From The Economist, Nov 24th 2024:
The president-elect’s intelligence picks suggest a radical agenda
OF DONALD TRUMP’s nominees to high office, few are more suspicious of the government they are pegged to join than Tulsi Gabbard. She warns of a “slow-rolling coup” by “the entire permanent Washington machine”, as she describes it in “For Love of Country”, a campaign book published in April. Her list of putschists is long, catholic and spook-heavy: “the Democratic National Committee, propaganda media, Big Tech, the FBI, the CIA, and a whole network of rogue intelligence and law enforcement agents working at the highest levels of our government”. Yet she may soon oversee some of that machinery.
On November 13th Donald Trump chose Ms Gabbard as his nominee for Director of National Intelligence (DNI), a post that co-ordinates the work of the alphabet soup of 18 spy agencies in the country’s intelligence community. The news raised fears in the agencies and among America’s allies that intelligence will be distorted to suit Mr Trump’s preferences. And it heralds rifts within Mr Trump’s administration between hawks like Mike Waltz and Marco Rubio, nominated as national security adviser and secretary of state respectively, and radicals such as Ms Gabbard, who have argued for a softer line on China, Russia and Iran.
Mr Trump’s intelligence team is still taking shape. On November 12th he picked John Ratcliffe as CIA director. He is a former congressman who briefly served as DNI at the end of Mr Trump’s first term. At the FBI, Christopher Wray, the director, who was appointed by Mr Trump in 2017 to a ten-year term, seems likely to be replaced. In his first term, Mr Trump clashed repeatedly and frequently with the FBI and other agencies. He was angered by their reports that Russia had intervened on his behalf in the 2016 election. In 2020 he fired a string of top intelligence officials including Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who had declared that the 2020 election was not, as Mr Trump insisted, stolen.
That history suggests that Mr Trump and his appointees will seek dramatic reforms, even purges, in the spy agencies and at the FBI. The bureau, the premier federal law-enforcement agency, houses big counterintelligence and counterterrorism sections that collect and analyse intelligence. It is likely to be first in line for Mr Trump’s plans to neuter perceived enemies. Kash Patel, an inexperienced loyalist whom Mr Trump sought and failed to install as deputy CIA director in the dying days of his first administration, has been linked to Mr Wray’s job. “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” promised Mr Patel last December. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly…we’re putting you all on notice.”
The bureau might also be checked in other ways. Mr Trump and Ms Gabbard are both opposed to Section 702 of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence (FISA) Act, which authorises electronic surveillance on American soil. It was renewed this year after a fierce debate in the Senate but will lapse in 2026. “The [FISA] court has proven to be a dependable rubber stamp for government requests,” argues Ms Gabbard (not inaccurately). If Mr Trump quashes it, the FBI will lose a major source of intelligence.
Other clues for Mr Trump’s plans might be found in the writings of those in his political orbit. Last year Project 2025, an initiative by the conservative Heritage Foundation think-tank to prepare for a Trump administration, published “Mandate for Leadership”. Dustin Carmack, a former aide to Mr Ratcliffe, contributed a chapter on intelligence. In May this year the America First Policy Institute published a similar volume, with a chapter on intelligence by Sam Faddis, a retired CIA officer who sought to overturn Mr Trump’s election defeat in 2020. Many of Mr Carmack’s proposed reforms are technocratic, such as efforts to improve intelligence sharing and streamline security clearances across agencies. He also expresses enthusiasm for covert action, in line with the views of traditional Republicans. Other proposals are more contentious....
....MUCH MORE
As noted in the intro to November 3's "60 Years Ago, Congress Warned Us About the Surveillance State. What Happened?":
It's time for another Church Committee.
And probably the break-up of the CIA and FBI. The agencies have become little more than extortion rackets, gathering their bits and bytes of information not for the greater good of the country but to exert pressure and control on the people who pay their salaries and on the people's elected representatives.
Extortion, blackmail and coercion are what they do.They knew all about the Biden family corruption and used that information, not to warn the country but to feather their own nests and expand their power base. And that's just one example among dozens. It's a nasty business. As Senate [then]-Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Washington insider since 1980, said in January 2017:
“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
Possibly also of interest, August 31's "'The CIA And The Media' By Carl Bernstein"