Intel politicization

What national security adviser Robert O'Brien is saying about Russia briefing 'conflicts' with what lawmakers were told

National security adviser Robert O'Brien pushed back Saturday on information relayed to members of the House Intelligence Committee maintaining Russia is interfering in the 2020 election in order to benefit President Donald Trump.
O' Brien said he has seen no intelligence or analysis to support that claim, but a source told CNN that the intelligence assessment is not that cut and dry.
"The intelligence is that there is no preference right now," the official said. "Not Bernie (Sanders), not Trump," a senior national security official said.
An intelligence official has also told CNN that the initial characterization of the intelligence presented during the briefing was "misleading" -- when referring to Trump specifically.
"I've also heard that from the briefers that that's not what they intended the story to be," another source said.
In an interview with ABC News, O'Brien said he had not seen any intelligence indicating Russia is attempting to assist Trump in the 2020 election. That assertion from O'Brien "conflicts" with what intelligence committee members were told at the briefing, the source said.

Intel politicization

The risk of a politicized national intelligence director

President George W. Bush signed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Act into law some 15 years ago, creating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the National Counterterrorism Center and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Designed to increase collaboration and transparency across the Intelligence Community (IC), the reality has been greater competition for resources and increased bureaucracy. More grave is the ODNI’s potential to be politically weaponized, as some argue Attorney General William Barr has done with the Department of Justice. 

The ODNI was conceived to address inherent flaws that the 9/11 Commission believed had accounted for the tragedy’s intelligence failure. Recommendations focused on six principal weaknesses, foremost of which was reforming structural barriers and addressing the lack of common standards and practices to pool overseas information with that collected domestically. 

Intel politicization

Intelligence, Politicization, and the Russia Probe

All presidents have incentives to politicize intelligence. Intelligence agencies are particularly effective public-relations vehicles because they control secret information, and individuals tend to believe in secrets. In this case, Trump has obvious reason to use intelligence leaders to muddy the waters about what happened during the campaign, and to create distance between the actions of the Russian government and his own staff. One reason why the Russia investigation is so explosive is that the intelligence community takes it so seriously. The president would surely love to see it downplay the results.

There are many ways to get intelligence to toe the policy line. Direct politicization occurs when they lean on intelligence leaders directly, cajoling them to shape intelligence conclusions in ways that are politically convenient. Indirect politicization, by contrast, occurs when policymakers send subtle signals about what they expect to see and hear. In this case, concerned intelligence officers seem to accuse Trump of what I call “manipulation by appointment.” Rather than twisting the elbows of intelligence chiefs, the idea is to put reliable friends in high places. Critics accused President Reagan of this tactic, for instance, when he appointed his campaign manager William Casey to lead the intelligence community. While pressuring senior officials can lead to political scandal, manipulation by appointment helps avoid that risk.

Intel politicization

Wayne Madsen: CIA Interference in US Election is Without Precedent – Blackmailing McCain & Graham

Although the Central Intelligence Agency has had a long history of undermining presidents-elect and prime ministers-elect in other countries, the United States has never witnessed the intelligence agency so blatantly attempting to politically weaken a U.S. president-elect just a few weeks prior to the inauguration. What the CIA is doing in forcing Donald Trump into shifting from his campaign promise of restoring good relations with Russia to one of outright hostility to Moscow — favored by the CIA, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the neo-conservatives within the Republican and Democratic party establishments — is nothing less than an overt threat to American democracy.

Amid pressure from the CIA, DNI, National Security Agency, and the Department of Defense’s under-secretariat for Intelligence, Trump has vowed to revamp the U.S. Intelligence Community. Trump has also questioned the politicization of U.S. intelligence, particularly the January 5 Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony of DNI James Clapper, NSA director Mike Rogers, and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Marcel Lettre. Clapper, in particular, not only called out Russia for hacking election-related computers at the Democratic National Committee but also using “fake news, social media and RT to influence the recent US elections.” That was a slap at Trump’s incoming national security adviser, former Defense Intelligence Agency chief retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who stood accused of re-tweeting, along with his son, “fake news.”