Will politics creep in?<\/strong><\/p>\nBut with Coats and Gordon gone, and with the nation\u2019s top spymaster, Central Intelligence Agency Director Gina Haspel, choosing to largely stay out of the public eye, some wonder whether politics will increasingly creep into the intelligence community\u2019s assessments.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe departure of Coats and Gordon is most unfortunate \u2014 for the country and for a healthy intelligence-policy relationship \u2014 because their departure appears to be all about Trump\u2019s unwillingness to hear anything from the intelligence community that doesn\u2019t suit him politically,\u201d said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA officer now with Georgetown University.<\/p>\n
Those concerns were heightened late last month, when Trump initially announced he was going to nominate Republican Congressman John Ratcliffe, one of the newer members of the House Intelligence Committee, to be his new, top intelligence official.<\/p>\n
Ratcliffe withdrew from consideration following questions about his credentials and experience. The fact that Trump\u2019s first move, however, was to pick someone who was viewed primarily as a political ally sounded an alarm for some former officials.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously, the president wants someone in this position whose first priority is loyalty to him,\u201d James Clapper, who served as director of national intelligence under former President Barack Obama, said at the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI worry about people in the Intelligence Community, and the impact of potentially being directed to produce intelligence analyses that comport with the president\u2019s worldview and not their best judgment as to the facts,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Overblown concerns<\/strong><\/p>\nPresident Trump\u2019s supporters, though, dismiss such concerns as overblown.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there\u2019s been a lot of partisan rhetoric, which is unfortunate,\u201d said Fred Fletiz, a former CIA analyst who now heads the Center for Security Policy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe job of the ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] is to provide to the president the most accurate, objective and non-political intelligence possible,\u201d he said. \u201cThe president\u2019s committed to that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fleitz, who said he has talked to the administration about the position, likewise believes whoever comes in as the next permanent leader of the U.S. intelligence community will keep many of the current efforts to stay ahead of Russia and China, and to secure the upcoming presidential elections in 2020, in place.<\/p>\n
But he also sees the need for some changes, citing what he describes as the misuse of foreign intelligence during the 2016 presidential election.<\/p>\n
\u201cIntelligence officials have to admit that intelligence was weaponized in the 2016 election to defeat Donald Trump. It was abused,\u201d Fleitz said.<\/p>\n
Fleitz, and others, allege former President Barack Obama wanted fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton to win that presidential election so badly that he and his allies came up with a plan to discredit Trump using a counterintelligence investigation in the unlikely event that Trump would win. To date, no persuasive evidence has ever been presented to support the claim.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all know that this happened,\u201d Fleitz told VOA. \u201cWhat\u2019s important is that intelligence officials have to admit that this happened and put in place steps to make sure that it never happens again.\u201d<\/p>\n
‘Bit of crazy talk’<\/strong><\/p>\nOther former officials view such claims, aimed at discrediting the Russian election interference investigation, with suspicion, seeing them more as an excuse to ensure that the next director of national intelligence meets Trump\u2019s political litmus test, rather than to correct any problem within U.S. intelligence.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a little bit of crazy talk,\u201d said Larry Pfeiffer, a former CIA chief of staff and former senior director of the White House Situation Room. \u201cNobody in the United States intelligence community, down to its lowest level worker was weaponizing intelligence to try to defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 election.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf there really had been an effort to weaponize intelligence for anti-Trump purposes, then there would have been all sorts of leaks, before the election, of intelligence about the Russians helping Trump, but there were no such leaks,\u201d Pillar added.<\/p>\n
\u201cStraightforward collection and analysis about something as important to the national interest as a foreign government\u2019s interference in U.S. elections isn\u2019t weaponization; it is doing the intelligence agencies\u2019 proper job,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
VOA – WASHINGTON – The new, top-ranking U.S. intelligence official is promising the country\u2019s intelligence agencies will be undeterred in their work, a day after his predecessor and his predecessor\u2019s top deputy were ushered out of government. \u201cThe Office of the Director of National Intelligence remains focused on leading the Intelligence Community [IC] and providing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["fa","en"],"languages":{"fa":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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VOA – WASHINGTON – The new, top-ranking U.S. intelligence official is promising the country\u2019s intelligence agencies will be undeterred in their work, a day after his predecessor and his predecessor\u2019s top deputy were ushered out of government. \u201cThe Office of the Director of National Intelligence remains focused on leading the Intelligence Community [IC] and providing critical information in support of our nation\u2019s security,\u201d acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire said in a statement issued Friday. Maguire, a former Navy SEAL who until Thursday had been serving as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, also said he was \u201chumbled to follow in the footsteps\u201d of former National Intelligence Director Dan Coats, who along with Deputy Director Sue Gordon, \u201cled the IC through some of the most dynamic global challenges our nation has faced.\u201d<\/p>\n