr. Page 'has established relationships with Russian government officials, including Russian intelligence officers'; that the bureau believed 'the Russian government's efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with' Mr. Trump's campaign; and that Mr. Page 'has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian government.'"

Despite GOP claims, there was no abuse: four judges, each appointed by Republican presidents, signed off on the Page surveillance, persuaded that there was probable cause.

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This Week in God, 7.21.18

First up from the God Machine this week is the latest effort from congressional Republicans to empower houses of worship to engage in partisan politicking without fear of consequence. Politico  reported the other day:

The House voted Thursday to make it harder for the government to punish churches that get involved in politics.

In a 217-199 vote, lawmakers approved legislation barring the IRS from revoking the tax-exempt status of churches that back political candidates, unless it is specifically approved by the commissioner of the agency.

The provision, buried in a budget measure setting IRS funding for the upcoming year, amounts to a backdoor way around the so-called Johnson amendment, a half-century-old prohibition on nonprofits getting involved in political campaign activities.

The House vote came just three days after the Trump administration made it easier for dark-money entities to keep their largest donors hidden from public scrutiny.

To be sure, Republicans have spent much of the last year and a half targeting the Johnson amendment through a variety of vehicles -- it was nearly included in the GOP's massive tax-cut package late last year -- but those efforts involved trying to rewrite the relevant portion of the tax code.

This latest measure takes a different approach, leaving the letter of the law in place, but neutering the policy by making it vastly more difficult for the Internal Revenue Service to impose penalties that deter religious leaders from breaking the law.

And as of Thursday, a majority of the House signed off on the change, voting to create a system in which churches and other ministries could engage in partisan politicking, confident in the knowledge that their tax-exempt status would likely be left alone.

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