it s not going to happen. it s not going to happen. full disclosure. i like that. jeffrey, on that note, we keep hearing justice breyer believes the court isn t a political institution. he was all for sort of civil discourse and then we see all of the politics around the nomination and all of the politics around the supreme court. is it a political institution or not? is justice breyer the last vestage of when it was a kinder, apolitical court? if i can just tell quick story about justice breyer. g jimmy carter nominated him to the first court of appeals in december of 1980 after carter had already lost the presidential election. he was still confirmed but with 80 votes in the senate.
cia operations officer. now, with georgetown university center for security studies. now, earlier, i asked him about the u.s. strategy of releasing apparently classified intel in an effort to head off possible russian plans. have a listen. it s really unprecedent precedented, the amount of information that was declassified from apparently real intel jennings. we have seen the khashoggi report. we have seen the information on russian meddling. those are finished products that had gone through analytic review and a good deal of scrubbing before it was made declassified. here, we have the president secretary of defense releasing almost daily information that seems to be coming in a stream of information. we haven t seen that since at least december of 1980 when we tried to hold off the then soviets who were planning to invade poland. i don t necessarily think it was done with the belief it was going to preempt putin s invasion. i think we were pretty confident he was going to do it.
so, in the context of ukraine, what what was fascinating, particularly early on? was the u.s. tactic of releasing apparently classified intel to head off possible russian plants for false-flag operations and so on. how unusual was that in the world of intel? declassifying things like that? it s really unprecedented, the amount of information that was declassified from apparently real intelligence. we have seen the khashoggi report. we have seen the information on russian meddling. those are finished products that had gone through analytic review and good deal of scrutiny before it was made declassified. here, we have the president s secretary of defense releasing almost daily information that seems to be coming in a stream of information. we haven t seen that since at least december of 1980 when we tried to pull off the then soviets who were planning to invade poland. i don t necessarily think it was done with the belief it was going to preempt putin s invasion. i think we were pr
what we re also eulogizing here, is that wing of the party doesn t that is gone. he was from texas, but he was a new england republican. i mean, he was born in that was a sin to some conservatives. yes, absolutely. he was born in massachusetts, grew up in xwrgreenwich, connecticut. it was a rough thing for him, and when he went on to ronald reagan s ticket, reagan asked that question, before i make you vice president, this is the december of 1980, i have to know if you re going run on the platform. he was talking about, above anything else, abortion. and bush, who had been pro-choice, changed his mind. that was the first time that issue was put into a political context. so to have reagan make that point was part of his compromise. right. you saw the compromising of this new england republicanism to the submerging conservative push from the south.
change before our very eyes. donald trump is a guy that is going around the country holding these campaign style rallies picking fights with people on twitter and delegating with these great responsibilities to people like mike pence and his generals as he said in terms of getting these daily briefings. donald trump is not going to be a conventional president. i think we need to change what our conceptions of the office are because of who is going to be in it. there are a lot of people that said reagan was more detached than many americans would think. the difference with reagan is he had james baker. he had a group of people around him. if something had happened over the weekend in december of 1980 where ronald reagan had said something or confronted the cia, it would have been cleaned up four hours later by james baker calling members of the press and leaking and then putting out a