Trump vs. the Spies
Something stunning happened on Capitol Hill Thursday: Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee practically stood shoulder to shoulder with senior officials from the U.S. intelligence community as they declared that America’s spies were right after all: The Russian government sought to interfere in the U.S. presidential election by hacking into election-related email and leaking information. It was a striking bipartisan rebuke to President-elect Donald Trump, who has consistently cast skepticism on allegations of Russian involvement and seemed to disparage the intelligence community. Perhaps in anticipation of that committee hearing, Trump was already backpedaling on Twitter before it started, declaring, “The media lies to make it look like I am against ‘Intelligence’ when in fact I am a big fan!”
Trump’s “never mind” tweet is unlikely to the CIA’s assessment of the Russian government’s role in election hacking “ridiculous” and has insisted, repeatedly, that the culprit could be anyone, including a 400-pound hacker or “somebody sitting in a bed some place.” His transition team has disparaged and discredited the CIA as “the same people who thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction”—even though they aren’t the same people, Russian cyber hacking isn’t the same intelligence target as Iraq WMD, the Iraq failure was 14 years ago, and intelligence agencies have radically overhauled their analytic process since then. The president-elect has also said he won’t bother getting daily intelligence briefings—making him the first president since 9/11 to skip them—because he’s smart. And just a day before Trump declared himself an intelligence fan, reported that his team was cooking up a scheme to purge the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence of suspected politicization in the ranks by trimming and both agencies. (The Trump team has this report, which was based on the accounts of sources “familiar with the planning,” including at least one close to the transition.)
