It won’t ‘end well’: How Trump’s repeated attacks on US intelligence endangers the country
In dismissing the Central Intelligence Agency’s report that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman almost certainly ordered dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, President Donald Trump last week pulled one more block out of the shaky Jenga tower that is his relationship with his own intelligence community.
Over the Thanksgiving holidays, the president said the CIA’s report was really based on “feelings,” not facts, concluding that perhaps “the world should be held accountable, because the world is a vicious place.”
ThinkProgress reached out to the CIA asking for an on-the-record response to Trump’s comments, as well as other intelligence-related issues, but did not receive one as of publication time.
Some within the agency are unfazed by what the president says, seeing nuances that might be missed by the public. Former CIA chief Daniel Hoffman pointed some of these out in an op-ed he wrote for Fox News.
“CIA delivers analytical judgments with low, medium, and high levels of confidence. At the very best, the CIA might produce an assessment with ‘near certainty,’” wrote Hoffman. “It is always the president’s responsibility and prerogative to incorporate intelligence in his policy deliberation and decision-making.”
But not all former CIA chiefs feel the same. James Clapper and John Brennan have criticized President Trump (the former calling Trump a “show-me-the-money” president, the latter calling the president’s behavior “treasonous“), and in return, the president has threatened to revoke their security clearances.
“Intelligence work is not about getting the smoking gun…there’s going to be gaps in the understanding. And I don’t think a guy like Trump understands this concept at all. It’s all very black and white to him.”
Former CIA analyst John Nixon told ThinkProgress that while all presidents — especially after Sept. 11 — have had issues with intelligence assessments, President Trump’s disdain is magnified on social media.
“A lot of presidents and politicians in general don’t understand intelligence,” said Nixon, adding the Trump is no exception and it is problematic as it “creates a schism between the policymaker and the intel community.”
“Intelligence work is not about getting the smoking gun…there’s going to be gaps in the understanding. And I don’t think a guy like Trump understands this concept at all. It’s all very black and white to him,” he said.
Nixon has written about his experiences in briefing former president George W. Bush and times when those briefings were not well received. For instance, he once told President Bush that Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was likely going to have a long career in Iraq.
“Bush just looked at me like I’d accused his father of being a child molester,” Nixon told ThinkProgress (al-Sadr’s party took the lead in Iraq’s parliamentary elections in May).
Choosing to believe the Saudi crown prince over the CIA’s report is only the president’s latest broadside against his own intelligence agencies. Since taking to office, President Trump has railed against any report that runs counter to his world view or interests.
He ignored an FBI report in May 2017 that sounded an alarm on the rise of white supremacists in the United States, and didn’t stray from his position even after Heather Heyer was killed protesting against the nationalist Unite the Right rally in August of that year. Indeed, President Trump strayed from this mission during a press conference on infrastructure to make a point that there were “very fine people” on both sides of that protest — including the side with people waving torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”
Trump also ignored the CIA’s intelligence stating that Iran had not violated the 2015 nuclear deal. This conclusion was grudgingly held up by then-CIA director (now Secretary of State) Mike Pompeo, but was brushed aside by the president, who violated the 2015 agreement by pulling out of it in May, potentially upending global trade and regional security.
For Trump, FBI is ‘crawling with Democrats’
It seems as though President Trump has a persistently contentious relationship with the agencies, and, in the case of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (which operates under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice), those who head them.
He flat-out fired FBI Director James Comey in 2017, and has had what appears to be a contentious relationship with his replacement, Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump himself.
And we are privy to just how the president feels owing to his prolific tweeting habit and his tendency to speak off the cuff at press conferences. For instance, take the following from his July 16 summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, when he made it clear that he believed Putin’s word over the FBI’s intelligence on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election (about which he had been warned, but which he chose to ignore):
President Trump later tried to walk back his support for President Putin in the face of solid U.S. intelligence (put together by several agencies, including the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency) in a series of awkward statements, but the damage was done. And he’s done little to fix it.
Trump instead uses every opportunity to rant about how the FBI hasn’t done enough to investigate the emails Hillary Clinton sent using a private server.
His other favorite target comes in the form of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is currently investigating ties between President Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia.
Mueller, a former FBI director, is viewed with naked suspicion and derision by the president, who has tweeted about him 58 times since December 2017 (compared to Comey’s 100 since October 2016).
On Tuesday morning, President Trump seems to wake up angry, starting his day by insulting Mueller, Democrats, and the Department of Justice:
The Phony Witch Hunt continues, but Mueller and his gang of Angry Dems are only looking at one side, not the other. Wait until it comes out how horribly & viciously they are treating people, ruining lives for them refusing to lie. Mueller is a conflicted prosecutor gone rogue….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2018
“The comments he’s made, the descriptions of Mueller and his ‘gang of Hillary supporters’ is just nuts, and does not comport with reality,” said Manning. “I mean, if you listen to Trump, suddenly the FBI is crawling with Democrats. When did that happen?”
The Justice Department did not respond to ThinkProgress’ request for comment.
The consequences
While the lesson of questioning authority is not a bad one, President Trump is not the one to teach it, as he bristles anytime his authority is challenged in even in the slightest.
And it would be one thing if President Trump pushed back on things like the CIA’s involvement in targeted killings or the FBI’s excessive surveillance. But he doesn’t. He only ignores or berates the agencies when they go after those who are close to him — be it Mohammed bin Salman or his former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
The consequences are serious, telling adversaries that as long as they have a direct line to the president, they can interfere in U.S. elections and savagely murder people, all evidence and intelligence be damned.
“It gives encouragement to our enemies…and I’ve talked to people who are there [at the CIA] now, and they say that they are just ignored. And that is a very bad thing, because we’re there for a purpose. And the purpose is to prove warning, to enable policymakers to make better decisions,” said Nixon.
And America’s adversaries use whatever they can for leverage — from exploiting these gaps between intelligence and the presidency to “using the tools of our capitalist society against us,” in flooding social media with false accounts and bad information.
“The credibility of the United States is really at issue — if you’re an ally or an adversary, you draw conclusions based on this,” said Manning. “And a lot of the things Trump does are interpreted by white supremacist groups through his own dog whistles.”
Manning said that Trump’s “authoritarian tendencies and disregard for the fundamental provisions of American democracy” are damaging.
Trump’s attacks on intelligence agencies have also had the strange effect of making the CIA and FBI underdogs. It’s difficult to recall a time when Americans have marched in support of a career FBI man, as they did for Mueller after the president replaced Attorney General Jeff Sessions with Matthew Whitaker, an outspoken critic of Mueller’s investigation.
But here we are. And it is in this climate that the intelligence agencies have to continue writing reports they know the president might disregard — or publicly excoriate — and somehow, present them to him. Though, Manning notes, this is never done directly.
“The reports won’t get read by him — some summary of it will be read to him,” he said, adding that the contents will no doubt be “reduced to Trump-speak.”
They need to keep it short (because “no one reads a memo more than two pages”) and, as Manning put it, they must “give it their best shot” as they try to sustain the integrity of their operations.
Nixon, though, is worried.
“I don’t think this is going to end well at all,” he said. “All I can hope for is that he’s a one-term president and that we will get sanity back in the White House.”
Source: thinkprogress