Kushner Kiboshed

There was never much doubt about who would win - General John Kelly, former four-star Marine Corps commander and someone used to getting his own way, and Jared Kushner whose biggest claim to fame is that he is the son-in-law of Donald Trump. Why it was thought appropriate to give him temporary top security clearance when the FBI was struggling to check him out, I don't know. But after enjoying access to the most secret stuff landing on his father-in-law's desk, he has now been humiliated after being told his clearance has been downgraded to not-very-interesting-stuff. He remains, I think, Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, so at some point he is going to have to see intelligence higher up the clearance chain, but General Kelly will no doubt decide that on a case by case basis. It's all about need-to-know. If Jared doesn't need to know, he won't be told, but of course he won't know what he doesn't need to know which will be pretty frustrating for him. Trump now has another reason for not liking Kelly. But the besieged chief of staff must have told the president that there was no way his son-in-law could be treated as an equal to his father-in-law when it came to America's most closely guarded secrets. But I wonder how much Trump himself is actually told. He gets his daily presidential intelligence brief compiled by the CIA and others, but although that sounds like a daily dose of the Crown Jewels, the presidential briefing is sanitised by the intelligence agencies. Trump who has shown he is not interested in poring over intelligence, is in some ways like his son-in-law. He knows what he is told but he doesn't know what he is not told unless he is particularly astute and asks a pertinent question that forces the CIA to tell him what he hadn't been told before in his briefing. For example, is Trump aware of all the black ops being carried out by US special forces and the CIA's special activities division? I doubt it. He will be informed if some vital intelligence gleaned from black ops requires a presidential decision or if something goes seriously wrong. But even the president and commander-in-chief doesn't need to know everything. If he was shown raw intelligence every day - that's unprocessed, non-analysed intel - Trump would have to spend every hour of every day reading it all, and the president is not a great reader of anything we have been told. But if he really wants to know what's going on in some part of the world that's top top secret, he, as commander-in-chief, is entitled to be told. Jared Kushner won't get anywhere near this sort of stuff. Very humiliating for a man who until now enjoyed special access.