Stevenson’s army, January 20

– NYT explains how & why White House walked back Biden statements on Ukraine at news conference.

– BTW,the CIA director made a secret visit to the region shortly before SecState Blinken’s trip there.

– After CODEL to Kyiv, Senators are planning Ukraine support legislation.

– CIA says Havaan Syndrome does not seem to come from a foreign power’s worldwide effort. CNN has one report; WaPo another.

– WH released a new directive on NSA role in DOD cybersecurity. I think WSJ exaggerates the significance. In my view, this is just the latest in an administration planned clarification of duties within government. The bigger problem, as Lawfare noted last month, is that the US now has officials with overlapped authorities and only one is legally an “officer of the United States” with real authority.  This question of authorities is an important one we’ll talk more about in class.

– It’s hard to show unity when leaders are seated 20 feet apart, but Russia and Iran tried that yesterday.Look at the photo!

-Amy Zegart discusses the role of nongovernmental sources doing spying.

– A think tank studying presidential transitions has a report on the Trump/Biden change.

– Deja vu: GOP plans rerun of 1994 campaign to capture Congress.

My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).