Intelligence

The most powerful intelligence alliance in the world is breaking up. In January, Donald Trump restricted intelligence-sharing on Russia and Ukraine, cutting allies out of negotiations and freezing certain channels entirely. Then in March came the so-called “Ukraine intel blackout,” an unprecedented freeze that shut Britain and Australia out of updates on Russian troop movements. And last month, the Dutch said they were scaling back intelligence-sharing with America over fears of “politicization.” Trump tends to treat intelligence as leverage, a tool to reward countries that fall in line with Washington and punish those that don’t. In his hands, intelligence and secrets have become bargaining chips.

Tulsi Gabbard's declassification of documents that support the view that the intelligence community engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to target the incoming president with false or dubious claims is truly explosive – unless you deliberately choose to ignore it. Surprise, surprise – the same people who helped manufacture and propagate these claims in the first place are sticking to their guns, with the normal veterans of the CNN octobox.

In 1906, the famous polymath Sir Francis Galton visited a country fair on the edge of Plymouth, England. A bullock had been tethered for slaughter and almost 800 locals were invited to guess its dressed weight: how heavy it would be after butchering. Galton – an obsessive measurer of people, weather and intelligence – gathered the entries, calculated the average and found something remarkable. The crowd’s collective estimate came within a single pound of the ox’s actual weight. This elegant experiment would become one of the founding truisms of modern democratic thought. Galton had shown that while individuals may err, the group, in aggregate, can reason with uncanny accuracy and prescience. He had discovered “the wisdom of crowds.

For the proponents of what they like to call realism and restraint in foreign affairs, it’s been a banner day. President Donald Trump has initiated peace talks with Russia by sidelining Ukraine. And Tulsi Gabbard has been confirmed to become director of national intelligence — overseeing eighteen agencies — on a 52-48 vote. At the White House, where she was sworn in by Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump declared that Gabbard is “an American of extraordinary courage and exceptional patriotism.”   The sole Republican to dissent from her nomination was Mitch McConnell who has vowed to uphold oldline Republican internationalism during what is more than likely his final term in the Senate.

Despite all the precautions and double-checks, at some level everything ends up a matter of trust. And in the case of Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, much of that trust was violated. Why couldn't the military trust him? Why do we have to trust him? The documents against Jack Teixeira, the twenty-one-year-old airman first class who is accused of leaking classified documents, indicate that he was granted a top secret security clearance in 2021, which was required for his job as a computer network technician in the Massachusetts Air National Guard. While that may sound like an exceptional degree of access for such a junior service member, having top secret/SCI (sensitive compartmentalized information) clearance in that kind of job is standard.

Take Cockburn's hand and let him whisk you back to the halcyon days of fall 2020. The presidential campaign was in full swing and the New York Post had just gotten its hands on a scoop: Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, had left his laptop at a repair shop in Delaware. On its hard drive was a treasure trove of damning emails and pictures, including one that appeared to show Hunter passed out in bed with a crack pipe in his mouth. The Post published its story, the Biden campaign yelped, and the establishment duly lost its mind. The Post's Twitter account was suspended. And perhaps most damningly, fifty-one intelligence "experts" signed a letter warning that the laptop story could be Russian disinformation.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. If Donald Trump is driven from the White House, he’ll blame the Deep State. His belief in ‘the Deep State conspiracy’ was behind the call he made to Ukraine’s president that might now get him impeached. One of President Trump’s former aides, Sebastian Gorka, who’s now a radio talk show host, asked him how the effort to defeat the Deep State was going. Trump said he had already seen off the ‘absolute scum’ at the top of the FBI. ‘With the destruction of the Deep State, certainly I’ve done big damage...I think it’ll be one of my great achievements.

Here we go again. Another Trump nominee bites the dust. This time it is Rep. John Ratcliffe, who tried to pass himself off as a seasoned practitioner in the secret world of intelligence. It turned out that the dour Texan didn’t even show for meetings of the House Intelligence Committee he served on, let alone prosecute any terrorists, as he claimed on his résumé. If there was ever a case of all hat and no cattle, Ratcliffe is it.True to form, Trump himself put out a lachrymose message on Twitter, bemoaning the hostility of the news media to his favored pick. Trump babbled, 'Our great Republican Congressman John Ratcliffe is being treated very unfairly by the LameStream Media.

No sooner did Donald Trump announce the resignation of Dan Coats than the handwringing began in Washington. Coats, an establishment Republican, was the only man who could stand up to Trump. He was tough on Russia. He wouldn’t water down intelligence reports. Almost overnight he was converted into a wise man whose wisdom made him a model of rectitude and probity. In reality, Coats is something of a hack who was occupying a position that should never have been created in the first place. George W. Bush capitulated to conventional wisdom in Washington by vastly expanding the national security bureaucracy after September 11. Trump’s apparent instinct to gut the agency has been put on the back-burner. Now he’s substituting an even worse hack in the form of Rep.

Fred Fleitz doesn’t like me. When I last saw national security adviser John Bolton’s former chief of staff, in January, he told me my journalism was ‘crap,’ that I was ‘crap,’ and that he ‘didn’t have anything to say’ to me. Fair enough. This was the second time I’d tangled with Fleitz, a career conservative, civil servant and intelligence officer. Our first interaction came before he became Bolton’s chief of staff in 2018. Fleitz had publicly condemned my profile of his ally and mentor, Frank Gaffney. Gaffney, controversial in his own right, has since been entirely decent to me. But Fleitz is both Gaffney and Bolton’s pitbull, and seems to have no time for less than obsequious journalists.