"...[T]he Trump-Russia scandal has the potential to spark an even more damaging US constitutional crisis than Watergate. Unlike Watergate, it involves a hostile foreign power and its intelligence services. At the same time that Mueller's opening indictments were unveiled yesterday, it was revealed that Russian-backed fake election content had reached a staggering 126 million Americans on Facebook during the 2016 election campaign. The Russia-Trump scandal, Watergate 2.0, is just beginning."

"The issues at stake in this reality TV series of presidential politics can be easily ridiculed—will Trump tweet?—but they are profound. Comey's Congressional testimony goes to the heart of the proper functioning of US democracy, being concerned with checks and balances on the executive branch, and, crucially, whether President Trump obstructed justice by exerting pressure on America's senior law enforcement officer."

"The disparity between British and US media reporting of the Manchester attack highlights a problem only likely to increase in the future: how to regulate reporting on national security issues in a free society, with a free press, in the digital age. With the world’s increasing interconnectivity, in which we can receive news from outlets all over the world to our phones, and even watches, previous arrangements to regulate British press reporting seem increasingly anachronistic."

"It is arguably one matter to spy on colonial delegations, but quite another to bug the president of the United States. Could the Russians have done it? The Trump administration's confusion about whether the TASS reporter in the Oval Office was photographing for private use, as the White House thought but apparently did not check, or acting officially for publication, as the Russian Foreign Ministry claimed, does not inspire confidence."

"To make matters worse, this intelligence was derived from a US ally, reportedly Israel. Never before has a US president unilaterally disclosed to a hostile power, Russia, ultra secret intelligence derived from a US intelligence ally without permission from that country. If the reports are true, we are now in historically uncharted territory. Trump's disclosures to the Kremlin—pundits are calling it LeakGate—pose a serious risk to US national security. America and its intelligence allies are not equipped for a leaker-in-chief as president. No wonder Lavrov and Kislak are smiling in the pictures of their Oval Office meeting."

"A leader who accesses raw intelligence risks short-circuiting this entire enterprise, bypassing agencies that are supposed to prevent partial assessments. An inevitable risk is that a decision-maker with access to raw data that has not been professionally assessed will look for information that confirms his or her preexisting beliefs. Far from intelligence agencies telling leaders what they do not want to hear, in these circumstances, intelligence risks becoming self-fulfilling sycophancy."

A video based on Calder Walton's op-ed, "Trump Risks Making Stalin’s Disastrous Mistake On Intelligence Analysis."

An expert in intelligence history and implications for intelligence communities and policymakers today, Walton has written several articles that connect his research with recent headlines on Russia’s interference in U.S. elections. 

"Whether Trump likes to admit or not, we are now back in the territory of the Cold War. The White House would do well to study closely the history of that conflict— not least because the Russian government does so. As a former KGB officer, Putin lived the Cold War. His intelligence services today, the FSB and SVR, are known to look on the KGB’s history with pride."