Aloha and namaste everyone and welcome to Impolitic with John Heilman, a puck and

Odyssey joint featuring lively in-depth conversations with the people who roam the quarters of power

and influence in America weaving the warp and wept of our politics and culture.

So a funny thing happened on the way to this episode of the show.

And when I say funny, I mean, as usual, in the Trump 2.0 era, shocking, stunning, staggering, appalling, grotesque,

and really, you know, at bottom completely and entirely pathetic. Here is the deal. At the end of last week, you know, at bottom, completely and entirely pathetic.

Here is the deal.

At the end of last week, you may remember Donald Trump fired a bunch of people who worked for

him at the National Security Council, as well as General Timothy Howe, the head of the

National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, apparently at the urging of the far-right crazy-ass conspiracy

theory peddling whack job and professional provocateur Laura Lumer. Then, over the weekend,

there was an excellent piece in the New York Times by David Sanger, which reported that the

firings were connected to a larger set of moves that Sanger said, quote, have torn away at the country's

cyber defenses just as they

are confronting the most sophisticated and sustained attacks in the nation's history.

One of which, he said, Sanger that is, said, was a campaign of dismantlement of Sisa, the

cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, which was created and signed into law by Donald

Trump in 2018 and had been doing invaluable work, especially on election security, ever

since.

Now, my immediate thought on reading this story was, hey, we got to get Chris Krebs on the

podcast to talk about all this.

Chris, as many of you will recall, surely, was the first

...