They Also Serve

On Friday, August 24, President Donald Trump, as promised, revoked the security clearances of Sally. Q. Yates, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, Susan Rice, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr.

He had formerly revoked the clearance of ex-CIA director John Brennan. Like Brennan, those listed were all former leaders in the intelligence community who had been critical of Trump’s administration. 

These revocations were the backbone of Operation Red Herring, which is a Trump strategy to revoke a significant former intelligence official’s clearance whenever attention is needed to be shifted from yet another Trump scandal.

The original Red Herring strategy had been to revoke the clearances one or two at a time as needed for diversion, but on Wednesday, April 22,   Omarosa had played a tape on Rachel Maddow’s show which contained a snippet of John Kelly telling Trump that the “spics” in Puerto Rico were mainly freeloaders, with Trump answering, “Yeah, like the niggers.”

Thus on Friday the clearance revocations as damage control were released en masse, Trump playing his own personal enemies list against the Omarosa tapes.

The following Monday, August 27, in front of the three Senate office buildings on Constitutional Avenue north of the Capitol, Brennan and the other nine on Trump’s enemies list who had their clearances revoked appeared together promptly at ten o’clock and simply stood, silent.  And kept standing, silent.

Ten minutes later the first television news truck arrived. A slender young woman with a microphone followed by a cameraman approached the silent group.

“Do you have a spokesperson?” she asked.

Sally Yates shook her head and handed the TV woman a sheet of paper. It read: “Milton wrote: ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’ We shall appear in front of the Senate office buildings and stand silently for an hour every morning until the Republican members of the United States Senate cease their silent acquiescence to the tyrannical policies of this administration.”

By noon, the first video clips were international and the Milton Memo, as it was already called, had been read throughout the world.

That was the beginning. Every morning, tens of thousands of silent protesters joined the Intelligent Nine, as they were now called, and within a week hundreds of thousands of people were pouring from every corner of this vast country to make what had become a pilgrimage to stand in silent support of the Nine and of America.

At the beginning of the third week, with no letup of the morning vigil, two Republican Senators silently joined the Nine and by week’s end fourteen more had come over.

In the White House situation room, Stephen Miller advocated mass arrests and summary executions, if need be, to stem the tide of Senate treason. 

The President had a better idea. “I’ll go out and cut a deal. Give ‘em their fucking clearances back. You know.”

The next morning, Trump appeared in front of the Nine and the thousands of silent supporters.

“Look,” he said. “We can work this out.”

The Nine turned their backs. The thousands turned their backs. 

America turned its back.