[LAWFARE] The Dangers in the Trump-Brennan Confrontation

https://www.lawfareblog.com/dangers-trump-brennan-confrontation

The Dangers in the Trump-Brennan Confrontation
By Jack Goldsmith
Monday, August 20, 2018, 9:01 AM

President Trump’s revocation of former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance brings together in an unfortunate way two pathological trends in the Trump era, and highlights the conundrum of the former intelligence official who wishes to speak out against the president’s attacks on the Russia investigation and the intelligence community more generally.

The first trend is the politicization of intelligence. Through the 1970s, the intelligence community used its domestic surveillance powers to commit two kinds of abuses. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, for example, engaged in political abuse when he served political masters by spying on disfavored Americans (such as suspected communists, political dissidents and antiwar protesters) for political ends. And he engaged in sabotage when he used secret intelligence to further his or the FBI’s institutional interests at the expense of elected officials, sometimes to influence policy. Hoover’s key sabotage mechanism was to leak or threaten to leak secretly collected information about government officials or their friends and family either to enhance his power over the official or to achieve some other political end.

Ever since the domestic intelligence abuses by Hoover’s FBI and other agencies came to light in the 1970s, the intelligence community has been governed by a “grand bargain”: It was allowed to continue to surveil domestically in the homeland but became subject to legal restrictions on the collection, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence information; strict reporting requirements to Congress; intra-executive monitoring by lawyers and inspectors general; and judicial oversight. The grand bargain went a long way toward eliminating political abuse and, to some degree, also the sabotage. As Benjamin Wittes and I explained last year, the intelligence community’s compliance with the grand bargain helped bolster trust in it and its own legitimacy, which it needs to operate in secret, as national security requires, to protect the nation.

Since the beginning of the Trump presidency, the grand bargain, and the de-politicization of the intelligence community it was supposed to guarantee, have been under fierce assault from many quarters. The story begins with Russian meddling in the 2016 election, followed by the appropriate but inevitably politically fraught counterintelligence investigation of a Republican presidential campaign by a Democratic administration. As Wittes and I wrote, the investigation invariably “entered the dangerous land of surveillance related to politics,” and from the beginning it “spelled trouble for a community that wants, and needs, to stay clean of politics.”

In that unfortunate context came the main cause of the intelligence community’s difficulties: President Trump’s unceasing and increasingly heated charges that the investigation of Russian meddling is in fact politically motivated—attacks that sought to destroy intelligence community credibility. A string of unfortunate events—especially the unusual, so-called “Steele dossier” and Peter Strozk’s seemingly biased texts—gave the president’s mostly irresponsible charges a patina (or more) of credibility in many quarters. And Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, churned this and other information in usually misleading and almost always norm-breaking ways that had the effect of further diminishing trust in the intelligence community.

But Trump and his allies are not the only culprits here. In reaction to perceived evils by Trump campaign and transition officials, members of the intelligence community—intelligence bureaucrats or outgoing Obama national security officials, or both—contributed a lot to diminishing trust in the intelligence community when they leaked, early in the Trump administration, a great deal of U.S.-person information collected from FISA warrants in order to bring down Trump’s national security adviser and achieve other anti-Trump goals. As Wittes and I wrote last year, “these leaks violated the core [Grand Bargain] commitment not to politicize the use of surveillance tools or the fruits of their use.” The leaks hurt Trump, but they also hurt the intelligence community a great deal, and probably for a longer term, by making Trump’s politicization charges credible. It was an unnecessary shot in the foot since the issues that the leaks sought to shed light on were under full official investigation.

This leads to the second unfortunate trend during the Trump era: the president’s uncanny ability to induce his critics to break norms in response to his norm-breaking behavior, in the process lending credibility to his critiques. This was a major theme of my Atlantic essay last fall. The FISA leaks break norms and confirm to many that the intelligence community in general and the Russia investigation in particular are politicized. The press often overreacts to Trump by (in Bob Woodward's words) “binge-drinking the anti-Trump Kool-Aid,” thereby lending credence to Trump’s charges of bias and the shortcomings of “the fake-news media.” Some early lower-court reactions to the Trump immigration orders confirmed to many the appearance of such bias when they issued heated opinions that failed to pay the president proper deference and respect in cases touching on immigration and national security.

Which brings me to the reaction to Trump by the big guns in the intelligence community. It has been awkward to watch many former very senior intelligence officials go on television, often in groups of two or three, to blast the president, especially when they touch on the topic of Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference. It is awkward because intelligence professionals have typically shied away from such sharp and, in the aggregate, one-sided public criticisms of a president. And it becomes unseemly (as Eli Lake notes today) when they discuss a matter under investigation on which they had access to classified information while in government, since that appears to prejudge a case based on information that cannot yet be publicly assessed.

I don’t for a moment deny these officials’ right to speak out against the President as long as they don’t reveal classified information. Indeed, I share almost all of the concerns I have heard them state about Trump. I understand why they they are speaking out, even if I sometimes wish they moderated their tone (as I sometimes wish I moderated mine). The president is viciously and inappropriately attacking the intelligence community that these men and women have long served and feel compelled to defend, especially since no one in the government is defending them publicly. He has also attacked some of these men and women personally in ways that are hard not to respond to. Trump has a way of making silence seem like acquiescence in evil, and of provoking a responsive attack. Finally, I imagine that these officials believe that the norm of avoiding criticism of the president is premised on a belief that the president acts in good faith—a belief that is absent here.

But however understandable or admirable the motivation, the fact is that for many Americans the relentless attacks on Trump by scores of senior long-term intelligence officials lend credibility to the president’s claims of a politicized “Deep State” bureaucracy that seeks to preserve its elite authority and reverse the results of the election by non-democratic means. It is not clear what these attacks on Trump add to the loud chorus of his other elite critics. But I do think that the credibility of the intelligence community as neutral and trustworthy suffers as a result. I might be wrong about this, especially compared to the option of the officials remaining silent. But if I am right, it is ironic that intelligence officials who are speaking out because of (as former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper put it) “genuine concern about the jeopardy and threats to our institutions” may be exacerbating the problem by doing so. It might also be that they are in the terrible position of watching those institutions be harmed whether they remain silent or speak out—it might be Trump’s particular skill that the institutions lose big either way.
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more at the link

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I know sometimes folks get pissed at me for posting entire articles, but many times they are paywalled and I know how frustrating it is as a reader to run into paywalled links I can't then access.

Anyway, this is a piece well worth reading from the Washington Post. And look Ma! no new thread.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...-why-are-so-many-us-speaking-out-about-trump/

CIA officers learn to keep quiet. Why are so many of us speaking out about Trump?
And why is the White House so eager to retaliate for it?

By Steven L. Hall
Former head of Russian operations for the CIA
August 21 at 12:30 PM

Here’s what is really going on when President Trump rescinds the security clearances of former senior intelligence and law enforcement officials. There’s no need to delve into the legalities of whether the president has the authority to revoke clearances. No need to dive down the rabbit hole of whether anything former CIA director John Brennan or former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said or wrote merits lifting of the clearances. It’s not even worth spending much time analyzing whether canceling the security clearances of former senior intelligence officers will hurt the security of the United States.

This is all you really need to know: Trump is using presidential power to retaliate against the critics who have the best understanding of his relationship with Russia.

Just go down the list of now-former government officials who had unique insight into Trump’s connections to President Vladimir Putin’s Russia: James B. Comey, former FBI director (fired); Andrew McCabe, former FBI deputy director (fired); Sally Yates, former acting attorney general (fired); Peter Strzok, senior FBI counterintelligence officer (fired). The people Trump is now threatening are the ones he can’t fire, because they have already left their positions.

Silencing critics is one of Trump’s strongest skill sets, and now that he has been in the presidency for a while, he understands how to use the bully pulpit in very literal terms. Revoking security clearances is code, a dog whistle, for all former and some current intelligence professionals: Criticize the president, especially about Russia, and bad things will happen to you.

I cannot say for sure how this is playing out inside the CIA, my old agency, or in other parts of the community. But I can say that the president’s attack on the First Amendment rights of retired intelligence officers does have a chilling effect. The threats can tamp down criticism. As McCabe found out, losing federal retirement benefits is no laughing matter. I personally have had to consider what I would do if this administration decided to go deeper into the ranks of retired officers and target people like me. As Clapper rhetorically asked during a recent CNN interview, where will it stop? Will former intelligence officers who speak against the president and his policies see their health benefits and annuities canceled? It can be harder to be brave when one’s own family might be put at risk.

While in the Clandestine Service, I served for more than 30 years in countries that were far from Jeffersonian democracies. Many of them tried open society on for size, but they struggled with corruption, freedom of speech and association, and the idea of a loyal opposition. In such countries, it was commonplace for recently elected heads of state to threaten the chiefs of their intelligence and law enforcement services, because those agencies often had the dirt on how the new president really got elected. Often, those elections were not free and fair. And often, those with the evidence to prove it ended up imprisoned or worse.

But I served in developing nations, not the United States, the world’s oldest and (until recently, perhaps) most venerated democracy. To see the country devolve into what Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) recently described as “a banana republic” is heart-wrenching. As one former CIA colleague asked me recently, “I feel utterly helpless: Is there anything we can do to right this wrong?”

Revoking security clearances will not affect the daily lives of people like Brennan. When senior intelligence and law enforcement officials leave service, they mostly move on, taking up positions in universities, accepting jobs in private firms and occasionally serving on ad hoc government commissions. Some simply retire and pursue private interests. Their clearances do not benefit them. They do not have access to classified information unless somebody from the intelligence community calls them in to ask for their views.

But something has made these men and women speak out. Something has caused them to do one of the most unnatural and uncomfortable things for an officer trained to keep secrets, trained to be discreet and, when necessary, clandestine: Address the American public directly via the press. Under normal circumstances, these people would not put themselves out there. Why take the chance? Why go against your training and the intelligence community’s culture of discretion? The goal of intelligence officers is to avoid the media and any public attention, to operate in the shadows. This is almost a job requirement when you are an active officer. If what you are doing comes to light, in most cases, you have failed. Avoiding public attention used to be de rigueur for retirees, too, because even when an intelligence officer leaves service, we are still bound by the oath of secrecy we took when we first entered on duty. Classified information is classified, and sources and methods require protection, even after an officer has retired or moved on to another job.

So why would anyone trained in such a fashion speak up? Only extraordinary circumstances would justify it. What are those circumstances today? Mostly, it’s Russia, and Trump’s connection to that country and its leader, Putin.

In the wake of the news conference in Helsinki, when the U.S. president seemed to side with the authoritarian Putin and called the idea of turning over American citizens to Russia for questioning “a great offer,” I tweeted that I was sickened. I cannot formally speak for my former colleagues, but I would wager that many felt the same way. And now, more and more former U.S. government employees are publicly criticizing the president’s politically motivated revocation of Brennan’s clearances. This is not the “deep state” rising up but rather a common-sense, apolitical cry of foul.

Of course, many Americans are unhappy with our current president. He is a serial liar. He has debased the national dialogue with his gross inanities, especially in his late-night and early-morning tweets. Undoubtedly, he is an immoral actor, self-interested and self-important. And there can be little doubt that all of us will be paying for many of his policies for years to come. Already, we are weakened in the eyes of our allies. At home, race relations are more strained than they have been in decades.

But as a former intelligence officer, I know these are not the prime reasons my former colleagues are speaking out against Trump.

Americans can legitimately disagree with a president’s policies. We can reasonably criticize a president’s morals and actions. But it’s hard to find an argument beyond bizarre conspiracy theories (of the sort developed by people who believe in the deep state and think child sex rings are being run in the basement of D.C. pizza joints) that can reasonably justify the contacts and behaviors of Trump and his team with Russia. As Brennan wrote recently in the New York Times, it is no longer a question as to whether the Trump team colluded with Russia. It is simply a question as to whether the collusion — or contact, or cooperation, whatever you want to call it — rises to the level of criminal conspiracy.

This is why an unprecedented number of former intelligence and law enforcement officers — including myself — are ignoring the discomfort of breaking with our culture and tradition of silence and speaking out. For those who claim we are “monetizing” or enjoying significant remuneration for our work, I’d be happy to release my tax returns — as soon as our commander in chief does. Now is not the time to remain silent. Even when faced with threats from the White House.

These are especially dangerous times. The facts we can see already are grounds for concern. The former intelligence and counterintelligence officials with access to the most sensitive intelligence on Russia seem to be the most worried of all. What don’t we know yet that’s making them speak up? And what don’t we know yet that’s making Trump so furious at them?

Steven L. Hall Steven L. Hall retired from the CIA in 2015 after 30 years of running and managing Russian operations. ​

 

Spoiler

 

fair enough, I appreciate that. thx