One approach Biden is considering, others said: placing people in charge who are experienced and who are already familiar faces to the intelligence community and its oversight bodies.
There’s precedent for holding over senior national security officials from one administration to the next — George Tenet, for instance, served as CIA director under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, while Bob Gates became Obama’s defense secretary after several years with Bush.
Intelligence has become a political weapon under Trump, the Democratic nominee's advisers say.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden speaks during a drive-in campaign rally at Riverside High School on October 18, 2020 in Durham, North Carolina.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden speaks during a drive-in campaign rally on Oct. 18, 2020 in North Carolina. Biden’s advisers and allies are thinking about how to restore morale and public trust in the intelligence community’s leadership, should Biden defeat President Trump
By NATASHA BERTRAND and KYLE CHENEY
10/19/2020 04:30 AM EDT
President Donald Trump was in the middle of receiving a highly classified briefing on Afghanistan at his New Jersey golf club when he suddenly craved a malted milkshake.
“Does anyone want a malt?” he asked the senior defense and intelligence officials gathered around him, an august group that included the head of the CIA’s Special Activities Center, which is responsible for covert operations and paramilitary operations. “We have the best malts, you have to try them,” Trump insisted, as he beckoned a waiter into the room where code-word classified intelligence was being discussed.
The malt episode, which took place a few months after Trump took office in 2017, became legendary inside the CIA, said three former officials. It was seen as an early harbinger of Trump’s disinterest in intelligence, which would later be borne out by the new president’s notorious resistance to reading his classified daily briefing, known as the PDB, and his impatience with the briefers, current and former officials said.
But what initially seemed like mere boredom — which demoralized intelligence officials but could potentially be managed by including pictures and charts in briefings to hold the president’s attention — later morphed into something the officials saw as more sinister: an interest in wielding intelligence as a political cudgel. Whether selectively declassified by spy chiefs he installed for their loyalty, or obscured from congressional and public scrutiny if it conflicted with his preferred narrative, intelligence became just another weapon in the president’s arsenal.
Trump’s actions, and the endless partisan battles over the Russia probe and impeachment, have left the intelligence community bruised and battered. Former Vice President Joe Biden’s advisers and allies in Congress are already thinking about what a heavy lift it will be to restore morale inside the agencies, legitimacy on Capitol Hill and public trust in the intelligence community’s leadership should Biden defeat Trump in November, according to more than a dozen people close to the candidate.
“This will be among the most important things a President Biden would need to do—and that he’ll want to do—immediately,” said Tony Blinken, who served as deputy secretary of state and deputy national security adviser under Barack Obama and is a top adviser to the Biden campaign. “I know from several conversations with him about this that he has deep concern about what has been done to the IC these last several years in terms of the politicization, and repairing that starts at the top with the president.”
Blinken recalled Biden telling him in February 2017, shortly after leaving office, that the thing he missed most about being vice president was receiving the PDB every morning.
“He said he felt so connected to what was going on around the world thanks to the PDB, and that losing that connection felt like a real void,” Blinken said. “I think that is evidence of the basic value he placed on the work of the intelligence community, because the PDB is of course their most important product.”
One approach Biden is considering, others said: placing people in charge who are experienced and who are already familiar faces to the intelligence community and its oversight bodies.
There’s precedent for holding over senior national security officials from one administration to the next — George Tenet, for instance, served as CIA director under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, while Bob Gates became Obama’s defense secretary after several years with Bush.
But there appears to be little appetite for that kind of bipartisan gesture now. When Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe canceled in-person election security briefings for lawmakers over the summer, Biden accused the Trump administration of hoping Russian President Vladimir Putin would “once more boost” Trump’s candidacy.
"This is not how democracy works," Biden said at the time. "But it is how American national security and sovereignty are violated."
“A couple of people at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would have to go, absolutely,” said former CIA and NSA Director Gen. Michael Hayden, referring to Trump’s stocking the office with loyalists, like Ratcliffe, over the last few months. The former Texas lawmaker’s scant intelligence experience — fewer than two years on the House Intelligence Committee — was among the issues that scuttled his confirmation prospects when he was first nominated by Trump last year.
“Probably Gina Haspel would have to go, too,” Hayden said.
Haspel, a career intelligence official who became the agency’s first female director in May 2018, has rankled some current and former officials by at times appearing overly willing to appease the president. She has clamped down on the flow of Russia intelligence to Trump—who is known to erupt in anger whenever confronted with news of Moscow’s malign activities in the U.S.—and stood and clapped for his state of the union address earlier this year, a move out of step with past directors’ efforts to appear apolitical.
“Gina is a good woman, but she would have to go,” Hayden said.
The Biden campaign has been considering a couple of veteran national security hands who could serve in senior intelligence roles in a Biden administration and hit the ground running to repair what they see as the damage Trump has done to the intelligence community over the last four years, people familiar with the internal discussions said. Among the names is former acting CIA director Michael Morell, former Obama national security adviser and close Biden confidant Tom Donilon, former Obama deputy national security adviser Avril Haines, former Deputy NSA Director Chris Inglis, and former deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Robert Cardillo.
“There is no question that Biden and his team will have an urgent task in restoring faith, trust, competence, and morale in the intelligence community,” said former NSA general counsel Glenn Gerstell, who retired earlier this year. “It’s going to be a huge effort.”
He added that a Biden administration will need to pull off a revolution in how the intelligence community thinks about and responds to a changing world—complex, transnational threats like climate change and pandemics—following the reduced focus on the war on terror and the onrush of new technologies.
“That transformation, which should have occurred in earnest years ago, has to be accelerated under Biden,” Gerstell said, “or else we will be so far behind China we won’t be able to ever catch up. With ODNI having four directors and being so distracted, we mostly blew four years at a time when every moment counts.”
Trump’s prevailing attitude toward the intelligence community, current and former officials said, has been that he knows better—and that the agencies therefore need to be constrained to better align with his priorities.
He has also repeatedly made clear his distrust of the intelligence community, from comparing them to Nazis before he was even inaugurated to discarding their analysis of Russia’s 2016 election interference in favor of Vladimir Putin’s denials. He often uses quotation marks around the word “intelligence” in his tweets to signal his disdain. And he has been reckless with classified information, from revealing highly sensitive secrets about ISIS to the Russians in the Oval Office to tweeting out sensitive images of Iran taken by one of the U.S.’s most advanced spy satellites.
"I think we need somebody like that that's strong and can really rein it in,” Trump said last year, when outlining why he wanted Ratcliffe to replace Dan Coats, a respected former Indiana lawmaker who often resisted the president as ODNI chief. “As you've all learned, the intelligence agencies have run amok,” Trump added. “They've run amok."
In some ways, the reins of the intelligence and defense communities have been loosened under Trump, current and former officials said. NSA Director Paul Nakasone, for example, has been “unshackled,” as Wired put it, to wage more offensive cyber operations against adversaries than previous administrations ever allowed.
And Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who served as the director for European Affairs on Trump’s NSC until February, said the degree to which Trump has “shaken the faith in the executive branch” could undermine the progress that the Pentagon and intelligence community have made in responding more quickly to various threats, particularly in cyberspace. “That is another, in certain ways more troubling, issue that will have to be managed,” he said in an interview.
A president should always have a healthy skepticism of intelligence, be willing to ask tough questions, and demand accountability, said former CIA Director John Brennan, who served from March 2013 to January 2017 and is now one of Trump’s fiercest critics. His new book, "Undaunted," outlines some disagreements he had with then-Vice President Biden, for example, on issues including the Osama bin Laden raid and the U.S. military presence in Iraq.
“I remember [former DNI] Jim Clapper and myself would be in NSC meetings in the Situation Room, and we knew we'd be the skunk at the party because we would be presenting intelligence that might be at odds with the prevailing view,” Brennan said. “I was questioned on it, challenged on it, and rightly so. But I never felt that they didn't want to hear it.”
Hayden echoed that sentiment. “Many times I disagreed with Biden,” he said. “And that’s OK!”
Biden served on the Senate Intelligence Committee for a decade before entering the White House and was rarely seen in his West Wing office without a copy of the PDB under his arm, his former aides said.
He is the “diametric opposite of Trump” in that respect, said a former senior administration official. In a 2009 speech for the swearing-in ceremony of Leon Panetta as CIA director, Biden said, “The most important thing for this job, in my view … is to give the president of the United States the unvarnished truth, not what he thinks the president may want to hear.”
It’s a sentiment seldom heard from Trump, who has instilled a sense in some intelligence professionals that they have to be careful not to present information that might conflict with his political agenda. He fired the former acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, earlier this year for allowing a subordinate to brief lawmakers on Russia’s interference in 2020. And there’s been “tip-toeing” around Congress among analysts and briefers wary of their findings getting back to the president, as one former senior intelligence official put it — particularly in the presence of staunch Trump ally and Gang of 8 member Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).
The fear of provoking Trump’s wrath led to a months-long standoff earlier this year between Congress and ODNI officials, who pushed for the annual Worldwide Threats hearing to be held behind closed doors so that the agency directors would not be seen publicly contradicting the president on key issues like Iran, North Korea and Russia. (CIA officials have had some trouble getting through to the president on issues related to North Korea, former officials said, beginning early on in his presidency when he instructed them to consult with former professional basketball player Dennis Rodman on the subject.)
Over the summer, a DHS whistleblower alleged that intelligence on Russia’s malign activities in the U.S. and the domestic terror threat posed by white supremacists was also being suppressed by senior DHS leadership so as not to anger Trump, though the White House pushed back on the claim.
“For many of us, Biden’s demeanor in and of itself is like the healing balm we all need,” said Elizabeth Neumann, who served as assistant secretary of counterterrorism and threat prevention at DHS until earlier this year and has been outspoken about the department’s politicization of intelligence under Trump.
“And we don’t want to get into a tit-for-tat, with the Biden administration just focusing on vengeance,” continued Neumann, who has endorsed Biden. “But it will be really important to acknowledge that there has been a brain drain of good, competent, and qualified intelligence leaders under this administration, and these people should be given an opportunity to come back into government.”
One that immediately comes to mind, Neumann said, is former counterterrorism chief Russ Travers, who alerted the former IC inspector general Michael Atkinson earlier this year to his concerns over the shrinking budgets and resources available to the intelligence community. Travers was removed from his post in March by Ric Grenell, a Trump devotee who pushed through a number of controversial moves during his brief stint as acting director.
Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), a former CIA analyst, said in an interview that “a targeted callback” of officers who were forced out or resigned under Trump might be one way of getting some of that expertise back.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, agreed and pointed to Sue Gordon, a career official and former Coats deputy who was well-respected on both sides of the aisle and within the agencies but left the administration after Trump ousted her boss.
"I think that to the extent that we could attract some of these people back to public service, even in a transitional role, to build up a little bit of trust again with people that are known inside the intelligence community and liked and trusted also by Congress, I think that might not be a bad idea," Krishnamoorthi said.
Another task for a Biden administration will be to identify “who in the senior ranks may have been supportive and complicit in politicization of intelligence,” Slotkin said. “If those people are still in their jobs, there should at a minimum be some pretty clear conversations—and, at a maximum, to me, it's probably not the right career for them.”
Vindman, who was forced out of government following his impeachment testimony against Trump, said he was unnerved by the “creep of politicization” within the defense and intelligence community before he was effectively forced to resign from the military earlier this year after he testified at Trump’s impeachment trial.
“In many ways, I am a victim of that trend,” he said, “because under normal circumstances, you would expect senior leadership to defend their people aggressively—especially people doing the right thing. So that authoritarian mindset that has infiltrated these institutions will have to be undone by a Biden administration through a protracted period of confidence-building.”
To that end, Krishnamoorthi said it would be important for Congress to partner with a potential President Biden on whistleblower reforms and other measures introduced by Democratic lawmakers to help insulate the intelligence community from politics. Trump repeatedly and publicly attacked the whistleblower whose complaint led to his impeachment proceedings, and fired the intelligence community watchdog, Michael Atkinson, who brought the complaint to Congress—one of five inspectors general Trump dismissed in the space of six weeks earlier this year.
Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), also a member of the House Intelligence Committee, encouraged Biden to back legislation protecting the independence of inspectors general and whistleblowers that Democrats recently unveiled as part of a post-Watergate-style reform package.
"Fundamentally, the key thing is that there must be trust between the oversight committees and the intelligence community and that starts at the top," Maloney said, adding that it was “time to show the political hacks the door and bring back the nonpolitical professionals who care about our country's national security and who will tell it to us straight regardless of the politics.”
