The Washington Post's intelligence reporter Greg Miller reported on July 28 that a senior intelligence official told Miller privately that he would refuse to brief Trump because of concerns about Trump's alleged admiration of Russian president Putin and because "he's been so uninterested in the truth and so reckless with it when he sees it." Reuters ran a similar story on June 2, reporting that eight senior security officials said they had concerns about briefing Trump; Reuters did not indicate how many of the officials cited were intelligence officials or Obama appointees.These calls to deny intelligence briefings to a presidential candidate are unprecedented, but they also reflect a serious problem within the U.S. intelligence community that awaits a possible Trump administration: the politicization of American intelligence by the Left.
I saw this constantly during my 19 years as a CIA analyst. CIA officers frequently tried to undermine CIA directors Casey and Gates because they disagreed with President Reagan's policy goal of defeating the Soviet Union. Several testified against Gates's nomination to be CIA director in 1991 by lodging false claims that he and Casey had politicized intelligence. Former senator Warren Rudman, a moderate Republican who headed President Clinton's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, described these attacks by CIA analysts as "an attempted assassination, an assassination of [Gates's] character . . . McCarthyism, pure and simple."
| No briefing? No problem. Obviously you can't be fired, but your annual bonus is now ZERO! Have a nice day. Next briefer please. |
| Always okay to politicize briefings, actions and the whole agency. It just always has to favor the Democrats... |