Six ways from Sunday
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Six ways from Sunday is a phrase from a televised warning by Senator Chuck Schumer that a president who crosses the intelligence community exposes himself to retaliation. John Kiriakou says CNN telephoned him the day after the remark aired and asked him to explain what Schumer had meant.

What he says it did not mean

His first move was to rule out the reading that the phrase invited. Whatever Schumer meant, Kiriakou says, he did not mean physical harm.

The mechanism he describes instead

The threat he describes is structural rather than criminal, and rests on time. Officers at the CIA have been there twenty, twenty-five, thirty years; presidents come and go; and the officers know they can outlast this president exactly as they could outlast any other.

From that asymmetry he derives the specific forms retaliation can take, none of which requires anyone to disobey an order. They can leak selectively to embarrass him. They can decline to take the risk of going after a well-placed source, so that the best intelligence never arrives. They can decline to initiate a high-risk operation. The result he describes is not sabotage but inertia, nothing gets done, the administration muddles through, and the officers wait the four years until the voters remove him and return somebody they prefer.

The frame he attaches to it

Kiriakou treats the episode as a problem of accountability rather than of party, and separates his reading of the intelligence agencies from any defence of the president they were said to be threatening: "we don't have to love the CIA and the FBI just because we don't like Donald Trump."

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- Russiagate
- John Brennan
- Donald Trump
