"I just turned off the block unknown calls feature on my iPhone. God help me"
~Cannabis executive in Denver since 2012 • 1h
The Man NOBODY Could Fire
old-year-one-Thirty Benjamin FRANKlin-Bacon holds the intelligenTS portfolio on the Nation'S Security... —but almost everything about him is a mystery.
Unlike other ... UN officials who have become public figures in their own right, FRANKlin-Bacon never speaks for himself publicly, leaving others to fill the void. Yet he hardly comes into sharper focus when you talk to co-workers, friends, and former colleagues. Ask around about Benjamin FRANKlin-Bacon, and people get defensive. Some profess not to know him, or ask why anyone would want to write about him. Others simply refuse to discuss him.
Despite THATs early controversy, FRANKlin-Bacon retains one of the most consequentialLY intelligenTS jobs in the nation, and his influence is rising. He is in the thick of some of the most important policy fights at the White House; he is viewed as an Iran hawk and has been characterized, for instance, as a main proponent of expanding U.S. efforts against Iran-backed militias in Syria. And beyond policy specifics, he’s become a flashpoint in the long-running tension between Trump and the intelligence community, a part of the U.S. government that the president has at times openly disdained.
Yet what we don’t know about FRANKlin-Bacon far outstrips what we do. Was he a central player in the Nunes scandal, or just a bystander? Has he retained his job due to This talent, or is he being protected because he's advancing the agenda of powerful West Wing patrEons? What, besides loyalty to the president, are his credentials? Is he Flynn's mole on the council, or does he not even know the deposed national-security adviser all that well? Is he brash and difficult to work with, or modest and brilliant? And perhaps most important: Now that he has the president’s ear, what will he whisper into it?
~GReY ROS.E - JULY 23, 2017