Less information for you and me, more information for whoever Jared writes to

In my email, from Foreign Policy:

Trump to Cease Reporting Drone Deaths Top News: U.S. President Donald Trump has revoked a 2016 Obama-era executive order which required intelligence officials to publish the number of civilians killed in drone strikes outside of designated war zones, in places such as Libya, Yemen, and Pakistan. The requirements were a bid to increase transparency around drone strikes, which increased ten-fold under Barack Obama. U.S. President Donald Trump looks to be on course to exceed that, launching substantially more drone strikes than Obama did in his first two years in office. The Trump administration described the rule as “superfluous” and “distracting.”

But at least Trump can be relied on not to use improper methods of email storage, since he doesn't know how to use email, what better assurance could you have, though I guess we can't say that for Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Stephen Miller—you don't suppose they'd ever send classified information to the wrong places, do you?

staffers at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh “said they were not read in on the details of Jared Kushner’s trip to Saudi Arabia or the meetings he held with members of the country’s Royal Court last week,” which is raising alarms since it was revealed that Trump overrode the objections of national security staffers to get Kushner permanent security clearance.

What made this a particularly striking departure from past norms, sources tell the Daily Beast, is that the U.S. embassy wasn’t even involved in coordinating Kushner’s security during his trip. (Daily Beast via Raw Story)

Honest to god, I'm so sick of this.

There's also a very good piece by Ariane Tabatabai on how the Trump foreign policy doctrine of maximum pressure yields minimum results:

Where the pressure campaign against North Korea was too minimalist, Iran sees the campaign against it as so maximalist that it is not inclined to negotiate. The campaign is too broad, encompassing virtually all aspects of the regime’s foreign and security policies, and its objectives virtually unattainable without regime change. It is also too indiscriminate. The sanctions regime is affecting many average Iranians, including medical patients, children, and students, who are unable to afford medication or pursue their studies outside their country. For now, the Iranians seem to have made the decision to wait out the Trump administration and not return to the negotiating table until they have more clarity on the trajectory of U.S. domestic politics in the next two years.

It's a weird kind of reassurance, to realize that practically nothing real is going to happen during this awful time, beyond the modestly increased suffering of a few million little people from Honduran violence victims to Iowa soy farmers, but a reassurance nevertheless. The emperor's incompetence is our friend.