At the end of his first term, then-President Donald Trump attempted to install Kash Patel, a hardline MAGA loyalist, as deputy CIA director. But the agency’s then-head, Gina Haspel, a career intelligence officer, threatened to resign in protest, and the appointment was scuttled.
Now, four years later, Patel is considered a possible choice for CIA director or another top national security post in a second Trump administration. And this time there probably won’t be anyone in the way.
Patel is one of several fiercely loyal political allies who President-elect Trump is considering overseeing the country’s national security. During his first term, Trump frequently clashed with his deputies and top officials, whom he came to view as insufficiently loyal to his agenda.
This time, the president-elect is keen to fill his government with people who will carry out his decisions without question, according to sources familiar with the transition process.
Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, said the people Trump picked to lead the intelligence community in his first term, including Haspel, and former lawmakers Mike Pompeo and Dan Coats, were highly capable figures who performed well.
“There was undeniable competence there,” Short said. “And I think it would be a mistake to go in any other direction.”
Short added: “It certainly seems like some of the people who may be the most vocal in his inner circle are hungry for a different path.”
Lawmakers, former intelligence officers and Western officials worry that Trump and a group of loyalists could reshape the composition and mission of the country’s intelligence apparatus.
Officers could be pressured to tailor their findings to the White House’s political agenda, allies could scale back information sharing because of Trump’s cavalier approach to secrecy and, in the worst-case scenario, the spy agencies could be turned into instruments of retaliation against domestic political opponents, the former officers and others say.
“I think a lot of it depends on who they appoint as director, deputy and chief operating officer” at the CIA, said a former senior intelligence officer. These appointments will set the tone and determine whether the spy agency is able to maintain professional, apolitical standards or whether it becomes the target of a politically motivated overhaul, the former officer said.
Patel, an outspoken critic of the intelligence community and the Justice Department who worked on the White House National Security Council during the Trump administration, declined to comment. He has endorsed Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was “stolen.”
Trump’s aides have previously dismissed warnings about how the president-elect could politicize the intelligence community, saying it was President Joe Biden and his administration who had injected partisan politics into the intelligence community, not Trump.
Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the transition, told NBC News in an email that Trump had won a decisive victory on “a common sense mandate for change” and that “people can expect an administration that reflects a commitment to to see that agenda being introduced. place from day 1.”
Distrust of a ‘deep state’
Since the start of his first term in 2017, Trump has had a difficult relationship with the intelligence community. He and his supporters have portrayed officials at those agencies — along with the Justice Department — as part of a “deep state” conspiring against him.
At a press conference with Vladimir Putin in 2018, Trump sided with the Russian president over his own intelligence services when asked whether he believed Moscow had interfered in the 2016 election.
“I have great confidence in my intelligence people,” Trump said at the event in Helsinki. “But I will tell you that today President Putin was extremely strong and forceful in his denial.”
Another critic of the intelligence community, former Rep. Devin Nunes of California, could also be considered for the CIA job under a new Trump administration, according to congressional aides and Republican activists.
“Other possible picks for the intelligence community include: John Ratcliffe, the former Texas congressman who served as director of national intelligence during Trump’s previous term; Robert O’Brien, Trump’s former national security adviser; and Senator Marco Rubio.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign collaborated with Russia to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton deeply angered Trump and his supporters. The investigation, which concluded in 2019, found no evidence of collusion but did not reach a conclusion on whether Trump had obstructed justice.
In response to the investigation, former Attorney General Bill Barr appointed a special counsel to investigate the FBI and the intelligence community’s investigation into Trump. After a four-year investigation, Special Counsel John Durham released a scathing 300-page report stating that the FBI acted negligently when it opened the investigation based on vague and insufficient information.
Yet Durham found that no senior FBI or CIA officials had committed crimes. The two criminal charges he brought, both for lying, ended in the acquittal of the suspects by juries.
However, Trump and his allies continue to portray the Justice Department and the intelligence community as a hostile bureaucracy with officials out to get the president.
After Trump’s election victory on Tuesday, Steve Bannon. one of Trump’s longtime allies, called for “justice” and punishment against officials from the FBI, DOJ and CIA, who he claimed had persecuted him and Trump and damaged the country.
“Now you’re going to pay the price for trying to destroy this country,” Bannon said.
Domestic espionage is over
Former intelligence and security officials said their former colleagues are bracing for a difficult period when they could face dilemmas over whether to follow orders they consider unethical or harmful to national security.
“I strongly expect that members of the intelligence community will be challenged to decide whether or not to oppose Trump, just as they did repeatedly during his first term,” one congressional aide said.
Former intelligence officials disagree over whether Trump would try to use the spy agencies against domestic political opponents, and if he did, how the intelligence agencies and the courts would respond.
After the Watergate scandal, laws were passed expressly prohibiting the use of spy services against Americans. The measures were in response to the Nixon administration using the CIA to gather intelligence on domestic protesters opposed to the Vietnam War.
Nixon also tried unsuccessfully to enlist the CIA’s help to quash an FBI investigation into the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel that led to the scandal.
A former senior intelligence official said that for all its shortcomings, the intelligence community could not easily be turned into a domestic spy agency, and that many of its career officers would refuse to follow illegal orders.
“They would be quite resistant if they turned on the American people,” the former official said.
Thousands of political appointments
Trump’s allies have called for a review of an effort at the end of his last term, when senior officials planned to fire thousands of officials in the federal government and replace them with political appointees.
It is unclear whether Trump and those he nominates to lead the intelligence community will seek to replace large numbers of officials in the spy agencies.
Presidents face few legal constraints when it comes to their authority over the intelligence community, legal experts and former senior officials say.
“The law provides an awful lot of discretion” and Trump would “have a pretty free hand,” said Glenn Gerstell, who worked as general counsel for the National Security Agency from 2015 to 2020.
Trump supporters say dire warnings about the future of the intelligence community under a new Trump administration are hysterical and exaggerated, and that his record in the White House shows he has strengthened the spy services.
Trump’s supporters said it would be reasonable for the president-elect to exercise control over the intelligence community through political appointees to ensure the agencies implement the president’s policies without bureaucratic subterfuge.
“No matter what side you are on politically, you have to want political control because we don’t want this country to become a security state,” said a former official close to the Trump team.
The Heritage Foundation’s proposed action plan, titled “Project 2025,” calls on the president-elect to immediately select a deputy director of the CIA, who would not require Senate confirmation and “can immediately begin implementing the agenda of the president’.
“Additional appointees should be placed within the agency as necessary to assist the director in overseeing its operation,” the report said.
The document also calls for breaking up “the cabal of bureaucrats in DC” by moving some of the CIA’s directorates outside of Northern Virginia, where its headquarters are located.
Robert Litt, who served as general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2009 to 2017, said that placing political appointees in the spy agencies’ management in unprecedented numbers could disrupt the way intelligence is analyzed and lead to illegal or bad information. recommended decisions.
“I think it would be a very, very bad thing for the intelligence community and for the nation if the intelligence community were dominated by a group of political loyalists,” he said in an interview with NBC News earlier this year.
“One is the risk that the intelligence analysis is not done down the middle,” Litt said. “And the other is the risk that the intelligence services will be instructed to do things that are illegal or inappropriate.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
