Intelligence figures fear Trump reprisals over assessment of Russia election role
Spencer Ackerman in New York Sunday 11 December 2016 18.03 GMT
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President-elect Donald Trump speaks in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Friday. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters
Legislators overseeing the CIA and other intelligence agencies have told the Guardian they will be vigilant about reprisals from Donald Trump over an internal assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to ensure Trump’s victory.Fears of retaliation rose within US intelligence agencies over a tense weekend that saw Trump publicly dismiss not only the assessment but the basic competence of the intelligence apparatus.
Fears of retaliation rose within US intelligence agencies over a tense weekend that saw Trump publicly dismiss not only the assessment but the basic competence of the intelligence apparatus.
“When the president-elect’s transition team is attempting to discredit the entire intelligence community [IC], it has never been more important for the IC and Congress to guard against possible political pressure or retaliation against intelligence analysts,” Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, told the Guardian.
Like his Democratic colleagues on the panel, Wyden is pressing Barack Obama for additional public disclosures revealing Russian electoral interference. Such pressure has placed the CIA and other intelligence agencies between the incoming president to whom they will soon answer and a chorus of legislators, mostly but not exclusively Democrats, who consider the Russia hack a national emergency.
It is not possible to gauge precisely how deep fears of retaliation run within the intelligence world. Two currently serving intelligence officers told the Guardian this weekend they had not heard their colleagues express such concerns.
One noted that civil-service laws prevented Trump from launching a purge, but also called attention to a report that Trump is combing through the energy department bureaucracy to identify people “who have attended climate change policy conferences”.
Former intelligence officers told the Guardian they considered retaliation by Trump to be all but a certainty after he is sworn into office next month. Trump still has several appointments to make at the highest levels of the intelligence apparatus, picks which are likely to be bellwethers for the new president’s attitudes toward the agencies.
“There is not just smoke here. There is a blazing 10-alarm fire, the sirens are wailing, the Russians provided the lighter fluid, and Trump is standing half-burnt and holding a match,” said Glenn Carle, a retired CIA officer and interrogator.
“The facts hurt, Trump won’t like the truth, and he will without question seek to destroy those individuals or organizations that say or do anything that he thinks harm his precious grandiosity.”
After congressional Democrats called for additional briefings and public disclosures about an intelligence consensus that Russia made a deliberate decision to intervene in the election, Barack Obama ordered a new review of the evidence.
On Friday, the Washington Post reported that intelligence sources believe the Russians decided to penetrate the Democratic National Committee’s digital networks with the goal of aiding Trump, not merely to spread uncertainty about the outcome of the election.
In response, Trump attacked the credibility of the intelligence agencies on which he will rely for early warning of security emergencies and geopolitical developments. His transition team said in a statement: “These are the same people who said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
Adam Schiff, the leading Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said Trump “cannot abide the idea that Russian hacking helped his campaign” and was lashing out in a manner that undermined confidence in his handling of intelligence.
“If Trump is willing to disregard sound intelligence now, and demean the hard-working and patriotic Americans who produced it, I fear what he will do as president when confronted with unpleasant truths,” Schiff said.
“Will he accept the best insights of our agencies, or punish them for daring to contradict his assumptions?”
Trump’s clash with the CIA comes at a moment of acute turmoil within intelligence circles. Obama officials jeopardized the tenure of National Security Agency chief Mike Rogers in a seemingly thwarted bureaucratic reorganization of the US surveillance and cybersecurity apparatus. Congressional sources have told the Guardian they expect to hold a public hearing on the issue in January.
Should Trump go through with the reshuffle, it will leave him appointing an NSA director as well as a director of national intelligence, after James Clapper announced his resignation last month. Trump has also been noncommittal about retaining the FBI director, James Comey, whose bureau houses significant sympathy for Trump.
Congressional Republicans are in an uncomfortable position, between a president of their own party and Russia, a traditional adversary.
Devin Nunes, a California Republican who chairs the House intelligence committee, said on Saturday Russian electoral hacking was “no surprise”. He also blamed Obama for coming late to the threat out of “delusions of ‘resetting’ relations with Russia” – a policy that Trump is also pursuing.
On Sunday, anti-Trump GOP hawks Lindsey Graham and John McCain offered a different path, joining with leading Democratic senators Chuck Schumer and Jack Reed to plead for a bipartisan inquiry into the alleged Russian hacking, which they said endangered the country.
“We have an obligation to inform the public about recent cyberattacks that have cut to the heart of our free society,” the senators said in a joint statement.
“Democrats and Republicans must work together, and across the jurisdictional lines of the Congress, to examine these recent incidents thoroughly and devise comprehensive solutions to deter and defend against further cyberattacks.”
Also on Sunday, Elijah Cummings, the Maryland Democrat on the investigations-heavy House oversight committee, pressured the Republican committee chairman, Jason Chaffetz, and speaker of the house Paul Ryan to “join us now in our effort to launch a robust and truly bipartisan investigation of Russian interference in our election that puts our nation’s interests over the interests of any political party”.
Carle, the retired CIA officer, said Trump’s temperament had played into Russia’s hands and put the president-elect on a collision course with the CIA.
He said: “Look, in my professional assessment as an intelligence officer, Trump has a reflexive, defensive, monumentally narcissistic personality, for whom the facts and national interest are irrelevant, and the only thing that counts is whatever gives personal advantage and directs attention to himself.
“He is about the juiciest intelligence target an intelligence office could imagine. He groans with vulnerabilities. He will only work with individuals or entities that agree with him and build him up, and he is a shockingly easy intelligence ‘target’ to manipulate.”
Were Trump an intelligence officer himself, Carle said, “he would be removed and possibly charged with having accepted the clandestine support of a hostile power to the harm of the United States”.
A senior intelligence official who was not cleared to talk to reporters supported the push to declassify additional material on the “serious matter” of the alleged Russian electoral interference, since “it happened on our watch”.
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