Most Americans have probably never heard the name Vinh Nguyen, but inside the National Security Agency, he apparently earned an impressive reputation.
Nguyen’s math skills were so exceptional that he was recruited to join the NSA when he was still a 17-year-old high school student. In time, he rose through the ranks, ultimately becoming the agency’s chief data scientist. Recently, Nguyen’s focus was on using AI to scrutinize foreign communications and improving the intelligence community’s work on quantum computing.
Of course, this was the work Nguyen was doing on the nation’s behalf, but not anymore. The New York Times reported:
The acting director of the National Security Agency tried to protect one of his top scientists from losing his security clearance as Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, prepared to announce the move this week, according to officials briefed on the matter. The effort failed. Ms. Gabbard, on orders from President Trump, fired the scientist, who was a leading government expert on artificial intelligence, cryptology and advanced mathematics.
Much of Gabbard’s work of late has been public and dramatic. She’s falsely accused some of the White House’s political foes of “treason.” She’s taken steps to slash the staff at the national intelligence office and gut the office responsible for tracking foreign adversaries’ efforts to manipulate U.S. elections. She’s scrambled to stay on Trump’s good side after the president said he didn’t care about her assessments on Iran. She’s revoked dozens of security clearances.
But Gabbard’s decision to fire the NSA’s chief data scientist is a reminder of the kind of damage she continues to do while out of the spotlight.
According to the Times’ report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, Lt. Gen. William Hartman, the acting NSA director, reached out to Gabbard directly before she revoked Nguyen’s security clearance — making it impossible for him to do his job — and asked for evidence that would suggest he had done anything wrong.
She ignored the request and proceeded with her plan.
The question, of course, is why.
Gabbard hasn’t commented on the developments, but the Times’ report noted that assorted far-right media outlets ran reports on Nguyen’s work in 2016 as a national intelligence officer. There’s still no reason to believe he did anything wrong or made any misjudgments, but as the article noted, “his role in the analysis of Russian election meddling in 2016 has been a focus of conservative news media, which under Ms. Gabbard has been enough to cost N.S.A. officials their jobs.” The article added: Mr. Nguyen had no involvement in the judgment that Republicans have taken issue with: that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia favored Mr. Trump’s election. In any case, most of the analytic work was done at the C.I.A., not at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where Mr. Nguyen worked, according to former officials. All of which suggests the NSA just lost its top data scientist because of a loose association with facts that Gabbard and other conspiracy theorists on the right don’t like. I don’t know when the intelligence community will recover from recent and ongoing events, but it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.
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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