Suddenly, they have standards again.

Playtime is over. Cat's coming back.

What else can one conclude with this kind of news from the New York Times?

A C.I.A. official has been charged with disclosing classified documents that appeared to show Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran for a missile attack earlier this year, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter.

The official, Asif W. Rahman, was indicted last week in federal court in Virginia with two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. He was arrested by the F.B.I. on Tuesday in Cambodia and brought to federal court in Guam to face charges.

The documents were prepared by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes images and information collected by U.S. spy satellites. It conducts work in support of clandestine and military operations.

Mr. Rahman, who worked abroad for the C.I.A., was set to appear in Guam on Thursday.

The information in the documents is highly classified and details interpretations of satellite imagery that shed light on a possible strike by Israel on Iran. They began circulating last month on the Telegram app.

That was quick.

Based on the sparse info in the story, he appears to have been a highly vetted CIA officer with responsibility abroad, and his absence of social media presence suggests a clandestine capacity. He was busted on U.S. Election Day in Cambodia, meaning, the lawmen had been working on the matter before that, probably dating from the leak itself reported on Oct. 19. The Cambodia locale was the kind of place they might lure someone for an arrest, so he could have been based pretty much anywhere within flying distance of Phnom Penh. But betting markets and polls had shown that Trump was the likely next president around the time of the leak, so they may have been motivated to get this guy based on what was coming. He may have been motivated to leak based on the same likelihood. The institution strives to save itself, preserving some kind of appearance of professionalism, which was hardly the case in the recent past.

The questions the New York Times is unlikely to ask is what kind of culture infests that agency that someone like this could so blithely leak data on a political matter around a country he didn't like? Was it widespread? In the past, this was treason, surely the most unforgiveable sin to a spy agency and CIA officers knew how to keep secrets. Not anymore, apparently. The pickings must be fabulous for many enemy and even friendly foreign intelligence agencies.

And what culture was in place at CIA that this alleged creep would hate Israel so much he would harm it and the U.S.'s relationship with it, using his classified clearance like a lever to get his job done? Was it the same culture that bred this Amy McFadden creature, who merrily posted pictures of Palestinian paragliders coming down to massacre Israeli women and children in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack on her social media, the severity of which she would have known about as a top intelligence official? Were they all of one woke mind?

And what agency culture was in place that he could leak so easily and then expect to get away with it? An Aldrich Ames, burrowed deep for years in secrecy, he was not, he leaked the same way other recent leakers did apparently because a lot of them have clearances, a lot of them are doing it, and because penalties for doing it were so low if not unlikely. Army SPC Bradley Manning, let out of prison by President Obama after he claimed to be transgender, and getting free surgery on the government's dime while he was at it, was the perfect example beginning in 2010. There were similar low standards with Air Force E-4 Reality Winner who also leaked to help terrorists and support the enemies of Israel in 2018 and got let out early. The common-ness of the activity and its methods seems to have enabled the lawmen to scoop Rahman up fairly quickly, because so much is known about the existing low standards and methods.

They busted him fast and this isn't the only example of a propensity to suddenly behave instead of ignore by these agencies. There's sort of a pattern emerging now:

Witness the case of the FEMA official who was fired this weekend for telling her rescue teams to bypass homes with Trump banners, a grotesque politicization of the agency's mission, given that someone calling for help under the rubble of a hurricane-damaged home could have been studiously ignored by these FEMA officials, who noted in their records that they ignored homes because of the Trump signs based on her orders, while the residences next to them without Trump banners would have been offered aid.

Prior to the hurricane, the agency and the press that slavishly printed their press releases had denied that aid had been politicized, despite complaints of no aid from conservative enclaves in North Carolina and elsewhere. President Trump was denounced as a conspiracy theorist by the New York Times for making the charge. Now it turns out he was right all along and subsequent statements from the fired official, Marn'i Washington, as well as a recent report that FEMA officials were suddenly banging on Trump-sign doors in North Carolina to see if they got FEMA aid after the Florida story broke, suggests that she was not the only one doing it.

Again, they fired Washington quickly, less than a week after the whistleblower story ran, with FEMA chief Deanne Criswell basically saying she was shocked, shocked this could happen.

They're being good, you see, probably to avoid scrutiny and a reckoning as Trump dispatches Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to ask them 'what do you do here,' as the common meme goes, with their Department of Government Efficiency put there to hose out the muck in government.

That didn't happen when the IRS was caught during the Obama administration of targeting Tea Party activists and the miscreants involved were allowed to retire with full pensions. It also didn't happen when an FBI official was caught falsifying a FISA request in order to spy on an innocent Trump campaign activist (the official got a slap on the wrist and was allowed to keep his law license), or when it colluded with once-woke Twitter to censor American free speech during the election of 2020. It didn't happen when the FBI targeted parents at school board meetings as terrorists, individuals posting on social media, or Latin Mass enthusiasts as potential terrorists. Nobody was busted for those violations of the First Amendment at all. It didn't happen at the Transportation Safety Administration, which blacklisted then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard on the terrorist watchlist, forcing her to undergo extensive scrutiny and intrusive searches any time she flew an airplane, while illegals rode without identification for free. Whoever made that illegal decision is still on the job.

I suspect Elon and Vivek are not only going to unearth a lot of government waste as their scrutiny goes on but a lot of wokery and a lot of corruption and perhaps even crime as they just try to find ways to make government more efficient.

In the meantime, the swamp tries to shield itself, in a sorry bid to claim it had standards all along, even though we can all see that that's pure Eddie Haskellism in their sudden claims to being choirboys all along.

Image: Wikipedia, government logo // public domain