Did Vladimir Putin Order Pres. Trump to Fire Rex Tillerson?

What if Vladimir Putin ordered Pres. Trump to fire Secretary of State Rex Tillerson? Rex Tillerson left office warning the American people about Russia as a hostile power. He fingered Russia as the culprit behind the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer before flipping to the British side, and Yulia Skripal, his daughter, on British soil. A British police officer who found the Russian double agent and his daughter losing consciousness on a public bench is also in serious condition. U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May named the Russian government as the attempted assassin first and has retaliated by severing high-level Russian communication and ordering 23 Russian diplomats to leave the U.K. within the week. She accused them of espionage. She cancelled Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's expected visit to the U.K. She said that British royals and ministers will not attend the World Soccer Cup in Russia. Critics have said that Brits have been reluctant to freeze the billions in Russian assets coming through London, but May said that where it is clear that Russian money is used to threaten the lives or property of British nationals or residents, she will freeze those assets.

Nikolai Grushkov, another Russian ex-pat and friend of a Russian oligarch and prominent Putin critic, Boris Berezovsky, died a few days after Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned. The autopsy is "inconclusive," but I read elsewhere that Grushkov was strangled and then hanged to make his death look like a suicide.

All Rex Tillerson did was agree that Russia poisoned Sergei and Yulia Skripal, but that might have been enough, given his other disagreements with Trump.

Tillerson learned that Trump had fired him on the news and by reading a tweet from Trump about his replacement. You can't beat Trump for humiliating his adversaries. I think he's sadistic. He stated that "I think that Rex will be a lot happier now." Happy? Rex Tillerson's voice cracked several times as he said goodbye to the State Department. Although his last day is officially March 31st, 2018, his deputy John Sullivan will take over immediately until Mike Pompeo is confirmed.

Andy Borowitz, a satirist for the New Yorker, joked that Rex Tillerson hopes that Pres. Trump will find out he's been impeached by tweet.

Before Tillerson knew of his firing and before his last official day, Trump named Tillerson's successor, Mike Pompeo, lately head of the CIA. Pompeo's former role as CIA director devolved to Gina Haspel, the first female head of the CIA. What bothers me about the first female head of the CIA is not that she's female -- that would normally be cause for a feminist to celebrate, but the fact that she presided over torture in a dark ops site in Thailand. In one of the books I read about Pakistan and Afghanistan, I read that Pakistan would give up innocents to the CIA for interrogation to punish them for fighting real terrorists. I can't remember which book it was now. Maybe "Jawbreaker: The Hunt for Bin Laden," by Gary Berntsen, former CIA field commander of Operation Jawbreaker in 2001.

Berntsen wasn't allowed to go into Pakistan, which is where bin Laden was eventually found in Abbottabad, within a mile of the Pakistani equivalent of West Point. A female CIA officer found him through satellite imagery of "The Pacer," a very tall man walking on top of a compound in a neighborhood full of Pakistani generals in Abbottabad. I wonder if that female officer was Gina Haspel. She wasn't identified except as "Jen," obviously a pseudonym, in "No Easy Day," a book by a Navy Seal involved in the bin Laden mission. Once bin Laden's identity was established, the best of the best Navy Seals, were ordered to go in and "detain" him. They killed him in a confusing kerfuffle of agitated women and children, who were not harmed, after killing several of his guards on their way in.

Torture itself is bad enough, but what if Gina Haspel tortured or presided over the torture of the wrong guy? Tell me she didn't and I'm still worried about the future of the CIA and also about the future of our country. Two senior conservative fellows, Rauch and Wittes, at the Brookings Institution have urged their fellow Republicans to vote for Democrats "down to dogcatcher" to defeat "Trump and Trumpism," which is undermining "the rule of law and our democratic values." Trump and Trumpism are that serious of a threat to our republic.