Very disturbing thing I have noticed recently is that U.S. officials no longer care about being perceived as lying. After the "SignalGate" scandal several top officials went public to claim that the information they shared was not classified (immediately disproved after it was then published) or that it was somehow "planted" there by a nefarious infiltrator, for which no evidence at all was provided.

The reason they are doing this is because they don't care about convincing people necessarily, they just have created their own separate right-wing media echo chamber that just need to feed narratives to run with. We are well past the era of reasoned debate or persuasion. 

We are still far from that point thanks to separation of powers and a strong judiciary, but this is how dictatorships operate. Over time it generates a level of cynicism in the system that makes it unsupportable.

Reporter at Drop Site News, co-host at Breaking Points/Counter Points

The avoidance of FOIA paper trail is very upsetting