The Oxymoron of Trump and "Intelligence"

Happy Watergate burglary day to all who celebrate! Today, June 17, marks the 54th  anniversary of the morning that security guard Frank Wills called in a strangely taped basement garage door and kicked off a series of events that unraveled a presidency, and I thought I’d spend it writing about a scandal that normally would seem equal to that, but that barely even registers in national news. 

Second, an apology for the accidental pause since the last newsletter — I’ve had my head down finishing my next book for the last couple weeks and am just emerging and returning to regular posting. More in the coming days about that next book and the summer’s fun new project.

On to the news: Overnight Donald Trump blew up his own nomination of the supremely unqualified Jay Clayton to be the nation’s next director of national intelligence, replacing the supremely unqualified hack Bill Pulte, who was replacing the merely mostly unqualified Tulsi Gabbard, who has served in that post since Trump took office last year.

Clayton was supposed to face a confirmation hearing today in the Senate, as part of a carefully negotiated deal that would see his nomination advance alongside the reauthorization of Section 702 of FISA, a critical and longstanding intelligence tool that allows the government to conduct warrantless surveillance of non-US persons by compelling US companies (think: Google) to turn over data (think: phone calls or emails) about foreign targets (think: spies, terror suspects, transnational criminals).

Now, though, Trump has predicated Clayton’s nomination on the confirmation of his nominee to take Clayton’s job as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, James McDonald, and then said he’ll only approve a FISA extension if it’s also passed alongside the SAVE America Act, the MAGA conspiracy bugaboo legislation about voter fraud.

It’s too early to know exactly how all of this will play out, but for the moment it leaves Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence, a position he’s holding alongside his role as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency — not typically, to say the least, the background the nation’s top intelligence officer. It’s been clear in fact that Pulte was chosen precisely because of how effectively he used that low-profile post to become a social media star and attack dog for Trump.

Pulte over the last year has used his position to orchestrate political attacks on Trump opponents by using private mortgage applications to invent a scourge of fraud and attempt to prosecute people like Letitia James, Adam Schiff, and Lisa Cook — a scandal that last summer I highlighted as itself as every bit as bad as Watergate.

Every day that Pulte sits in the director’s suite at Liberty Crossing, the headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is a danger to the safety and security of every American. It’s not clear that Clayton would be that much better — he too has no intelligence background, experience that is actually legally mandated by the legislation that created the job (50 US Code § 3023: “Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.”) and has a reputation for also being a lackey aiding Trump’s conspiracies, but Clayton does have one of the most important qualifications for the job as far as Capitol Hill is concerned: He’s not Bill Pulte.  

Trump actually pulled this trade of replacing terrible-for-slightly-less-worse actually in the first term as well: John Ratcliffe, now the CIA director and among the most grown-up-and-thoughtful adults of Trump II, had been poised in August 2019 to be DNI in Trump I, replacing Dan Coats, but the outrage over his incompetence and lack of qualifications led to Trump pulling his nomination. Then, in February 2020, Trump named social media troll Ric Grennell as acting DNI, a nomination so terrible that the Senate Intelligence Committee hustled through Ratcliffe’s confirmation because he appeared so sober and reasonable by comparison.

But the story that interests me today is a bit less about Pulte or Clayton themselves and more how Trump has corrupted what is supposed to be — legally — one of the most important roles in the US government.

The post of DNI was created in the wake of 9/11 in order to help wrangle all the nation’s intelligence agencies together, created unified analysis, and serve as the president’s top intelligence advisor.

It has long been one of the hardest posts in government — an almost impossible job requiring an immense understanding of both intelligence as a craft as well as a nuanced knowledge of federal bureaucracy and authorities to understand how to make 17 different intelligence agencies, with a combined annual budget larger than the GDP of 100 countries and a workforce of perhaps 100,000 personnel spread across every corner of the globe, covering everything from agricultural trends in Africa to counterterrorism cases in Detroit to the intricacies of the Chinese Politburo, all to work together to help protect US security and ensure that every morning when the US President wakes up, he’s the best informed person on the planet.

Yet, with a US president who actually has no desire to be the best informed person on the planet — and who, instead, stews his brain all day in a fever swamp of online conspiracies and is surrounded by toady yes-men and yes-women who only show or share information that conforms to the president’s existing worldview, it’s actually a mostly irrelevant task.

Last year over Memorial Day Weekend, I was in the stands just behind pit lane for the Indianapolis 500 and was surprised to see Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard walk right by me. Gabbard was never announced to the crowd, but rode in the back of a Chevy pickup during military appreciation parade with, incongruously, actor Terry Crews, who is not a veteran nor active-duty. I texted some friends to check on what Gabbard was doing there, but it turned out even senior Indy 500 executives didn’t know she was there. In fact, just about the only sign of her attendance at all is this Instagram Reel by Crews.

It was just an incredibly bizarre sighting and at the time seemed part-and-parcel with a Trump national security leadership that was clearly more interested in the perks and cos-play of their jobs than actually doing their jobs, just as FBI Director Kash Patel was still living in Las Vegas, showing up at UFC matches and hockey games, and using the FBI’s jets to visit his two-decade-younger country-music star girlfriend in Nashville.

In watching Gabbard and her role since, I’ve come to think of the Indy 500 moment differently: Her invisibility at the race was an accurate summary of her invisibility and irrelevance in her role as DNI. But for her one surprise appearance lurking in the background of an FBI raid of Fulton County election offices and an equally bizarre video she posted warning of nuclear annihilation during the drama of last summer’s war with Iran, she was all-but a non-entity as DNI — completely sidelined by the Trump administration during this year’s Iran war because of her opposition and statements that Iran was not close to a nuclear weapon.

At one point, Gabbard tried to remake the Presidential Daily Brief into something more like a Fox News show — complete with video and animations, because Donald Trump couldn’t hold his focus enough to read the briefing.

She tried too to attract his attention, like a needy child, by doing things like helping orchestrate the stunt of the Fulton County raid.

None of it worked or mattered. As Shane Harris summed up Gabbard’s tenure, “It’s a measure of Donald Trump’s low regard for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as well as its soon-to-be former occupant, that while the commander in chief was making final preparations to invade Venezuela and kidnap its president, Tulsi Gabbard was posting photos of herself from a beach in Hawaii.”

She quit-slash-was-pushed-out this spring amid Trump’s purge of the controversial women of his Cabinet — Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and Gabbard. She said in her resignation letter that she was stepping down because of her husband’s diagnosis of cancer — her husband is a videographer and, as best I can tell, actually was the reason she was at the Indy 500 last year, effectively as his +1.

Which brings us to the Pulte and Clayton drama, both of whom make 2019 John Ratcliffe and 2025 Tulsi Gabbard seem eminently qualified by comparison.

Back in 2020, when John Ratcliffe was coasting toward DNI confirmation, I wrote about how supremely unqualified he was for the job, summarizing the national security background of the post’s historic nominees:

The reality is that even most of those Senate-confirmed DNIs struggled in their jobs. Arguably, there have only been two effective DNIs in the nearly two-decade history of the role — Barack Obama’s James Clapper (who I profiled for WIRED in 2016) and Joe Biden’s Avril Haines, both of whom came to the job with immense expertise, were trusted by their president, and stayed in the role long enough to make a difference. (Avril Haines was actually just named the new head of the Carnegie Endowment last week.)

At the end of the day, the entire raison d’etre and effectiveness of a DNI comes down to whether a president wants to listen to him or her. Obama deeply relied on Clapper; Biden similarly on Haines. And their presidencies were better and more effective for it, and the nation safer.

Trump simply hasn’t cared about the role at all. And in many ways John Ratcliffe, his first term DNI is serving the role of the president’s top intelligence advisor now in his current post as CIA director. Trump likes him, trusts him, and Ratcliffe is willing to do the dirty things that Trump wants him to do. CIA and ODNI have actually even stopped coordinating on certain intelligence analysis, which, mind you, is the entire point of ODNI’s existence.

But of course neither Clayton nor Pulte are being tapped for the DNI role because Trump wants their intelligence analysis or national security expertise. He wants them to weaponize the nation’s intelligence agencies into a tool for punishing his political opponents — a la the absolute darkest chapters of actual Watergate. Their appointments are also, as Daniel Drezner has written, that Trump has burned through so much talent that he’s on the “F list of hires.”

It’s a shame for all the obvious reasons, but it’s also an important problem for US national security because the need for ODNI and the DNI was identified as a key part of helping to prevent the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 and then to the Iraq War and the bad intelligence around Saddam Hussein’s WMD. The reality, though, is that US intelligence is well overdue for a 25-years-after-9/11 overhaul, as Mark Stout argued late last year. But instead Trump’s disinterest and disrespect for the DNI role has led a host of calls to do away with ODNI generally and the DNI position specifically.

We’re watching and living through an entirely-predictable-yet-still-shocking train-wreck of the entire apparatus of US intelligence, a $100-billion-a-year enterprise that under normal circumstances is the literal envy of the world.

Fundamentally, the DNI role is in eclipse and the US intelligence community is being driven off the rails because of two fundamental problems:

• We elected the only human being on the entire planet who is not interested in reading or consuming the President’s Daily Brief.

• The President’s mind is so melted and his interests are so mercurial, bizarre, and corrupted by right-wing online conspiracies that everyone around him actively undermines the integrity of the information that arrives at his desk both to curry favor and to avoid provoking his wrath.

Until those problems are solved, the DNI role will remain irrelevant — and apt for politicization and weaponization, the two most dangerous threats that could face intelligence in a democracy.

Under normal circumstances, that would be a Watergate-size scandal worth caring about.

Thanks for reading — and looking forward to being back in your inboxes regularly!

GMG