Observers and alumni of America's intelligence community have already fretted over Donald Trump's impending control of the world's most powerful spy agencies. They've worried that he could abuse their heady surveillance capabilities, turn them on his personal enemies, revamp the NSA's mass surveillance programs, and strip away domestic privacy protections once in charge. But before Trump has even taken office, he's already found a less expected way to abuse the US intelligence community: Ignore, contradict, and insult it.
Trump's relationship---or lack thereof---with US intelligence agencies isn't just a cause for political spectacle. According to national security experts and former intelligence agency staffers, it could have serious consequences that go well beyond the current dispute over Russian hacking.
On Friday, the Washington Post and New York Times reported that the CIA has confirmed that the Russian government repeatedly hacked and leaked Democratic Party documents throughout the presidential election season with the express intention of aiding Trump's campaign. That conclusion goes a significant step beyond earlier intelligence reports that had merely pinned the attacks on the Kremlin without naming its motive.
In response, the Trump transition team offered a brusque rejection of that finding: "These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," read the Trump team's statement.
That abrupt dismissal of the intelligence community's findings follows months of Trump's assertions that no one can know the source of the last year's long series of political hacks---despite a publicly released report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security stating that Vladimir Putin's state-sponsored hackers were behind those breaches. "It could be some guy in his home in New Jersey," Trump maintained in a Time interview earlier last week.
The remarks build on what may be the most troubling recent revelation of all, that Trump has declined the traditional daily intelligence briefing given to presidents and presidents-elect. Instead, he receives the briefing only about once a week. "I get it when I need it," he told Fox News Sunday. "You know, I’m, like, a smart person."
That dismissal and disregard of the intelligence agencies' fact-finding represents a disturbing potential preview of the next four years, say former members of the US intelligence community who spoke with WIRED. They worry that it threatens to politicize the intelligence community's work, pushing it toward conclusions that will please the president rather than inform him. They say the growing rift demoralizes staffers, leading to a loss of valuable talent, and that it could leave the commander-in-chief himself dangerously ignorant of crucial world events.
Susan Hennessey, a former NSA lawyer who is now with the Brookings Institution, says that since Trump was elected, she's spoken with former colleagues who are still in the intelligence community who have been "stunned" to hear Trump's repeated rejections of their findings. "It’s not outrage, although that might be under the surface," she says of her former colleagues' response. "It’s real uncertainty and a sense of fear...shock, bewilderment, wondering what’s going to happen next."
Trump's kneejerk comparison of the Russian hacking report to the faulty intel on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction takes that dismay to another level, says one former CIA official who helped to write the president's daily briefing under both Obama and Bush. "We’ve never seen something like this before. It's pretty ballsy," says the former agency official, who requested anonymity because he's not authorized by his current employer to speak about political issues. "From dismissing the briefings to dismissing the current assessment on the Russia stuff, it seems like he’s still in campaign mode. He's politicizing the intel, and that’s a problem."
"Every administration has problems with some intelligence," says Patrick Skinner, a former CIA official under Bush and Obama who now works for the security consulting firm the Soufan Group. "But it really shouldn’t be public. The open disdain Trump has shown for the agencies is unprecedented."
Trump's transition team didn't respond to WIRED's request for comment.
To be fair, Trump isn't the only skeptic of the intelligence agencies' findings. Neither the leaked CIA assessment that Kremlin hackers were motivated to help Trump nor the intelligence community's October report attributing the attacks to Russia have been backed up with published evidence. That's led Democratic members of congress Elijah Cummings and Eric Swalwell to demand a commission to independently investigate the hacking incidents. President Obama has directed intelligence agencies to conduct a renewed investigation into the attacks. And Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham joined with Democrats Chuck Schumer and Jack Reed to call for a congressional investigation into the hacker intrusions, splitting with Trump and other Republican leaders who have ignored or dismissed the Russian hacking reports.
In an interview on the CBS show Face the Nation Sunday, Senator McCain clarified that he doesn't doubt Russia was the source of the breaches of targets like the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, but still wants to better understand the motive of those attacks, and whether they targeted Republicans, too. What he doesn't dispute is that Russia was the source. "Now whether they intended to interfere to the degree that they were trying to elect a certain candidate, I think that's the subject of investigation," McCain said. "But facts are stubborn things. They did hack into this campaign."
Trump's doubt of the intelligence agencies' findings isn't the first sign that the divisiveness of the last year's presidential campaign has led to new, partisan distrust of the intelligence community's work, argues Dave Aitel, a former NSA staffer who now runs the security firm Immunity. That doubt had already surfaced with FBI director James Comey's public statements about the bureau's investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server. The Clinton campaign and Democratic leaders have criticized Comey's behavior, accusing him of influencing the electoral process by writing a letter to Congress about new emails that surfaced in that investigation just weeks ahead of election day. "Our intelligence community has become a political football, and that’s something that should never occur," says Aitel. "You need to have trust, and we don’t have trust."
Aitel says that lack of confidence in intelligence agencies' findings and politicization of their work has left his former colleagues increasingly "jaded." And he says that problem of low morale, already sunken after public response to the revelations of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, could lead to a dangerous brain drain from key agencies. "They don't complain, they don't whine to the press, they just leave," argues Aitel. "Then you get talent shortfalls, and then you get mission failures, which are bombs blowing up in American cities."
Compounding those issues are fears that Trump will continue to ignore his own intelligence apparatus, making uninformed decisions on the world stage, says ex-CIA officer Skinner. Some members of Trump's transition team have reportedly accepted daily intelligence briefings, including his pick for defense secretary, General James Mattis, and vice-president elect Mike Pence. But a president who wields ultimate executive power without that information could be dangerous, says Skinner. "If you close your eyes, the threat is still there: North Korea still exists, ISIS still exists," says Skinner. "These things are complex. You can’t counter North Korea with gut feelings."
The rejection feeds back into the morale issue as well. "There's a firm belief in the intelligence community that the president having this information is a really important thing," says ex-NSA lawyer Hennessey. "When you have a boss essentially saying they don’t believe or value your work---an outright rejection based on absolutely no evidence---there's a profound sense of uncertainty."
Beyond Trump's specific rejection of any inconvenient finding, Hennessey says it's that larger dismissal of the intelligence community that's most troubling. "If an intelligence agency produces a piece of evidence that’s ignored, people can be killed," she says. "The consequences could be as dire as you can possibly imagine."
Additional reporting by Lily Hay Newman.
