On a seemingly daily basis, the press provides a recounting of the indignities inflicted by the Trump administration on long-accepted government norms. Coinciding with these governmental actions, a concerted effort is now underway to circumvent and reorder standards designed to remove partisan political considerations from the production of foreign intelligence information relied upon by U.S. policymakers. Like so many other elements of governance long-accepted as essential to the rule of law, the Trump administration is now unabashedly seeking not only the removal of rules requiring the apolitical performance of intelligence functions but essentially mandating that partisanship become a prerequisite to performing those functions.

On the first day of his second term, President Trump signed an Orwellian executive order ostensibly designed to “ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people.” In reality, this directive has set in motion the unspooling of the critical analytic standards designed to ensure that intelligence activities are conducted objectively, apolitically, and without partisan influence.

Recent press reports indicate that the administration has created an “Interagency Weaponization Working Group” (IWWG), comprised of officials from across the federal government—including members of the Intelligence Community (IC). The administration tasked the IWWG with pursuing retributive actions against individuals perceived as political opponents of the president.  Reporting indicates that the IWWG’s stated purpose is to carry out President Trump’s Executive Order 14147 directing federal agencies to identify and “correct past misconduct” related to the so-called “weaponization” of government authority by “the prior administration.”

Events leading to reforms in analysis and tradecraft

In 1975, a Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church (“Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities” (the “Church Committee”)) issued a final report that documented significant illegal, improper and unethical activities by U.S. intelligence agencies leading to substantial reforms implemented as part of a grand bargain governing the conditions under which the IC would prospectively function.

The principal elements of the grand bargain contemplate the president’s continued use of the Intelligence Community to conduct robust espionage and surveillance activities.  As a counterweight to the political abuses documented in the Church Committee’s final report, Congress subjected those activities to significant legal restrictions through new legislation like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Oversight responsibility for FISA and other changes imposed by Congress fell primarily to a phalanx of new lawyers inserted into the intelligence bureaucracy and the Department of Justice alongside two newly constituted congressional intelligence committees.

An abiding axiom of professionals within the IC is that the collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination of foreign intelligence information be an apolitical undertaking. Intelligence serves to inform policymakers, not corroborate or effectuate policy. Congress statutorily requires that the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) provide the president, Congress, the heads of executive departments and senior military commanders with national intelligence that is “timely, objective … and independent of political considerations.” Consequently, the task of the intelligence analyst must be to describe reality as it is, not as anyone—politician, policymaker or agency—wants it to be. Such objectivity ensures that assessments are grounded in evidence, not ideology.

Current analytic standards governing intelligence products

In the Intelligence Community, this mandate for objectivity and political impartiality is implemented through Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 203 which sets “Analytic Standards” that represent “the core principles of intelligence analysis and are to be applied across the IC.” These analytic standards furnish the common foundation within the IC for achieving analytic rigor and accuracy and are expressed in five “Analytic Standards” (objectivity, independence from political considerations, timeliness, consideration of all intelligence sources, and the application of nine specific “Analytic Tradecraft Standards”). Emphasizing the importance of these analytic principles, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act  (IRTPA) mandates that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) “assign an individual or entity to be responsible for ensuring that finished intelligence products produced by the intelligence community are timely, objective, independent of political considerations, based on all sources of available intelligence, and employ the standards of proper analytic tradecraft.” ICD 203 assigns the Chief of the Analytic Integrity and Standards Group within ODNI as the “ODNI Analytic Ombuds” to effectuate these analytic standards and “be available to ODNI analysts who wish to raise concerns about adherence to analytic standards (including tradecraft standards) in analytic products.”

In sum, consistent with the lessons gleaned from the Church Committee’s report into intelligence activities, the Intelligence Community has responded to congressional mandates by implementing a comprehensive framework designed to ensure an incorrupt, accurate, and apolitical foundation for intelligence reporting that is now under increasing pressure from the Trump administration.

The collapse of analytic integrity

Conceptually, nonpartisan intelligence analysis provides the leaders of any administration with a level of trust that the IC will furnish honest, untarnished assessments produced using an analytic process driven by standards specifically designed to exclude political opinion and partisanship—in other words, standards like those enunciated in ICD 203. Analytic judgments are undermined when an administration demands that those judgments be evaluated through a prism framed by some combination of self-promotion, revenge, or retribution.

A harbinger of this administration’s attitude towards the principle of apolitical intelligence can be adduced from its curtailment of the role of the National Security Council (NSC) which is designated in one of the Intelligence Community’s foundational documents (Executive Order 12333) as “the highest Executive Branch entity” providing review of, guidance for, and direction to the conduct of all intelligence activities. Traditionally, the NSC is heavily populated by intelligence and foreign policy professionals seconded from agencies like the CIA, State, and Defense Departments. This administration, however, has eviscerated the NSC as reflected in its decisions. First, the president appointed as National Security Advisor an amateur (Michael Waltz) with little apparent appreciation for protecting either intelligence information or the sources and methods that produce it. Second, upon finally removing Waltz, the administration then  cannibalized the NSC staff (based, in part, upon the recommendations of conspiracy theorist  Laura Loomer) as “the administration reviewed staffing and tried to align it with Trump’s agenda.”

During Trump’s first term, he voiced his animosity for intelligence officials, portraying them as a “deep state” out to get him stemming, in significant part, from the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that concluded with “high confidence” that Vladimir Putin had ordered an extensive influence campaign to affect the 2016 U.S. presidential election where “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” Trump viewed the ICA as discrediting the 2016 election results and tainting his victory. The president’s disrespect for the Intelligence Community culminated in his infamous press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July 2018 when he publicly accepted Putin’s “extremely strong and powerful denial” of any involvement with the 2016 election, saying: “[Dan Coats, then the DNI] came to me [and] said, they think it’s Russia;” but Trump then aligned himself with the former KGB apparatchik announcing, “I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

The 2017 ICA is clearly a bane to the current president’s governance practices. Despite it being one of the most closely scrutinized documents ever produced by American intelligence, his CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, ordered a new “review” of that eight-year-old document that yielded minor technical tradecraft criticisms but did not dispute the substantive conclusions of the ICA. These conclusions had already been validated by a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation that reviewed the same processes, tradecraft, and analytical integrity surveyed in the CIA’s review. The Committee further concluded that no witness testifying before the Committee claimed any attempt or pressure to “politicize the findings” of the ICA. None of this, however, deterred Ratcliffe from making the absurd claim that the CIA’s tradecraft review was evidence that the former heads of the FBI and CIA, along with the director of national intelligence, had “manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals—all to get Trump.”

Not to be outdone, Tulsi Gabbard, the current DNI, has been pursuing an orchestrated campaign to get the IC in line with Trump’s priorities. Although she had no prior experience in the intelligence field before assuming the role of DNI and was principally known for her support for Edward Snowden, Gabbard has:

• Fired two senior members of the National Intelligence Council after a declassified memorandum contradicted statements upon which the Trump administration had relied to deport Venezuelan immigrants using the Alien Enemies Act. Gabbard’s office said the officials were fired “because of their opposition to Trump” while offering, as further justification, “the director (Gabbard) is working alongside President Trump to end the weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community.”

• In an apparent effort to divert public attention from the dispute over the release of the Epstein Files, Gabbard publicly accused former president Obama of leading a “treasonous conspiracy” constituting a “years-long coup” against Trump while insisting that her actions were directed towards exposing the “egregious weaponization and politicization of intelligence.”

Gabbard’s efforts have endeared her to Trump as she helps pursue his unprecedented campaign of revenge and retribution against his perceived enemies, but they pose an existential threat to the apolitical, nonpartisan principles of intelligence tradecraft that have guided intelligence analysis for decades. This is especially true in an IC where the administration already has hollowed out significant leadership and oversight positions. Since Trump’s return to office, the Director and Deputy Director of the National Security Agency, along with NSA’s general counsel, all have been removed. The Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency was dismissed after a preliminary damage assessment prepared by DIA following the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities contradicted Trump’s claim that those facilities had been “obliterated.” The general counsel of the CIA was replaced by the agency’s deputy director, Michael Ellis, a long-time Trump loyalist, who then assumed the general counsel duties himself.

Conclusion

The disturbing chronology of events transpiring in the Intelligence Community since Trump’s inauguration reflects the reality that the IWWG is yet another tool designed to quash bureaucratic norms and bring the Intelligence Community to heel. The activities of the IWWG, and the public actions of the DNI and the CIA Director, who both clearly have been appointed for their loyalty to Trump rather than their expertise, are almost certainly intended to achieve a chilling effect on free expression and impartial professionalism in the national security workforce.

Recently, the Steady State, a non-profit organization comprised of over 340 former national security professionals, applied the analytic tradecraft of the Intelligence Community to conditions inside the United States and, speaking the parlance familiar to anyone who has read IC assessments, observed:

“We judge with high confidence that the Executive Branch is actively weaponizing state institutions to punish perceived opponents and shield allies.”

The administration’s path is not historically unique—it would be familiar to the KGB, the Stasi, and every other authoritarian suppression force. The question is whether the American electorate will rouse itself to keep it from happening here.

George W. Croner was the principal litigation counsel in the Office of General Counsel at the National Security Agency (NSA). He is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) in its national security program and a member of CERL’s Advisory Council. You can follow him on X (@GeorgeCroner) and find a list of his publications at FPRI.org. Read his full bio here.

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