After years of Republican apoplexy and conspiracy theories about the U.S. intelligence community allegedly politicizing information, fresh evidence suggests that it’s Donald Trump’s team that’s doing exactly that. The New York Times reported:
New emails document how a top aide to Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, ordered analysts to edit an assessment with the hope of insulating President Trump and Ms. Gabbard from being attacked for the administration’s claim that Venezuela’s government controls a criminal gang.
“We need to do some rewriting” and more analytic work “so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS,” Joe Kent, Gabbard’s acting chief of staff, wrote in an email to a group of intelligence officials on April 3.
For those who might benefit from a refresher, let’s revisit our earlier coverage and review how we arrived at this point.
To justify his administration’s plans to remove immigrants to a Salvadoran megaprison, the president has spent months insisting that Venezuela’s government controls the Tren de Aragua gang. Among the problems with this assertion is the simple fact that U.S. intelligence has come to the opposite conclusion.
In fact, the National Intelligence Council — the top entity for analyzing classified intelligence and providing secret assessments to policymakers — concluded months ago that Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuelan regime is not orchestrating Tren de Aragua’s operations in the U.S.
Those findings might’ve been accurate, but they didn’t sit well with Team Trump. In fact, the Times reported last week that Joe Kent — who, in addition to being Gabbard’s acting chief of staff, is also the president’s conspiratorial nominee to lead the National Counterterrorism Center — “told a senior intelligence analyst to do a new assessment of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and the gang.”
In other words, the National Intelligence Council analyzed the classified intelligence and provided a reality-based assessment. Soon after, a Trump appointee, unsatisfied with the available facts, effectively asked the council to do it again.
To hear the administration tell it, this was a routine and uncontroversial request for the most accurate available information. The latest reporting from the Times, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, pointed to emails from Kent that suggest his principal goal was to prevent a political embarrassment for Trump and Gabbard.
Or as the Times’ article summarized, “[T]he disclosure of his emails supports the accounts of critics who said he was applying political pressure to generate a torqued narrative that would support, rather than undermine, the administration’s policy agenda.”
As for why this matters, there are a few elements to keep in mind. First, there’s a growing body of evidence that Team Trump is politicizing intelligence in ways that could pose dramatic risks. As The Washington Post’s David Ignatius explained in his latest column, “Telling inconvenient truths to presidents is what intelligence analysts are supposed to do. … Sometime in the future, Trump will ask his intelligence advisers about a policy initiative — Will this work? Does it make sense? — and there won’t be anyone left to give him an honest answer.” Indeed, let’s not forget that after the leaders of the National Intelligence Council declined to tell the administration what it wanted to hear, Gabbard decided to fire the leaders of the council, which was ridiculous and sent a dangerous signal to other intelligence professionals throughout the government. Second, it seems increasingly obvious that the White House should pull Kent’s nomination to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, sooner rather than later. And finally, let’s not overlook the fact that there are some intelligence insiders who seem quite eager to let the public know about these behind-the-scenes abuses. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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