Trump's Most Dangerous Destruction Yet: reshaping intelligence community 2 serve his political needs

Trump’s Most Dangerous Destruction Yet
What the president is doing to America’s intelligence community could have enormous repercussions for the 2020 election and the country’s preparedness for threats from around the world.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/trumps-most-dangerous-destruction-yet/607021/

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On Wednesday, Trump dismissed the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, following a blowup over a briefing to Congress on election interference. Trump was reportedly enraged by the briefing, in which, as The New York Times reported, “intelligence officials warned House lawmakers … that Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Trump re-elected.” According to the Times, the “disclosure … angered Mr. Trump, who complained that Democrats would use it against him.” In particular, “Mr. Trump was particularly irritated that Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the leader of the impeachment proceedings, was at the briefing” and “the president berated … Maguire … for allowing [the briefing] to take place.”

In Maguire’s place, Trump installed on an acting basis Richard Grenell, the current ambassador to Germany and a Trump loyalist of no particular intelligence background. Grenell has moved swiftly to put his stamp on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, removing the No. 2 official, Andrew Hallman, and replacing him with Kashyap Patel, a White House national-security official who had gained notoriety earlier as an aide to Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chief of the House Intelligence Committee , himself a peddler of conspiracy theories.

The politics here were not subtle; the president’s own tweets on the subject made his concerns perfectly clear. Over the course of several days, Trump tweeted his rage that Schiff has had access to the briefing about Russia once again intervening on Trump’s behalf. “Just another Shifty Schiff leak. Isn’t there a law about this stuff?” he wrote. Later, he added: “Somebody please tell incompetent (thanks for my high poll numbers) & corrupt politician Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff to stop leaking Classified information or, even worse, made up information, to the Fake News Media. Someday he will be caught, & that will be a very unpleasant experience!”

All of this was taking place as Trump was simultaneously attempting to prevent former National Security Adviser John Bolton from publishing his book, which reportedly contains new information about Trump’s campaign to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations into Joe and Hunter Biden. The Washington Post reported last week that Trump has taken the position that “everything he uttered to [Bolton] about national security is classified and that he will seek to block the book’s publication.” Again, the politics don’t even have the shame to lurk beneath the surface; they are right out in the open. According to the Post, Trump has determined that the book “should not see the light of day before the November election”—as though legitimately classified material would be any less sensitive after the election.



So the president spent the week reshaping the intelligence community to serve his political needs, removing those who speak inconvenient realities, and using control over classified material to suppress criticism. And the result was, within a remarkably short period of time, exactly the sort of public abuse of intelligence one might expect from such conduct.