Who needs the KGB when you have the National Enquirer?

Can we just stop for a moment and consider what we found out last week? An organization literally has a vault full of information consisting of embarrassing and possibly illegal conduct by the person who occupies the office of the President of the United States. 

In the intelligence community, this is called “Kompromat” and it is accumulated and stored by foreign intelligence service to blackmail people into doing certain things (like spying on their country). 

So that leads me to several questions:

• was the US counterintelligence community aware that the person who holds the highest degree of clearance in the country was subject to kompromat?

• if David Pecker and Trump were friends, why was Pecker retaining this information instead of destroying it? It makes no sense to keep something unless you intend to use it in the future. How did Mr. Pecker intend to use this?

• How secure is the vault at American Media? Is it possible that foreign intelligence services may have gained knowledge of the kompromat or access to it? Is the material in paper or electronic form? Is there an inventory of it such that it can be determined whether it is all still there?

• Who else knows about it? Presumably David Pecker did not handle every aspect of the story; the investigation, collection of information, summarizing it, negotiating the deals to pay off the sources and then securing all that data in the vault? So isn’t each of those people also subject to being compromise by foreign security agencies in order to gain access to what they know?

• shouldn’t a US counterintelligence team be given full access to the information to determine what exposures exist and what safeguards need to be taken to prevent the kompromat’s use?

• who else within the administration and Trump family does American Media have kompromat on? Should their security clearances be reviewed? Were they aware of the existence of this material? Did they disclose it as required on their security clearance forms (my understanding is that providing false, incomplete or misleading information on an SF-86 is a federal felony).

This is potentially a very dangerous situation and Trump’s chief of staff General Kelly knows this. Has he addressed this with the President? Has the President disclosed all he knows? Enquiring minds want to know.