“Former National Security Agency analyst John Schindler has become well known for his commentary about ties between the Russian government and members of the Trump administration … ‘George Washington was all about counterintelligence,’ he said. ‘He would have had at least half the Trump WH shot as traitors, without tears or doubts.’”

I don’t know which is more risible: this “analyst’s” acute ignorance of history, his slander of George Washington, or his pathetic attempt to enlist the Founders on the side of the profoundly despotic “Intelligence Community.”

One charge we can never lay to General Washington’s account is bloodthirstiness. His Excellency went out of his way to save lives—even those of his enemies. He tried long and earnestly to excuse the captured British spy, John Andre, from execution for espionage. And while Washington might have been able to assassinate Benedict Arnold after the latter’s desertion to the British, he refused. Instead, His Excellency authorized a cloak-and-dagger scheme to kidnap Arnold and return him to American territory for trial. (You can experience these intensely dramatic episodes, and plenty more, in my novel, Abducting Arnold.)

For sure, if Washington were to order any miscreants “shot as traitors, without tears or doubts,” it would be the spooks at the NSA. Especially ones as indecent and obscene as John Schindler. Before he was anything else, George Washington was a devout Christian: he would have denounced in the strongest language possible Schindler’s lewd antics and drummed him out of the army—or government—in lowest disgrace.

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