President Donald Trump's stunt to use a decoy plane stunned Michael Feinberg of Lawfare.
His analysis came in the middle of an MS NOW panel that discussed the issue in the context of the Justice Department issuing subpoenas to New York Times reporters after leaks about the security breaches on the plane gifted by the Qatari government.
The revelation about the decoy plane stunt, said Feinberg, "complicates every discussion we've had about the subpoenas since we first learned they were issued," and "the timing does look suspicious."
"If there was a legitimate loss of national security information, it would seem that there is legitimate reason, at some point, to issue subpoenas in an investigation to find out how it was released," said Feinberg. "But as far as we know, these subpoenas were still issued just because the White House got embarrassed at the New York Times reporting," and Trump called FBI Director Kash Patel back to the White House on a whim to get this done.
The bottom line, he added, is that "the whole national security apparatus of the United States right now is, frankly, a clown show. And I think looking for rational explanations for why any given step is taken is a little bit of a fool's errand."
Feinberg said that in this case, it probably did make sense for Trump to use a decoy flight out of Turkey, "but that doesn't mean I'm going to defend the ham-fisted way in which Trump got in the press pool and started just mouthing off in the narcissistic way he normally does about how he's the center of the universe. And anything that happens to him happens to everybody."
"There's just an element of maturity and sobriety that every other president in the history of the United States has had that he lacks," said Feinberg. It's unclear why, he said but the fact is, "if I was a reporter in his press pool, I wouldn't be giving any credence to a single word that comes out of his mouth."