A survey reveals concern among the rank and file that Trump-administration meddling is undermining intelligence work.
This is a gift🎁link (i.e., no paywall) to an Atlantic article about how CIA analysts feel pressured by the Trump administration to distort intelligence information to support the administration's policies. Here are some excerpts:
The CIA officer Ray Cline, who was the agency’s chief analyst during the Cuban missile crisis, once observed that when it comes to intelligence analysis, “objectivity is the only virtue that really counts.” By that standard, senior Trump-administration officials have fallen short, and they risk corrupting a system that’s supposed to remain apolitical and grounded in facts, according to a recent survey of CIA analysts.
Since Donald Trump returned to office, the number of CIA employees who said they are concerned that the objectivity of analysis is being undermined by political influence has gone up significantly, according to the survey. [....] Among the analysts’ concerns was last year’s dismissal of two senior career intelligence officers after one of Gabbard’s deputies tried to rewrite their assessment that Venezuela was not directing a criminal gang, Tren de Aragua. The administration wanted to claim the opposite to create a legal basis for deporting Venezuelan immigrants.
Respondents also cited Gabbard’s decision to revoke the security clearances of more than three dozen current and former national-security officials, without citing any evidence of wrongdoing. Some of them had worked on the... investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, which Trump derisively refers to as “the Russia hoax.” Gabbard... spent much of her time in office trying unsuccessfully to gin up evidence that intelligence leaders had engaged in a conspiracy to link Trump to Russia.
But the survey results.... reflect broader concerns about a political climate in which the president has routinely misrepresented intelli-gence to the public and directed his advisers to find evidence, however dubious, to support his claims about a stolen election in 2020. [....] Trump has instructed his new acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, to find and disclose evidence that he actually won the 2020 election. Pulte will have access to essentially all of the classified information in the government’s possession.... Lawmakers worry that he will give the public an incomplete picture of what really happened in the 2020 election, and that he will undermine confidence in the fairness of the midterms later this year.












