with the saudis? the congress, michael mccaul, who is the lead republican on the house foreign affairs committee, says, i would have strongly preferred for the administration to utilize the long established and codified arms sale review process that requires the president to submit a formal notification to congress. mike pompeo saying he s determined that an emergency exists which requires the proposed sale. in the national security interests of the united states and thus waives security requirements. is there an emergency? is this entirely a fiction? it is a total fiction. look, chris, you know, because you re one of the few journalists who has been covering yemen, the saudis have been involved in a proxy war in yemen for the past three or four years, and nothing has changed on the ground. there is no greater threat to anyone in yemen, to anyone in saudi arabia. so it is total fiction. it s totally made up for the president to invoke this. it has no basis. congress needs to do t
journalist, did change the representation government gets on capitol hill. and this white house is beholden to the saudis, they re willing to take this step to sell some weapons. chris, you re absolutely right. unfortunately the starvation and famine in yemen didn t awaken the conscious of congress. but the khashoggi killing did. and you have rubio and lindsey graham saying there s no moral clarity. they have no stake of calling for american values if we re continuing to arm the saudi regime. and they are appalled by what mbs is doing and they frankly understand also that the saudis are aligned with al qaeda, fighting our own troops in yemen. so the administration s total alliance with the saudis, where they ve been willing to sell nuclear energy, they re basically goading the saudis into a war with iran and think that they re an ally of ours, is a policy that is opposed by bipartisan majorities on capitol hill. and one has to ask what is the link, why is the president and the admi
executive. he doesn t dish it out to other members of the administration to go off into the wild blue yonder and decide we will now declassify. there is a concern and quiet rumblings on the hill about what this potentially means going into the rest of the year and the full-throated aspects of the presidential campaign where you ve got the attorney general now surreptitiously and sometimes not so surreptitiously putting information out on the street that may be beneficial to the president s overall narrative about no collusion, et cetera, etc. when you stop and think about it, chris, this could be worse than hacking our government by the russians. the president through his operatives are willy-nilly putting it out on the street. that s a big concern right now. i just don t see any incentive for the people that participated in this in 2016.
right. michael? i was going to say, the narrative that is beginning to develop here in washington is the position that china potentially could be taking in this election. vis-à-vis the democrats because they do not like the president s tariff policy. the democrats tend to be more user friendly with their perspective on that front. we are opening ourselves up to have our government and our elections managed by these foreign enemies. chris, do you know what s staggering is that this is the response of the trump administration to the release of a report they claim is a total vindication and exoneration. right? so they re going around shooting the survivors. that s exactly right. doesn t look like they mean it. right. when he says it s personal, they went for the wrong person. they came for the wrong person. it s about extracting revenge and giving sean hannity programming.
they are watching the spectacle in washington right now and watching mr. trump expose all of this information to try to keep him safe from the appropriate investigations that are under way. i really am concerned that this is going to harm our national security in a manner that we have not seen before. john brennan, thank you very much for sharing your time and expertise. thank you, chris. for more on the president s weaponization, senior fellow with the ethics and policy institute and former aid in the reagan white house, michael steel. brennan is a cool tempered individual, generally. he seems not to be faking his concern here. right. look, part of the problem is that william barr, who until he was appointed as attorney general under this president had a sterling reputation and people believed he was acting in good