Editor’s Note: Samantha Vinograd is a CNN national security analyst. She is a senior adviser at the University of Delaware’s Biden Institute, which is not affiliated with the Biden campaign. Vinograd served on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council from 2009 to 2013 and at the Treasury Department under President George W. Bush. Follow her @sam_vinograd. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion articles on CNN.
President Donald Trump’s administration has taken politicizing intelligence to a new and terrifying level. Sunday, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, said the National Security Agency is withholding information relating to the “issue of Ukraine” ahead of the President’s impeachment trial.
“I’ll say something even more concerning to me, and that is the intelligence community is beginning to withhold documents from Congress on the issue of Ukraine. They appear to be succumbing to pressure from the administration,” Schiff told ABC.
In response to Schiff’s remarks, Amanda Schoch, the assistant director of National Intelligence for Strategic Communications, said, “The intelligence community is committed to providing Congress with the information and intelligence it needs to carry out its critical oversight role. The IC is working in good faith with (the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) to respond to requests on a broad range of topics and will continue to do so.”
Meanwhile, intelligence officials are pushing to cancel the public portion of an annual security threats briefing after last year’s session was met with anger from Trump.
Schiff’s statements build on the President’s own track record of cherry-picking intelligence to suit his personal needs. In the past, he’s disparaged the intelligence community’s (IC) assessments that don’t track with his talking points on issues such as North Korea and Iran. Yet he has expected the American public to trust intelligence when it suits his own pursuits, including, most recently, information pertaining to the strike against Iranian military leader Gen. Qasem Soleimani.
While the IC has long been the subject of Trump’s Twitter tirades, Schiff’s statements indicate it may also be becoming complicit in his influence operations against the American public – in pursuit of political ends as well as his legal defense during the impeachment inquiry.
War on truth
The intelligence community regularly provides classified briefings to the President – if he’ll allow it. Its job isn’t to tell him what he wants to hear, but rather to tell him what it assesses he needs to hear in order to keep the American people safe. The goal is to provide intelligence so the President and his team can make well-informed policy decisions.
There has been reporting that the President prefers to operate without intelligence – namely that he refuses to believe his intelligence briefings and he has publicly discounted the findings when they personally impact him or his policies.
Now, as the IC pushes to cancel the public portion of the worldwide threat briefing, it looks like the administration is effectively censoring what it tells the American people.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in a statement, said the IC is “committed to providing timely, accurate and useful information about the worldwide threats facing the nation to Congress and the American people,” but canceling a public briefing to avoid upsetting POTUS, as seems to be the case, according to a source who spoke with CNN, would do just the opposite. This briefing is an important opportunity for intel chiefs to inform the American public about our threat landscape.
The IC has good reason to be wary of invoking the President’s ire if it publlicly shares its coordinated, vetted assessments. After the public threat briefing last year, the President said the IC “should go back to school” and labeled it “passive and naive” because he disagreed with its analysis on Iran.
Public testimony at last year’s briefing also contradicted the President’s own statements on ISIS and on North Korea – it assessed that ISIS remained a threat to the United States (Trump said the group had been defeated) and former DNI Dan Coats said North Korea would likely not denuclearize.
Trying to cancel the briefing would effectively mean telling the American people only what the President wants us to hear. It would amount to an influence operation to distort Americans’ perception of the threat landscape. The threat briefing is not intended to prove the President right or wrong; it’s intended to inform Americans. The IC isn’t the President’s personal propaganda machine.
Legal aid
The IC also shouldn’t be a part of the President’s impeachment defense. Chairman Schiff indicated that the IC is withholding intelligence pertaining to the “issue of Ukraine” ahead of the impeachment trial based on, according to Schiff, “pressure from the administration.”
As a matter of routine collection, it is virtually impossible that the IC would not have gathered intelligence on Ukrainian officials discussing Trump’s calls for an investigation into the Bidens, the freeze of military aid (the President and his allies have alleged the Ukrainians didn’t know about the freeze when Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25 – a claim that others have discounted) and more.
Intelligence showing that Zelensky and his inner circle, for example, did think the President’s ask for an announcement into the Bidens was inappropriate would decimate a pillar of the President’s legal defense – that the Ukrainians thought everything was A-OK.
Unless the intelligence community shut down intelligence collection in Ukraine, there has to be intel on issues directly relevant to the investigation. And there is also likely intelligence from other, non-Ukrainian foreign sources discussing Ukraine-related developments. Those may be pertinent to the impeachment proceedings, not to mention to law enforcement.
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Buckling to Trump’s pressure to withhold relevant intelligence from Congress would risk turning the IC into a member of the President’s legal team rather than allowing it to adhere to its self-stated code of ethics, including to “seek the truth; speak truth to power; and obtain, analyze and provide intelligence objectively.”
The President is the intelligence community’s No. 1 customer – but that’s based on an understanding that he will use intelligence to inform policy decisions that advance US national security, and not that he will use intelligence to mitigate his own personal insecurities.
