As election nears, Trump builds the very 'deep
state' he railed against
White House manipulation of US intelligence on Russian
and Chinese interference may rival WMD fiasco that led to Iraq war, say experts
Julian
Borger in Washington
Thu 3 Sep
2020 09.00 BSTLast modified on Thu 3 Sep 2020 09.02 BST
Two months
before the presidential election, the US intelligence agencies are under
increasing pressure from the Trump administration to provide only the
information it wants to hear.
After
installing loyalist John Ratcliffe at the pinnacle of the intelligence
community, the administration is seeking to limit congressional oversight, and
has removed a veteran official from a sensitive national security role in the
justice department
One former
senior intelligence officer has suggested Donald Trump is seeking to create the
very thing he was repeatedly complained about: a “deep state”. Another official
has compared it to the intelligence fiasco that preceded the 2003 Iraq
invasion.
The intense
focus of the current struggle is the covert Russian role in the election
campaign. The intelligence community has assessed that Moscow is taking an
active role, as it did in 2016, to damage Joe Biden and boost Trump, largely
through spreading disinformation. But administration officials have sought to
stop public discussion of such interference.
ABC News
reported this week that an aide to the homeland security secretary, Chad Wolf,
blocked a bulletin in July warning about Russian efforts to create doubts about
Joe Biden’s mental health.
John
Ratcliffe
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John Ratcliffe has halted in-person security briefings, preventing any chance
of cross-examination. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AFP/Getty Images
Ratcliffe,
the new director of national intelligence (DNI), informed Congress at the end
of last week that his office would no longer provide in-person briefings on
election security, but would instead deliver written reports that could not be
subjected to cross-examination by sceptical legislators.
He
justified his action by accusing Congress of leaking classified material but
did not explain why the same risk did not apply to written reports. John
McLaughlin, former deputy CIA director, said the fears of leaks should not
outweigh the need for transparency.
“Frankly,
having briefed the Congress many times, it’s possible to talk about sensitive
things without giving away sources and methods,” McLaughlin told the Guardian.
“In my view
the American voter needs to know as much about this as can be revealed. They
need to know if someone is attempting to influence their vote or manipulate
them.”
Ratcliffe’s
predecessor as acting DNI, Richard Grenell, another highly partisan figure, had
sought to consolidate responsibility for election security under that office,
taking the highly charged issue out of the hands of career intelligence
professionals.
And on
Monday it emerged that the attorney general, William Barr, had abruptly removed
a veteran official running the law and policy office in the justice
department’s national security division.
The
official, Brad Wiegmann, was a widely respected career professional, part of
whose job was to advise on public disclosure of evidence of election
interference. He was replaced by a much younger prosecutor, Kellen Dwyer, a
conservative cyber-security specialist with very limited national security
experience.
Katrina
Mulligan, a former national security official who helped draft the policy by
which the law and policy office could raise the alarm on meddling, said: “It
remains the only avenue the [justice department] has to disclose foreign
interference in the absence of criminal charges.
“As you can
imagine, when it comes to foreign interference we may have things going on that
the public should know, and we don’t want to wait to have all our ducks in a
row for an indictment, before we disclose that to the public,” Mulligan argued.
Is China
really the biggest meddler?
As more
voices on the issue have been muted, senior Trump officials have been putting
out a different message on election interference – that it is China, not
Russia, that is the biggest meddler.
“It simply
isn’t true that somehow Russia is a greater national security threat than
China,” Ratcliffe told Fox News. “China is the greatest threat that we face.”
On
Wednesday evening, Barr echoed the claim. “I believe it’s China,” he told CNN,
“because I’ve seen the intelligence, that’s what I’ve concluded.”
What we are
seeing is, in some respects, worse than the intelligence failures surrounding
weapons of mass destruction
Susan Hennessey, former National Security Agency
attorney
He would
not say who China was backing, but he did not need to. In early August, William
Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center,
issued a statement in which he said Russia and China were backing different
sides in the election.
“Russia is
using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former vice-president Biden,”
Evanina said, adding: “We assess that China prefers that President Trump – whom
Beijing sees as unpredictable – does not win re-election.”
He gave
details of concrete actions that Moscow was taking to damage Biden but was much
more vague about Beijing, saying it was “expanding its influence efforts ahead
of November 2020 to shape the policy environment” to “deflect and counter
criticism of China”.
Democrats
and intelligence professionals have complained a false equivalence is being
made between the two threats when it comes to direct election interference.
“The
documentary evidence on Russia is massive and the documentary evidence – in
public at least – on China is minuscule,” McLaughlin said.
US attorney
general William Barr has echoed claims that China is a greater threat than
Russia. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
John
Sipher, a CIA veteran who once ran the agency’s Russia operations, argued in a
New York Times commentary on Tuesday that the pattern of the Trump
administration’s actions “smacks of the very thing that Mr Trump has used to
stoke outrage in his followers – the formation of a politicised national
security apparatus that can serve as a personal weapon for the president. A
‘deep state’.”
David
Rohde, journalist and author of a book published in April on the issue – In
Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America’s “Deep State” – agreed
with Sipher’s assessment.
“If a ‘deep
state’ is a group of officials who secretly wield government power with little
accountability or transparency, Trump and his loyalists increasingly fit that
definition,” Rohde said. “Under the guise of stopping a ‘coup’ that does not
exist, Trump is politicising the intelligence community and the justice
department and using them to boost his re-election effort.”
The battle
over intelligence is set to intensify as the election approaches. Barr has
picked a prosecutor, John Durham, to investigate the FBI and special counsellor
investigators who looked into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The
attorney general has said he would not observe normal protocol and wait until
after the election to publish Durham’s findings, or at least a version of those
findings, with the likely aim of creating the impression that Trump was the
victim of a conspiracy to undermine his presidency.
“The Durham
investigation presents the opportunity for bad actors to make a lot of
mischief, but the lack of clarity makes it difficult for observers to
criticise,” said Susan Hennessey, a former National Security Agency attorney.
She added
that the Trump tactics in manipulating US intelligence represented a historic
threat, potentially overshadowing the fiasco that led to the 2003 Iraq
invasion.
“What we
are seeing now is, in some respects, even worse than the intelligence failures
surrounding weapons of mass destruction,” said Hennessey, now a senior fellow
at the Brookings Institution and executive editor of the Lawfare blog. “Iraq
was obviously immensely consequential and illustrates why it is imperative to
guard against even subtle political influence in intelligence reporting. But
the politicisation here is brazen and explicitly partisan in nature.
“It’s all
these little things and so it’s often hard to pin down the precise place where
the line has been crossed,” she added. “Lots of lines have been crossed. At
this point, the cumulative picture of where we are at is not that there is a
risk of politicisation of intelligence, but that we’ve already crossed the
Rubicon.”
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