Report: White House officials hatch an odd revenge plan targeting former Obama administration

While Barack Obama is living his best life hanging out in tropical locales and wearing leather jackets, a gloomy group of Trump loyalists have put their heads together and concocted a plot to get revenge against the former president and members of his administration through an approach being described by one person as a "bag of crazy cats," Foreign Policy reports.

In the wake of The Washington Post's report that Trump gave highly classified information about the Islamic State to Russian officials during their visit to the Oval Office last week, members of Trump's inner circle held a meeting on Wednesday to discuss how to recover from the ongoing repercussions. A person with knowledge of the summit said the team is considering going after Obama's administration by accusing it of sharing sensitive information, too, launching an investigation into a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program called the Automated Indicator Sharing capability. That program gathers information from companies on possible cyberattacks, including malicious IP addresses and emails, that is then shared with foreign partners. The goal of the program is to "identify and block adversary methods that we've never seen before," DHS spokesman Scott McConnell told FP, but the Trump team suggests that the sharing capability can open up sensitive data to Russia and other non-allies.

The problem with this revenge plan is it "doesn't make sense," one former DHS official told FP, after bursting out laughing. "It seems ludicrous," said another former official, who added that the cybersecurity being shared is "beneficial for everyone to have, like, 'Hey, this Windows program has a bug.'" Beyond that, the information in the system is not highly classified but rather "indicators of an attack," the official said. "Nothing is going to be vital to national security." Aside from being "a bag of crazy cats," as the person with knowledge of the meeting judged the approach, Robyn Greene at the Open Technology Institute told FP it's a "massive distraction," and she doesn't understand "how they can draw the line between Trump sharing code-name information with the Russians and this." The White House told FP it is unaware of any meeting or talks.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up