The Trump administration has taken away the security clearance of Mark Zaid, a lawyer who works on national security cases.
Mark Zaid is a friend of mine and he has provided me a lot of help on the JFK assassination. For instance, he sent me some important court documents on Richard Case Nagell. Mark was also kind enough to provide a blurb for my book, Oliver Stone's Film-Flam: The Demagogue of Dealey Plaza:
Nearly 60 years after JFK's assassination, questions still abound over whether suspected killer Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, or even at all. But conspiracy theories are not facts. Fred Litwin's book Oliver Stone's Film-Flam firmly undermines some of the loudest theorists of the day in point-by-point factual rebuttals in an effort to accurately preserve the integrity of this historic tragedy. While some readers' minds may not be completely persuaded as to exactly what did or did not happen in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, every reader of this book should conclude that simply being a loud conspiracy critic does not turn fiction into fact.
Next in line are anti-Trumpers Andrew Weissman, the lead prosecutor in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russiagate investigation of Trump, who frequently maligns the former president in his role as an MNBC contributor; lawyer Mark Zaid, who represented Eric Ciaramella, the CIA analyst identified as the whistleblower in Trump’s impeachment in 2019 over a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; and Norm Eisen, special counsel to the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment.
Zaid himself is not exactly the President’s favorite person: He served as a lawyer for the intelligence official who exposed the Ukraine scandal, which led to Trump’s first impeachment. At a 2019 Louisiana campaign rally, Trump held up a photo of Zaid and accused him of ripping “the guts out of our country.” The following day, Zaid received a graphic death threat, for which the sender was sentenced to a year in federal prison—he also threw a table at the FBI agents who came to investigate him, Zaid told Washingtonian during his last interview with us in 2021.
I wish Mark all the best and I hope that this decision is rescinded as soon as possible.
Update
Trump has some legitimate concerns over politicization within the deep state. However, if he wants to take on deep state malfeasance, the very worst thing he could do is remove the security clearance of lawyers such as Zaid. That path helps only those who are interested in cover-ups and setting their own agendas outside of effective oversight.
After all, the government imposes strict conditions on how whistleblowers are supposed to disclose their concerns. If a whistleblower breaks these conditions, they will likely quickly find themselves facing a visit from the FBI. Even if prosecution and prison time don’t follow, suspension of a security clearance and dismissal are likely. For individuals who have spent their careers in the shadows and who have yet to put their children through college, this concern means that staying quiet about a deep state problem is often personally preferable to speaking out about it. Individuals such as Zaid are thus crucial in supporting democratic transparency by shielding those who want the truth to set Americans free.
Put another way, Trump is further flooding the swamp rather than draining it with this decision. The president should reconsider.