Abolish the ODNI

By John R. Bolton

Thursday, July 16, 2026

 

William Pulte’s appointment as acting director of national intelligence, a position he will hold while simultaneously remaining head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, caused remarkably bipartisan shock in Washington. Donald Trump’s adviser Steve Bannon called the Pulte announcement “a f*** you to the Deep State,” which accurately reflects Trump’s contempt for the  intelligence community and his lack of interest in its work — except when it’s searching for evidence of foreign tampering in the 2020 presidential election.

 

Considerable ink has been spilled over Pulte’s lack of qualifications, and his new status is decidedly temporary. Nonetheless, Trump’s appalling selection presents an opportunity to review the fundamental question of whether the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) should exist at all. The nomination of Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, somehow failed to prompt such a review. Thank goodness for second chances, because the ODNI’s “one ring to rule them all” approach has not and will not solve the problems it was meant to address, and it has created new ones of its own.

 

Structuring the far-flung intelligence community (IC) and, even more important, defining and managing its relationship with policymakers, has frustrated presidents and their administrations since the “big bang” of American intelligence during World War II. Before then, intelligence was almost exclusively a function of the military, conducted by the War and Navy Departments and focused on the intentions and capabilities of potential adversaries. George Washington, as commander in chief of the Continental Army, was his own top spy-runner and a master of the game.

 

Before World War II, State Department ambassadors also gathered as much information as possible, openly and not so openly, as diplomats have done since time immemorial. They did not distinguish between what we today call “open-source” intelligence and what they gathered by cloak-and-dagger methods, and there was no separate intelligence service within State. There existed, however, a very strong disinclination to engage in “spying.” As Secretary of State Henry Stimson wrote in 1929, “Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail.” In reality, they did that and more. Diplomats were propagandists and clandestine operators. After all, as the British diplomat Sir Henry Wotton wrote in 1604, “An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”

 

The contours of today’s struggle to structure the IC were set by the National Security Act of 1947, which among many other things established the Central Intelligence Agency. As the agency’s name suggests, its creators hoped to bring order to the proliferation of government intelligence units. These were particularly clustered in another of the statute’s major innovations, the Department of Defense, which was created by merging the War and Navy Departments and establishing a new Department of the Air Force. The overall direction of national security policy of course remained with the president, who would now be assisted by the act’s other major creation, the National Security Council.

 

President Harry Truman created the position of director of central intelligence (DCI) by executive order in 1946. The DCI also became the director of the CIA, which meant that one individual was charged with leading the work of all of the government’s intelligence components in Defense and in other cabinet departments. The DCI’s primary responsibility was to coordinate intelligence activities, avoiding unnecessary duplication and overlap and harmonizing the often conflicting analyses of the various intelligence operations.

 

This structure created two long-standing problems. First, the dual-hatted director was not automatically a cabinet-level official. All the bureaucratic components he was charged with leading were headed by cabinet secretaries who were often protective of their respective turfs, especially the heavyweight defense secretary, whose department housed the majority of intelligence activities. While the CIA grew quickly (“Bigger than State by ’48” was its battle cry), the DCI rarely won major turf fights. Second, other agencies, mostly within the Defense Department, contended that the dual-hatted role created an inherent conflict of interest, biasing the director in favor of the CIA’s institutional positions and against the rest of the IC.

 

These disputes percolated for decades until the 9/11 attacks, which provoked an important debate on why the IC failed to detect the impending terrorist plot. The government’s first response was to create the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which was renamed the National Counterterrorism Center in 2004 and is now housed in the ODNI. Critics of the dual-hatted CIA director also seized the opportunity to elevate responsibility for coordinating the IC to a higher-ranking official. They argued that this was the only way to take on the mighty defense secretary.

 

The ODNI, created by statute in 2004 and launched the following year, was originally envisioned as a small office with IC-wide oversight. Its purpose was to enforce budget discipline and manage IC priorities, including intelligence-gathering and analysis and clandestine activities for the president. Over time, however, bureaucratic creep caused the ODNI’s responsibilities and staff to multiply. Claims of bureaucratic empire-building, duplication and overlap with other departments, and inevitable personality conflicts made things worse, especially in analytical fields.

 

Turf fights erupted, including entirely foreseeable clashes between the ODNI and every other agency. Even today, on Iran for example, the CIA and the ODNI are reportedly withholding information from each other. Moreover, the ODNI has itself begun competing for resources, undercutting the idea that it would be impartial in its decision-making among IC agencies. The NSC’s role has also decreased as IC components have fought among themselves for programs, staff, and money. Moreover, in most presidential administrations since 2005, both the DNI and the CIA director have attended NSC meetings and lower-level meetings of NSC members, sometimes agreeing and sometimes not.

 

The debate over the ODNI, however, largely missed the real issue: how best to serve the executive branch’s consumers of intelligence. After all, the IC is not a self-licking ice-cream cone: It exists not to satisfy its own curiosity but to acquire information that policymakers can put to practical use. Intelligence consumers — decision-makers in key national security departments and agencies — frequently believe that they are unable to influence the IC’s seemingly impenetrable budget and policy process. While decision-makers appreciate the enormous importance of the intelligence they do receive, they often feel excluded from the process that determines intelligence-collection priorities and resource allocation. In some respects, various intelligence agencies and bureaus within departments serve as proxies for their main customers in the scramble for staff and funding. But that is not the same as direct, frequent participation by intelligence consumers in decisions that allocate resources.

 

None of the foregoing is intended as a criticism of the personnel or leadership of the ODNI over the years. Nor can the long-term failure to find an optimal solution be primarily attributed to intelligence agencies. The real problem has been the absence of clear resolve from the president and the NSC to straighten things out. I confess that during my time as national security adviser, I struggled, often unsuccessfully, to keep the many policy trains on their tracks. The prospect of making long-term improvements anywhere, including in the IC, was just a tantalizing mirage.

 

With this abbreviated history in mind, how should we proceed? Given the importance of an effective IC to national security, there has been no lack of suggestions over the years. And there is certainly no perfect outcome. Nonetheless, the weight of decades of experience points to restoring the CIA director as the dual-hatted director of central intelligence, with one major modification. The National Security Council must be equipped to perform a larger oversight role — not only to increase IC coordination but to ensure that the community as a whole and each of its agencies is in fact providing policymakers with the intelligence they need to do their jobs effectively.

 

The principal misconception of the ODNI model is that coordination among intelligence agencies can only be accomplished by someone above the CIA director. There are 18 members of the IC. Remove the ODNI, and nine of the remaining 17 are components of the Defense Department. The other seven are part of the Justice Department (the FBI and the DEA); the Department of Homeland Security (an intelligence and analysis office and the Coast Guard); and the Departments of State, Treasury, and Energy (small analysis agencies).

 

Adding the ODNI to this mix simply compounded the problem and perhaps even further obscured it, notwithstanding more than two decades of good-faith efforts to make the arrangement work. This is not a question of bureaucratic size. The Trump administration proposed significant budget cuts and personnel reductions to the ODNI, as it did to other intelligence organizations. Budget and staff reductions, however, are not the real issue. Congress and the Trump administration have recognized that the United States requires more resources to address diverse and growing national security threats. Appropriately, defense budgets are rising, and intelligence agencies should not be shortchanged. Instead, the problem is one of sclerosis in the bureaucratic process. Adding another layer to a sclerotic system only increased the problem over time.

 

Another pro-ODNI argument, beyond questions of management and budgeting, is that the president benefits from having one principal intelligence adviser. But that role depends far more on the individual occupying it than on any organizational chart, and it can be performed equally well by a dual-hatted CIA director. Bill Pulte hardly compares with John Negroponte (the first DNI), or with Dan Coats (the DNI in Trump’s first term), or with prior CIA directors such as William Webster or Allen Dulles. This argument also assumes that the DNI, unlike Gabbard and Pulte, will actually do his job.

 

Moreover, while greater internal IC cohesiveness has its merits, policymakers facing hard choices often benefit from hearing different perspectives on intelligence. It is easy, and often correct, to say that duplication is wasteful. But in many cases, the unique goals and perspectives of individual agencies provide a more useful check on institutional biases than “coordination” and, worse, the homogenization of analytical products. This is one reason why, for example, military intelligence often differs from that of the CIA. It is not a question of one being invariably better than the other. Intelligence is not a crystal ball that reveals ineluctable pathways for national security policy. It is something that will always be disputed by policymakers with differing viewpoints.

 

There are legitimate concerns about whether the IC should devote more resources to collecting intelligence rather than analyzing it, a function performed by all IC components and particularly by the ODNI. The IC’s analytical responsibilities are unquestionably valuable. Agencies can answer questions ranging from the highly technical (What are those fuzzy bumps on a satellite picture?) to the most abstract (What is Vladimir’s Putin’s long-term objective in Ukraine?). But you can analyze a subject to death without reaching a conclusion, and policymakers often do not have that luxury. Analysis necessarily involves value judgments that also affect strategic and tactical calculations. It is not a sorcerer’s stone that determines policy but only one factor among many that policymakers must consider.

 

Before the ODNI was created, an “intelligence community staff” carried out the DCI’s government-wide functions. Much of that staff was simply transferred to the ODNI when it was launched and could easily be transferred back to serve under a restored DCI. The National Intelligence Council, for example, consists of experts on regional and functional issues such as arms control. It provides, as described on the ODNI website, “strategic, rigorous, and objective estimative all-source analysis.” But it can do this wherever it is housed bureaucratically. Similarly, the National Counterterrorism Center could be positioned administratively under the dual-hatted DCI without losing its analytical independence. The same is true for other coordinating functions of the ODNI such as counterintelligence, counterproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and cybersecurity.

 

But beyond organizational charts and wiring diagrams is the imperative of satisfying intelligence consumers, particularly those far removed from critical decisions on the allocation of IC resources. How much should be devoted to collection and clandestine operations rather than analysis? How should resources be divided among countries or global regions? How much attention should be paid to nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, or to conventional weapons intelligence, or to cyberspace, or to the multiplying forms of asymmetric warfare? As Congress envisioned in 1947, the NSC is the appropriate forum to resolve these issues, which are intimately linked to the policy decisions that the president and NSC members must make.

 

As Trump’s ODNI nominee Jay Clayton undergoes his confirmation hearings, senators should probe these issues and more. After two decades, we have an important opportunity to look back at the ODNI and make significant course corrections, thereby enabling a well-functioning  intelligence community to fulfill its critical national security responsibilities.

Don’t Hold Section 702 Renewal Hostage to the SAVE America Act

National Review Online

Monday, June 22, 2026

 

As we have previously editorialized, we support the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which serves important national security functions, and oppose the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE America Act, which (while pursuing noble policy goals by mostly prudent ends) intrudes upon the power of states to run elections. So, it should come as no surprise that we think it a bad idea for President Trump to insist that he will not support Section 702 renewal unless it has the SAVE America Act attached.

 

Pushing to attach controversial legislation to a must-pass bill with bipartisan support is hardball. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t happen, but we have no illusions that the sausage will always be made in a decorous fashion. Our objections are not to the tactic itself, but to how this is apt to play out.

 

Start with the good news. The silver lining to this effort is that what Trump is doing doesn’t require changing the rules by which laws are made in America. Our largest objection to the campaign for the SAVE America Act has been that its proponents demand the rewriting or outright abolition of the Senate filibuster in order to pass a comparatively marginal improvement in the security of American elections. By altering his tactics, Trump is implicitly conceding that this is not going to happen. That is welcome.

 

Success is another story. This tactic is much likelier to sink Section 702 renewal than it is to get anything enacted on election law, a subject where partisan divides are deepest. Democrats simply aren’t going to budge on the SAVE America Act. That’s the trouble with including poison pills in bills you actually want to see passed. In fact, Republicans in both the House and Senate are balking at this approach — and the last thing Republicans need ahead of the midterm elections is a losing battle that divides the party and leads to the president scapegoating people in tight reelection battles.

 

If Republicans insist on trying to attach an election-law fix to the problem of noncitizen voting to this or some other bill, they could at least offer a much more modest proposal, which is to revise existing law to permit states to require proof of citizenship (thus overruling the Supreme Court’s decision in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona (2013)). But even that is apt to prove a nonstarter for the Senate Democrats whose support is required to reauthorize Section 702. In the meantime, as we have warned before, allowing Section 702 to lapse puts our national security and the people who protect it at risk. That’s a very high price to pay.

Our Ability to Fight Foreign Terrorism Just Got Weaker

By John Yoo

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

 

Beset by partisan scuffles for political advantage as the midterms approach, Congress on Friday night failed to renew one of the powers central to the fight against foreign terrorists. Without the power to intercept foreign electronic communications, Republican and Democratic leaders have allowed a large hole to emerge in Washington’s ability to detect and stop foreign attacks. Congress has demonstrated again that it cannot shoulder the government’s most fundamental duties; its failure now requires President Trump to draw on his constitutional power to fill the gap.

 

Until Friday night, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allowed the National Security Agency and FBI to intercept electronic communications abroad. The intelligence agencies can use this information to build a mosaic of terrorist activities and inform law enforcement to pre-empt attacks before they occur. If our government had the legal ability to collect this information and share it before September 11, 2001, it could have prevented the catastrophic strikes on New York City and Washington, D.C.

 

As a Justice Department official on that day, and in the weeks and months after, I worked to plug that gap. We created the Terrorist Surveillance Program to intercept broad swaths of foreign communications to detect terrorist activities. But it had to operate without congressional authorization or judicial approval because, we believed, holding a public debate would tip off our enemies about our advantages and tactics. We knew that critics could challenge the program on Fourth Amendment grounds, because the interception of the messages occurred without a warrant. But we also concluded that foreigners had no constitutional rights against the U.S. government and that any U.S. communications unintentionally swept up would fall within the exigent circumstances exception to the Fourth Amendment. “The Fourth Amendment would almost certainly permit an appropriately tailored roadblock set up to thwart an imminent terrorist attack or to catch a dangerous criminal who is likely to flee by way of a particular route,” the Supreme Court observed in 2000.

 

When the existence of the program leaked, Congress eventually enacted Section 702 to place the surveillance program on a firm constitutional basis but included a sunset that required periodic re-authorization. Now that Congress has allowed Section 702 to lapse, President Trump will have to return to the constitutional basis that President Bush invoked at the outset of the war against al-Qaeda on September 11. FISA ultimately cannot limit the president’s powers to protect national security through surveillance because that authority stems from his unique Article II responsibilities. Intercepting enemy communications has long been part of waging war; indeed, it is critical to the successful use of force. The U.S. military cannot attack or defend to good effect unless it knows where to aim.

 

America has a long history of conducting intelligence operations to obtain information on the enemy. General Washington used spies extensively during the Revolutionary War. As president, he established a secret fund for spying that existed until the creation of the CIA. President Lincoln personally hired spies during the Civil War, a practice that the Supreme Court upheld. In both World Wars I and II, presidents ordered the interception of communications leaving the United States. Some of America’s greatest wartime intelligence successes have involved signals intelligence, as it is known. The most important was probably the breaking of Japanese diplomatic and naval codes during World War II, which allowed the U.S. Navy to anticipate the attack on Midway Island. Signals intelligence may be even more important in waging war against terrorists than nation-states. Al-Qaeda has launched a variety of efforts to attack the United States, and it intends to continue them. The primary way to stop those attacks is to find and stop al-Qaeda operatives who have infiltrated the United States. The best way to find them is to intercept their electronic communications about infiltrating the country.

 

The need for executive authority over electronic intelligence-gathering became apparent at the outset of the nation’s war against Islamist terrorist groups. In the hours and days after the September 11 attacks, members of the government thought that al-Qaeda might try to crash other airliners or use a weapon of mass destruction in a major East Coast city. Combat air patrols began flying above New York and Washington. Suppose a plane was hijacked and would not respond to air traffic controllers. In order to protect the nation from attack, it would be reasonable for U.S. anti-terrorism personnel to intercept any radio or cellphone calls to or from the airliner, in order to discover the hijackers’ intentions, what was happening on the plane, and whether it would be necessary for the fighters to shoot down the plane. Or suppose the government had to put up a net to intercept all cellphone calls in a city because it was searching for a terrorist cell that had yet to launch an attack. Under such circumstances, the absence of congressional authorization, or even limits imposed by Congress through FISA, should prevent the president from monitoring any radio or cellphone calls to or from the airliner; after all, the purpose is not to arrest and gather evidence for trial, but to protect the nation from attack. Indeed, because the United States is in a state of war, the military can intercept the communications of the plane to see if it poses a threat and target the enemy if necessary. This authority is not only within the president’s executive powers, but it also comports with the principle of reasonableness that guides the Fourth Amendment.

 

As commander in chief, the president has the constitutional power and the responsibility to wage war in response to a direct attack on the U.S. During the Civil War, President Lincoln undertook several actions — raising an army, withdrawing money from the treasury, launching a blockade — on his own authority in response to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, moves that Congress and the Supreme Court later approved. During World War II, the Supreme Court similarly recognized that once war began, the president’s authority as commander in chief and chief executive gave him the tools necessary to effectively wage war. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Congress agreed that “the President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.”

 

Even legal scholars who argue against this historical practice concede that once the United States has been attacked, the president can respond immediately with force. The ability to collect intelligence is intrinsic to the use of military force. It is inconceivable that the Constitution would give the president the responsibility to protect the nation from attack but then disable him from gathering intelligence to use the military most effectively to defeat the enemy. Every piece of evidence of the Framers’ understanding of the Constitution suggests that the government would have the ability to meet a foreign danger. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 41, “security against foreign danger is one of the primitive objects of civil society.” Therefore, the “powers requisite for attaining it must be effectually confided to the federal councils.” After World War II, the Supreme Court declared in Johnson v. Eisentrager that “this grant of war power includes all that is necessary and proper for carrying these powers into execution.” Covert operations and electronic surveillance are clearly part of this authority.

 

During the writing of the Constitution, some Framers believed that the president alone should manage intelligence because only he could keep secrets. Several Supreme Court cases have recognized that the president’s role as commander in chief and the sole organ of the nation in its foreign relations must include the power to collect intelligence. These authorities agree that intelligence rests with the president because its structure allows it to act with unity, secrecy, and speed.

 

Presidents have long ordered electronic surveillance without any judicial or congressional participation. More than a year before the Pearl Harbor attacks, but with war clearly looming with the Axis powers, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the FBI to intercept any communications, whether wholly inside the country or international, of persons “suspected of subversive activities against the Government of the United States, including suspected spies.” FDR was concerned that “fifth columns” could wreak havoc with the war effort. “It is too late to do anything about it after sabotage, assassinations and ‘fifth column’ activities are completed,” FDR wrote in his order. FDR ordered the surveillance even though a federal law at the time prohibited electronic surveillance without a warrant. Presidents continued to monitor the communications of national security threats on their own authority, even in peacetime. If presidents in times of peace could order surveillance of spies and terrorists, executive authority is only greater now, as hostilities continue against al-Qaeda. Justice Departments under Republican and Democratic presidents alike have held a similar view of the executive branch’s authority to conduct surveillance outside the FISA framework.

 

Courts have never opposed a president’s authority to engage in warrantless electronic surveillance of foreign individuals to protect national security. When the Supreme Court first considered this question in 1972, it held that the Fourth Amendment required a judicial warrant if a president wanted to conduct surveillance of a purely domestic group, but it refused to address surveillance of foreign threats to national security. In the years since, every federal appeals court, including the FISA Appeals Court, to address the question has “held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information.” In its 2002 decision in In Re: Sealed Case, which upheld the constitutionality of the Patriot Act’s main provisions, the FISA Appeals Court believed that the president’s power here was so obvious as not to merit much discussion, taking the president’s power to conduct surveillance during wartime “for granted,” and observing that “FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.”

 

Congress also implicitly authorized the president to carry out electronic surveillance to prevent further attacks on the United States. Congress’s September 18, 2001, Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) puts no limitation on time or place — only that the president pursue al-Qaeda. Although the president did not need, as a constitutional matter, Congress’s permission to pursue and attack al-Qaeda after the attacks, its passage shows that the president and Congress fully agreed that military action would be appropriate. Congress’s approval of the killing and capture of al-Qaeda members must obviously include the tools to locate them in the first place.

 

A choice between FISA and his constitutional authority gives the president the discretion to use the best method to protect the United States, whether through the military or by relying on law enforcement. There is a downside to relying on the president’s constitutional authority to wage war. It may mean that the fruits of warrantless surveillance will be used only to stop possible attacks but cannot be introduced into the criminal justice system. President Trump could alleviate any constitutional concerns about the expiration of Section 702 by publicly declaring that no evidence generated after its sunset will be used to prosecute criminal suspects. Although Section 702 cannot limit the president’s constitutional authority, it can provide a more stable system for the domestic collection of foreign intelligence, such as the NSA’s collection of phone call metadata and foreign e-mails, especially when used in prosecutions in federal court.

 

The real problem with operating under a Fourth Amendment framework is that it remains rooted in a law enforcement approach to surveillance. It ties the government’s counterterrorism efforts to individualized suspicion. Searches and wiretaps must target a specific individual already believed to be involved in harmful activity. But detecting terrorists who have no previous criminal record in the United States, and who are undeterred by the possibility of criminal sanctions, requires the use of more sweeping methods.

 

To successfully prevent attacks, the government must devote surveillance resources where there is a reasonable chance that terrorists will appear, or communicate, even if their specific identities remain unknown. What if the government knew that there was a 50 percent chance that terrorists would use a certain communications pipeline, such as e-mails provided by a popular Pakistani ISP, but that most of the communications on that channel would not be linked to terrorism? An approach based on individualized suspicion would prevent computers from searching through that channel for the keywords or names that might suggest terrorist communications, because there are no specific al-Qaeda suspects, and thus no probable cause. Rather than individualized suspicion, searching for terrorists depends on playing the probabilities, just as airport screenings do. The private owner of any website has detailed access to information about the individuals who visit the site that he can exploit for his own commercial purposes, such as selling lists of names to spammers, or gathering market data on individuals or groups. The government’s effort to find violent terrorists is a far more legitimate use of such data.

 

Individualized suspicion dictates the focus of law enforcement, but war demands that our armed forces defend the country with a broader perspective. Armies do not meet a “probable cause” requirement when they attack a position or fire on enemy troops or intercept enemy communications on a frequency. In the criminal justice system, the purpose is to hold a specific person responsible for a discrete crime that has already happened. It does not make sense when the purpose of intelligence is to take action, such as killing or capturing members of the enemy, to prevent future harm to the nation from a foreign threat.

 

This year is an anniversary not just for celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but also for honoring those killed 25 years ago in the 9/11 attacks. This year should remind us not just of the idealism of the Founders, but also of the difficult choices that they (and we) faced in waging war. Properly understood, their other handiwork — the Constitution — should not be understood to subject the government to unreasonable burdens in carrying out its highest duty of protecting the nation from attack.

In Trump’s Second Term, Things Start to Fall Apart

By Elliott Abrams

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

 

Let’s not exaggerate: Yeats’s lines do not yet describe the Trump administration and its foreign policy. But the direction now, in the 17th month of his second term, is toward confusion and failure.

 

The achievements of the second term in foreign affairs are real. The attacks on Iran in June 2025, and now in 2026, decapitated the regime and greatly diminished Iran’s economy and its military power. Similarly bold are the decapitation of the regime in Venezuela and the squeeze on Cuba. But in Europe, where the Ukraine war continues, and in Asia, where Xi Jinping continues his threats against Taiwan, there are no achievements to list. In fact, relations with India, critical during the 21st century, have been damaged.

 

And President Trump seems poised to throw away the achievements he has made. In Venezuela, he seems completely comfortable with a Maduro regime without Maduro; every other thug and thief remains in place, hundreds of political prisoners continue to rot away, and Trump never utters the word “democracy” or imposes any political demands on Delcy Rodríguez. When will there be an election? In Cuba, which must lie close to Secretary Marco Rubio’s heart, the outcome is in doubt: Will negotiations with Raúl Castro’s grandson produce real change? Trump has the chance in the two and a half years that remain of his time in power to leave the Western Hemisphere without a single regime hostile to the United States for the first time since 1959 (assuming that if Cuba and Venezuela are liberated, Nicaragua will not survive as a lone Marxist redoubt). That would be a tremendous and historic achievement for Trump — but he seems unaware that it works only if decapitation is followed by freedom rather than more pliable cronies.

 

The graver national security problems lie outside this hemisphere. The loss of Taiwan to Communist China would be a historic disaster for the United States. It would turn U.S. allies in the region into fearful neutrals or Chinese vassals, because the failure to save Taiwan would show Asians that Chinese power was now irresistible. It would give China control of TSMC and its 70 percent of the global semiconductor foundry market. Yet during Trump’s most recent China visit, he apparently agreed not to proceed with $12 billion in arms sales to Taiwan and said this: “Looking at the situation, China is a very, very strong power, and Taiwan is a very small island. Taiwan is 59 miles away from mainland China, while the U.S. is 9,500 miles away.” Hardly reassuring — except to Xi. And subversive of our alliances with Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Singapore, which are the same distance away.

 

The situation regarding Europe is arguably worse. Trump’s susceptibility to Vladimir Putin’s “arguments” over Ukraine and his coldness to Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky cannot be explained in terms of U.S. national security interests. Trump long ago began winning his battle for more military spending by NATO allies, but he has reacted not with a victory lap but with churlishness. His treatment of our NATO allies would be incomprehensible to previous Republican presidents, including Eisenhower and Reagan. One of the most committed NATO allies, Denmark, has been threatened with the use of military force over Greenland, even as just about every stated goal regarding Greenland is obviously achievable through negotiations. As to Ukraine, even without firm U.S. support, it is holding its own; with that support, Russian adventurism would be dealt a near-mortal blow, and Putin would likely fall. Yet Trump is turning a possible historic victory against Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine into a crisis for the Western alliance. And no one can explain why.

 

There are two theories. In both the Xi and Putin cases, Trump may be adhering to his personal version of a “great man” or “great leader” version of history, where he will settle things face to face with his peers. There are many problems with such negotiations with murderous dictators. Very often those men do not keep their promises, breaking them at will in political systems where there is no parliament or press or opposition party to challenge that behavior. Moreover, there is simply no way of knowing how long the dictator or his policy will last. Xi seems secure today, but is Putin — with complaints about his costly and endless war in Ukraine growing while he is obviously unwilling to end it and unable to win it?

 

Or, Trump may be following what he thinks is “realpolitik,” and his statement above about China and Taiwan reinforces that conclusion. But this approach is not actually realistic, because it treats every country as a black box — an empty vessel with one man at the top. The Chinese people or Russian people simply do not exist in this approach — nor, as we will see in a moment, do Iranians. Only Xi, and Putin, and Delcy Rodríguez, and others like them do. That we may have common interests today with Russians who want to end the Ukraine war, or Venezuelans who want democracy, or Iranians who want a new, democratic, Western-style government does not seem to enter Trump’s mind or his policies. His kind of realism tells him to deal with those in power and forget about the populace. In the short run, that most often works. In the medium run, it sacrifices opportunities that can change world politics and undermines America’s claim to stand for democracy. Trump seems content to celebrate the 250^th anniversary of Americans’ demand for popular sovereignty by ignoring that demand by any other people.

 

In this corollary to his brand of realpolitik, Trump seems completely unaware of, even resistant to, the idea that freedom is a great asset for the United States. His relationships with tyrants are in general warmer than those with democratically elected leaders. He eschews U.S. support for democracy activists in dictatorships and has tried to gut the National Endowment for Democracy and democracy programs at the State Department, as well as U.S. broadcasting to the people of nations like China, Russia, and Iran. He has properly chided Europeans for abandoning elements of Western traditions and culture, but seems unaware that democratic government and respect for human rights are at the center of the Western political tradition he says he wants to save.

 

Style and language contribute to this picture. Anyone who thinks Eisenhower kept four-letter words out of his private vocabulary forgets his 32 years in the Army. But Trump seems to feel no responsibility to uphold standards of conduct either abroad or at home — as was demonstrated by his curses at Israel’s prime minister in a June conversation between them, or his astonishing Easter Sunday social media post that included F-bombing the American public about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. His view of how a national and a world leader should behave — or, better put, how the representative of the American people should behave — also affects the way other countries and other leaders react to him and to U.S. policy. Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” was a carefully calibrated ploy designed to make opponents unsure how far he would go — to look far more unpredictable than he was, even to look irrational. But some of Trump’s behavior and statements leave not only enemies, but friends and allies — and tens of millions of Americans — wondering whether policy is based on anything more than whim and ego.

 

So does the question of personnel. When he came to office in 2017, Trump surrounded himself primarily with experienced Republican officials and generals. There was, of course, a group of personal loyalists as well, and these groups cooperated sometimes and fought sometimes. Over four years, many of them got fed up and left the administration — some building careers on trashing or celebrating Trump in books or on TV. In this second term, the administration is staffed primarily by people who are personally loyal and often have few other virtues or qualifications. Perfect examples would be Trump’s two directors of national intelligence (DNI), former Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard and home-builder Bill Pulte. Needless to say, some loyalists are also effective policymakers and bureaucrats, but that seems to be a happy accident rather than a qualification for office.

 

These days the personnel trend is downward, like the trend in Trump’s personal conduct. His own use of language and his family’s engagement in money-making schemes have changed in this term, and so has the way he explains (or fails to explain) his policies.

 

Iran is a case study of that downward trajectory. In his first term, Trump ordered the killing of Quds Force head Qasem Soleimani, and, in this term, ordered the bombing (along with Israel) of Iran’s nuclear sites and other targets. There was a clear policy: to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon and to punish terrorism against Americans. But it’s apparent now, several months in, that policymaking is as sloppy as it appears from outside. The usual laborious interagency process (which is so easy to caricature, but serves to present and evaluate options and raise likely dangers) was apparently absent. The president listened to . . . whom? Some combination of foreign leaders, U.S. officials, and hangers-on at Mar-a-Lago, and it looks as if there was no point at which long-foreseen challenges such as Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz were truly understood and evaluated by the president.

 

Today, Trump is in a tight corner. He clearly does not wish to return to full-on conflict. Equally, he does not wish to agree to a deal that is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s JCPOA and will produce rounds of mockery from Democrats who remember how harshly he denounced that agreement. So the stalemate goes on, damaging every economy reliant on Gulf sources for petroleum products, including fertilizer as well as gasoline and diesel, and producing U.S. gasoline prices that threaten Republicans in November. Now, Trump has linked Lebanon to the Iran talks and tried to constrain Israeli attacks there because they may upset the Iran negotiations — linkage that is a huge Iranian victory. While negotiations between Lebanese government and Israeli officials in Washington insist on Lebanese sovereignty, Trump seems willing to ignore all that if he needs Hezbollah included to make an Iran deal. Most recently, he urged Israel not to respond when Iran shot 20 missiles at it, a request (or demand) that was doomed to failure and also very bad policy.

 

That policy is the product of a remarkable mixture of friends and officials: his old real estate friend Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner as Iran negotiators; his old real estate friend Tom Barrack as ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria and Iraq; his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Lebanese-American businessman Massad Boulos, as a special envoy for the Middle East. The list goes on. And the intelligence coming in from all agencies (FBI, CIA, DIA, etc.) is supposed to be digested and presented to the president by the acting director of national intelligence, the home-building heir Bill Pulte, who has zero intelligence experience.

 

But that isn’t anarchy; the center does hold in the sense that the center is Donald Trump. Perhaps confusion or indiscipline is a better description than anarchy. Example: Most Republicans in the Senate support an extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as a key tool against terrorism (permitting warrantless collection of communications by terrorism suspects outside the United States), but that section is controversial. On June 5, seven Republicans joined all Democrats but one (Senator John Fetterman) in voting against proceeding to debate on the extension; the vote was 52–47 against. Several senators and cabinet members warned the president not to announce Pulte now for DNI because it would make the vote that much harder. Those warning him are said to include CIA Director John Ratcliffe, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Yet he went ahead, refusing any delay — and no one can explain why.

 

Equally damaging to Trump’s own interests, and his party’s, was his vendetta against Senator John Cornyn of Texas, whom Trump opposed in the primary election because Cornyn had not endorsed him for reelection early enough. Cornyn was defeated. Problem: He was defeated by someone universally regarded as the weaker candidate in November. This makes it seem that personal retribution is more important to Trump than just about anything — including having a majority in the Senate that can pass legislation and lay the groundwork for the 2028 election.

 

The Cornyn episode, like the Section 702/Pulte issue, tells us a lot about Trump’s second term, which is now one-third over. The common thread is Trump’s indiscipline, his egotism, his reliance on a motley crew of advisers — who include some excellent ones, too, such as Ratcliffe at CIA and Marco Rubio at State and NSC, but who must work in an environment that’s more like a medieval court than a modern democratic government. No White House staff and no Cabinet is ever a meritocracy; there are always friends, relatives, donors, political supporters, and party stalwarts in the mix. But in the usual mix there are also many individuals of real competence whose loyalties go beyond early support of the president. There’s a lot less of that in Trump II.

 

The center is holding for now — yet things may fall apart. The loyalty of congressional Republicans is being tested by Trump’s solipsism, elevating personal fealty over party-building, and it will be tested more if Republicans lose the House and perhaps the Senate in November. The ability of Trump’s motley crew to implement and explain his policies will diminish in the second half of this term if competent officials begin to depart (as usually happens in second terms) and Trump cannot or will not find equally competent replacements. Americans’ faith in Trump will decline if he cannot bring the Iran conflict to a sensible conclusion and if he makes foreign policy errors that bury his very real achievements.

 

Second terms are almost always harder, and Donald Trump’s way of governing will exacerbate the troubles. He can turn that around, but hiring more unqualified loyalists and placing allegiance to himself above principle and competence will make that a lot harder. Donald Trump will remain at the center, but centrifugal forces are growing. The first 17 months of his second term bode poorly for success in the remaining two and a half years.

 

 

Tulsi Gabbard Takes the Exit Ramp

By Shane Harris

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

It’s a measure of Donald Trump’s low regard for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as well as its soon-to-be former occupant, that while the commander in chief was making final preparations to invade Venezuela and kidnap its president, Tulsi Gabbard was posting photos of herself from a beach in Hawaii.

 

Gabbard, who informed Trump of her resignation today, spent 15 months as the director of national intelligence—on paper, at least. By law, the DNI is supposed to serve as the president’s chief intelligence adviser. Gabbard never was, and many of her stances were at odds with administration actions. Trump was contemptuous of even her modest efforts to speak truth to power. In the spring of 2025, when Gabbard testified to the intelligence community’s consensus view that Iran “is not building a nuclear weapon,” Trump replied, “I don’t care what she said.” Gabbard has long opposed U.S. military intervention in Iran and did not publicly come out in support of Trump’s decision to go to war. One of her top lieutenants quit in protest of the war.

 

In her resignation letter, Gabbard told Trump that she would step down on June 30, having recently learned that her husband, Abraham Williams, has a rare type of bone cancer. “Abraham has been my rock throughout our eleven years of marriage,” Gabbard wrote. People who know the couple have told me that they are exceptionally close; Williams, a video producer and cinematographer, has filmed Gabbard throughout her time in public service, including when she took a trip to Syria to meet the dictator Bashar al-Assad while serving as a Democratic member of Congress. Contrary to the Washington cliché, there’s every reason to think that Gabbard really does want to spend more time with her family. But the Iran war likely made leaving an easier choice.

 

It’s surprising that Gabbard lasted this long in her job. CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who served as DNI in Trump’s first term, has assumed the unofficial—and unenviable—role of chief intelligence adviser to a man who operates on gut instinct.

 

Because the president was not interested in Gabbard’s views on intelligence, she tried to get his attention in other ways. Gabbard accused former U.S. officials of mounting a “yearslong coup” against Trump. She railed against the so-called Russia Hoax and attempted to undermine the conclusion, by a bipartisan Senate committee, that Russia had indeed interfered in the 2016 presidential election. And she took revenge on Trump’s perceived political enemies by revoking the security clearances of current and former intelligence officials. None of this won the president’s public admiration, and it did lasting damage to the intelligence community. Gabbard’s decision to place politics ahead of objectivity has deterred intelligence analysts from making assertions that might run counter to the administration’s preferred storylines, current and former officials have told me.

 

To bolster her baseless claims, Gabbard declassified U.S. intelligence material—sometimes over the objections of the CIA—and publicly misrepresented what those documents actually said. Gabbard’s claim to have “uncovered weaponization” in the intelligence community gave Trump another dubious talking point in his unrelenting campaign of political revenge. Gabbard fired two senior intelligence analysts after they wrote an assessment that contradicted Trump’s efforts to link Venezuela’s president to a criminal gang. Trump’s tortured claims played a role in justifying his attack on Venezuela—a supreme irony for the supposedly anti-interventionist DNI.

 

By law, it was Gabbard’s responsibility to advise policy makers on life-and-death decisions and help them make sense of the torrent of intelligence that streams into U.S. spy agencies every day. Instead, she made her position a platform for promoting distortions and undermining public confidence in the very institutions she’d sworn an oath to lead.

 

The ODNI has long been a weak agency. It never really fulfilled the mandate that was set out for it two decades ago, when Congress tried to correct the failures that had led to the 9/11 attacks by creating another layer of bureaucracy on top of the already-unwieldy intelligence community. “Gabbard’s tenure has demonstrated just how easily an organization like ODNI that lacks clear mission and impact can become overly politicized and move away from the kind of objectivity and truth-seeking required for good intelligence work and U.S. national security,” William Walldorf, a professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University and a senior fellow at the think tank Defense Priorities, told me.

 

Toward the end of her tenure, the most salient question to ask about Gabbard was: Why does she stay? She had suffered the humiliation of being shut out of the big meetings and dismissed by the president, only to see the United States bogged down in a new war. When I’ve posed the question to people who have worked with Gabbard in the legislative and executive branch, they tend to offer a simple explanation: She wants power (and they don’t mean that as a compliment). Former congressional staff described her to me as the most ambitious person they’d ever met in Washington. American and foreign intelligence officers told me that she is unfailingly charming and warm in person; in less flattering language, they called her calculating, cautious, and keenly aware of the importance of cultivating her image. In every sense, then, a natural politician.

 

Gabbard ran for president once, as a Democrat. If she decides to give it another shot, she has an opening among Trump supporters. The president’s decision to attack Iran is polling poorly among voters. Gabbard remains admired among formerly MAGA-friendly media influencers who have lost patience with the president and feel that he has betrayed his pledge to not lead the nation into wars of choice. The podcaster Joe Rogan, who called Trump’s war on Iran “nuts,” is a friend of Gabbard’s, and he recently praised her as “amazing” and “the same person on air, off air”; he concluded succinctly, “She’s cool as fuck.”

 

Because Gabbard wasn’t involved in some of the president’s most unpopular decisions, she can’t easily be blamed for them. That gives her a strange credibility in an administration that prizes loyalty over candor. Being an outsider in the Trump administration may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to Gabbard’s career.

Is the Intelligence on Iran’s Capabilities Credible?

By Noah Rothman

Friday, May 08, 2026

 

We now have a better understanding of why Project Freedom, a Trump administration initiative in the Strait of Hormuz designed to neutralize the Iranian threat and get maritime traffic moving again, was abruptly aborted within 36 hours of its announcement. The reason? The Saudis wanted to teach the White House a lesson, and so reportedly imposed temporary restraints on the U.S.

 

To recap: Over the weekend, following a prolonged period of relative quiet, commercial shipping in the strait once again came under Iranian fire. Within hours, the administration announced its intention to clear navigable channels in the strait. To demonstrate U.S. resolve, two cruise-missile destroyers transited the waterway, drawing Iranian fire in the process. But, as they had during Operation Epic Fury, Iran’s field commanders also lashed out omnidirectionally, launching missiles and drones at targets inside Gulf states like Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

 

America did not respond. Rather, it spent the following 24 hours dispatching high-ranking administration principals — the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — to explain why Project Freedom was a strategic and moral imperative to which America was wholly committed. Hours later, however, the president announced that the imperative would have to wait. A deal with Iran was supposedly in the offing. So, for the time being, the strait would remain closed.

 

It was an inexplicable sequence of events before U.S. media outlets uncovered the impetus for Trump’s inconstancy. The Saudis restricted American access to their airspace and bases temporarily, allegedly to communicate Riyadh’s displeasure with America’s failure to respond proportionately to Iranian attacks on Gulf states. But following unspecified assurances from the American side, the Saudis (and Kuwaitis) subsequently lifted those restrictions. Not only was Project Freedom back on, but U.S. warships also transited the strait again on Thursday. And when those vessels took fire from the Iranian side, American forces retaliated with airstrikes on Iranian targets on the Islamic Republic’s shoreline.

 

There is clarity in this chronology. The Saudis continue to deny that any of this took place as it has been reported, but what we can see with our own eyes is more compelling than their denials.

 

That experience is worth keeping in mind as Americans evaluate reports alleging that the intelligence community believes that Iran’s offensive military and nuclear capabilities have not been significantly disrupted despite the unprecedented drubbing Tehran absorbed over the 40-day war.

 

“U.S. intelligence assessments indicate that the time Iran would ​need to build a nuclear weapon has not changed since last summer,” Reuters reported this week. After the June 2025 strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, American intelligence agencies estimated Iran’s window to break out with a fissionable device was pushed back from three to six months to nine months or, perhaps, a year. And yet, despite the hundreds of strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, nuclear science community, and heavy industry during the campaign that began on February 28, the intelligence community’s assessment remains unchanged from last year.

 

We have no reason to doubt that such an assessment was presented to the president, although it’s unclear if that is one intelligence agency’s view or the product of a synthesis of analyses across the U.S. intelligence community. But the evidence before us should also inspire skepticism toward that assessment’s conclusions.

 

In a response to the Reuters report, analysts with the Institute for Science and International Security (yes, ISIS, but the “good” one) were incredulous. They itemized the number of complex, expensive facilities that were damaged in the war. They detailed the loss of “know-how” (as opposed to “knowledge”) about nuclear-weapons manufacturing that had been neutralized. They observed that Iran’s uranium stockpiles are “bottled up in sites where any movement can be easily detected.” And they reached a very different conclusion.

 

“Recent media reports of the U.S. intelligence community finding that the second phase of the war did not set back timelines for Iran to build nuclear weapons do not accord with the visible damage of nuclear weaponization facilities and require both more explanation and scrutiny,” ISIS’s experts declared. Indeed, the difficulty Iran will face in attempting to break out with a bomb could dissuade the Iranians from even making the attempt. “That real risk of failing to successfully build a nuclear weapon may be a deterrent against deciding to try,” the report closed.

 

But what about Iran’s missile production and launch capabilities? Those, too, are largely intact, according to publicly reported American intelligence assessments.

 

According to the CIA, Iran still maintains about 70 percent of its pre-war missile stockpile, and roughly three-quarters of its mobile missile launchers remain operational. The allegations were reported in both mainstream and conservative media venues, and there is, again, no reason to doubt that such an assessment was provided to the president. But the conclusions in that assessment also merit scrutiny.

 

At the outset of the war, a general consensus maintained that Iran had about 2,500 ballistic missiles in its arsenal. According to General Dan Caine’s assessment on April 8, as the current cease-fire was struggling to take hold, U.S. and Gulf-region forces intercepted about 1,700 ballistic missiles — most of which were fired in the earliest days of the war. That is to say nothing of the dozens of missiles that slipped past the West’s defenses and reached their targets.

 

In addition, Caine said that 450 ballistic missile storage facilities had been destroyed, and 80 percent of Iran’s missile production facilities had been disabled — limiting Iran’s near-term capability to rebuild its stockpiles. As for launchers, Caine assessed that the “majority” of Iran’s “launcher vehicles” had been destroyed. Still, that would leave Iran with hundreds of operational or recoverable launchers, as well as thousands of missiles (particularly the short-range and cruise varieties) that could be brought back online.

 

That isn’t too far off from what U.S. intelligence allegedly assesses. And yet, the pattern of Iran’s launches during the war — which opened with a massive salvo but soon thereafter slowed to a trickle — suggests that it’s one thing to have missiles but quite another to deploy them against hostile targets in combat successfully. The Islamic Republic maintains a ballistic missile deterrent, yes. But if hostilities were to break out again, U.S. and Israeli forces would do what they did during the war: target the facilities they monitor from afar, strike launchers that emerge from their hiding holes, and frustrate Iran’s ability to deploy its formidable arsenal in a strategically coherent fashion.

 

It’s not that these intelligence assessments are inaccurate. As reported in the press, however, their emphasis on the degree to which Iran’s capabilities can (or, perhaps, should) deter further U.S. and Israeli action is not supported by the evidence presented. That assumes the intent of these leaks was to dissuade Trump from carrying out his threats against Iran. Maybe the point was merely to embarrass the president and to advance the conclusion favored by some within this administration that the United States gains nothing by securing its interests overseas via force.

 

Either way, we should be skeptical of intelligence assessments that are presented to the public as an airtight basis for a particular public policy. There is an advocate for that policy preference on the other side of those leaks. And when those assessments don’t comport with the facts in evidence, our skepticism is more than warranted.

Reauthorize FISA Section 702 — Again

National Review Online

Wednesday, April 15, 2025

 

Here we go again: Congress is voting imminently on whether to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which President Trump supports. Without reauthorization, the program would expire on April 20, placing a key anti-terrorism tool in legal limbo. Congress should vote to keep it in place.

 

We have supported the executive branch surveillance powers that are governed by Section 702 since its enactment in 2008. Before that, we supported the predecessor surveillance programs since their origins after September 11 — powers with roots dating back to the dawn of the Republic. Section 702 surveillance is also used for counterintelligence and interdiction of drug trafficking and human trafficking. The threat of international terrorism may not be as visible and visceral to the public as it was 25 years ago, but with the United States currently at war with the leading state sponsor of terrorism, this would be an especially inopportune time to let the legal authority for this crucial function lapse.

 

To recap: Surveillance targeting Americans, or targeting foreign civilians within the United States, is covered by the protections of the Fourth Amendment. (This may not be the case for foreign diplomats, spies, and other foreign government agents.) It therefore requires either a warrant or the availability of a judicially recognized exception to the warrant requirement. Nothing in Section 702 deals with those areas of surveillance — it addresses only surveillance targeting foreigners outside the United States, who have no rights protected by our Constitution.

 

Prior to 2008, such surveillance was conducted — largely by the National Security Agency — on the basis of the president’s Article II national security powers. Section 702 did not create those powers, but it subjected them to periodic judicial review and other legal strictures.

 

Where Section 702 and its predecessors become controversial is that surveillance of the communications of foreigners abroad may sweep in their conversations with Americans. Of course, this has a parallel in domestic law enforcement, where even searches or surveillance with a proper warrant can sweep in communications with people other than the target of the warrant.

 

There are two related concerns with Section 702 surveillance. One, given the relative ease of surveilling foreigners, is that such powers can be used pretextually to spy on Americans on the other end of the phone, text, or email. The other is that once surveillance agencies have collected so much data, they can be mined in a targeted way — especially by the FBI — for information whose original collection may have been honestly incidental. That latter concern is elevated in an age when artificial intelligence can process vast reams of information that previously would have gone unexamined. Say farewell to “security through obscurity.”

 

Deliberate abuse is best addressed by executive and congressional oversight rather than by killing the program. Significant reforms, however, have already been enacted on “minimization” — i.e., when the FBI can search the data that have already been collected. During the debates leading to the reauthorization of Section 702 in 2024, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray argued that the bureau had significantly reduced abuses by mandating new internal procedures. These included requiring supervisory approval, maintaining a paper trail of searches, notifying Congress of searches related to its members, preventing the FBI from storing searched data except in connection with a legitimate investigation, requiring the FBI to discipline personnel who misuse the system, and mandating annual reporting to Congress on the volume of queries about U.S. persons. Rules for submissions to the FISA court were also strengthened, including — of particular concern to Trump — explicitly requiring warrant applications that include information derived from political campaigns and sources to fully disclose those sources and what steps have been taken to corroborate them.

 

Prudently not trusting that the FBI would remain on its good behavior solely on its own initiative, Congress in 2024 codified these reforms directly into the statute. Skeptics may argue that Congress shouldn’t just keep rubber-stamping approval of a program it created 18 years ago and bum-rushing members into votes on the eve of expiration, but Congress already put in the work two years ago to revise the program. There’s no sign that these reforms haven’t worked — we did not get a reprise of Russiagate in the 2024 election even amidst that season’s riot of lawfare. That explains why longtime critics such as Trump, Jim Jordan, and Darrell Issa are now backing reauthorization.

 

Jordan, for example, notes that a 2023 report found 278,000 improper queries of the database, but mandated reporting to Congress found that searches on U.S. persons dropped from 2.9 million in 2022 to just 9,000 in the past year. This has happened while the use of Section 702 surveillance of foreign targets has expanded: Per official reports, targets increased from 246,000 in 2022 to 349,823 in 2025, and enough actionable intelligence was unearthed that, in 2023, 60 percent of the items in the President’s Daily Brief incorporated the fruits of Section 702 surveillance. Surveillance of foreign communications was, among other things, a crucial link in the intelligence chain that led to locating Osama bin Laden.

 

If Section 702 is not reauthorized, the executive branch will be back in the legal no-man’s-land it inhabited before 2008. No responsible president would simply stop doing surveillance of foreign threats, but the legal safeguards would lapse, and rank-and-file members of the intelligence and law enforcement community could face uncertainty about whether they would face legal jeopardy for doing their jobs.

 

It’s a curious situation that Congress has to keep revisiting this issue on increasingly compressed timelines — this is two years since the last reauthorization, and Congress is currently considering only an 18-month extension — when so many other laws, programs, and powers of the executive branch are authorized in perpetuity no matter how unpopular or obsolete they grow. Ideally, we’d like to see Section 702 put on the same footing as the rest of federal law — and still better, we’d like that to include periodic sunsets that force Congress to reconsider everything it has authorized. But in the meantime, one thing the federal government shouldn’t stop doing is watching out for foreign terrorist threats.

The Real Intelligence Failure in Iran

By Shane Harris

Sunday, April 05, 2026

 

In 2005, a bipartisan commission of lawmakers and security experts concluded that “the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” America’s spies had told President George W. Bush that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted a nuclear-weapons program and that Iraq possessed biological weapons and mobile production facilities, as well as stockpiles of chemical weapons. These supposed facts became the basis for a U.S. invasion and an eight-year occupation. “Not one bit of it could be confirmed when the war was over,” the commission found. “This was a major intelligence failure.”

 

If a similar panel of experts scrutinized the run-up to the current war in Iran, their assessment might go something like this:

 

The intelligence community was accurate and consistent in its prewar judgments about Iran’s capabilities and intentions to attack the United States and its allies. Contrary to what President Trump has said to justify his decision, the intelligence showed that the Iranian regime was not preparing to use a nuclear weapon; it did not have ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States; and in response to a U.S. military attack, Iran was likely to strike at neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf and try to close the Strait of Hormuz, precipitating a global economic crisis. All of this was known before the war and presented to President Trump. This was an intelligence success.

 

Trump’s “excursion,” as he calls the biggest U.S. military operation of his second term, has unleashed a parade of horribles. Iran now controls the strait, where it plans to charge vessels a toll and can govern global flows of oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and chemicals that are crucial for manufacturing. A regime that Trump claims to have replaced still remains in the hands of hard-liners, whose repression of the Iranian people will be strengthened for having survived a decapitation strike by the world’s only superpower. And neighboring countries in the Gulf, whose livelihoods depend on exporting energy and creating safe places for people to visit, live, and work, will amass new weapons and reconsider their strategic partnerships with the United States.

 

Two decades ago, a president embraced information that turned out to be wrong, and disaster followed. Today, a president disregards assessments that proved to be right, and the predictable comes to pass. There’s a failure of intelligence there too—just not the kind we’re used to seeing.

 

***

 

“Your successes are unheralded—your failures are trumpeted,” President John F. Kennedy remarked in a speech to CIA staff at their headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, in 1961. Ever since, intelligence officers have ruefully invoked that truism whenever they’re blamed for a major screwup. The familiar storyline of an intelligence failure features analysts who neglect to “connect the dots,” case officers who get seduced by sources who exaggerate or lie, and politicians who contort ambiguous information to align with their preferred outcome. That’s what happened in the months before the Iraq War.

 

The lead-up to Operation Epic Fury turns this narrative on its head. The spies called it right, but the president went another direction. The failures of the intelligence community on Iraq’s WMDs produced systemic changes meant to keep botched calls like that one from recurring. In many respects, those reforms have worked. But they couldn’t account for a decision maker who had been seduced by previous military successes into thinking that the U.S. armed forces, under his inspired and perhaps divinely endowed command, could never stumble.

 

Some of Trump’s allies have criticized him for not making a public case for war, as the Bush administration did. But if he had accurately presented the intelligence, the facts would have argued against attacking Iran—or at least for not striking before the diplomatic options had been exhausted. Perhaps that’s why the president ignored, and later misrepresented, what his advisers told him.

 

“The regime already had missiles capable of hitting Europe and our bases, both local and overseas, and would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America,” Trump said before a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House on March 2. But the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded that building a missile that could hit the United States would take Iran until 2035, and only then if it was determined to do so, which analysts concluded it was not. When Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—hardly the model of an apolitical presidential adviser—testified before Congress a few weeks later, she reported that Iran had missile technology that “it could use to begin to develop a militarily viable ICBM before 2035,” but did not say that it had done so. That timeline is crucial to understand, because to hit the United States with the ultimate weapon, Iran would have to place a nuclear warhead on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

 

That threat was not years away, Trump insisted. Iran was “going to take over the Middle East. They were going to knock out Israel with their nuclear weapon,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on March 16. A charitable reading might be that Trump believes Iran wants to use a nuclear weapon. But desire, or even intention, does not equal capability.

 

It’s true that Iran possesses uranium that could eventually be used to build a nuclear weapon, were it to be further enriched. But in late June, U.S. bombers struck nuclear-related facilities in Iran, which had made “no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability,” Gabbard said in her written statement to Congress. “The entrances to the underground facilities that were bombed have been buried and shuttered with cement.” That’s not a picture of a country on the brink of using a nuclear weapon.

 

Trump not only has misstated intelligence about Iran’s military potential. He has expressed surprise at the regime’s response to American and Israeli bombing, particularly Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the heavy drone and missile attacks it has launched on its neighbors in the Persian Gulf. But the president’s advisers had told him this was likely to happen. They knew that restricting a shipping artery would give Iran a chokehold on the world’s economy. It’s such a no-brainer maneuver that the Pentagon has built it into its war planning. When Trump’s military advisers apprised him of this possibility, he appeared to have shrugged them off. Iran would probably capitulate before trying to close the strait, he said, and in any event, he thought the military could handle it, The Wall Street Journal reported.

 

After threatening to bomb Iran if ships weren’t allowed to travel freely, Trump now says other nations should bear the burden of reopening the waterway. “The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future,” Trump said in a primetime address to the nation on Wednesday. “We don’t need it.” Oil prices rose following his remarks.

 

Trump has also said that no one told him that Iran was likely to attack Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and other Gulf nations that are close allies of the United States and host vital military bases. “They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East,” Trump said during a White House event on March 16. “Nobody expected that. We were shocked.”

 

How could they be? In 2025, the U.S. intelligence community publicly reported that “Iran’s large conventional forces are capable of inflicting substantial damage to an attacker, executing regional strikes, and disrupting shipping, particularly energy supplies, through the Strait of Hormuz.” No less than Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, perhaps the war’s biggest cheerleader in the administration, had to admit that Iran’s regional retaliation was not exactly a surprise. “I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react, but we knew it was a possibility,” he said at a press conference on March 10.

 

Before the war, officials from two Arab countries told Trump and his top aides that they worried Iran could launch counterattacks on them, in order to halt the flow of oil, drive up prices, and trigger a global economic crisis, Politico reported. In early February, as U.S. warships were moving into position, I met with several of Qatar’s senior government officials. The likelihood of an Iranian reprisal was top of mind. One official pointed out the obvious, that a war could make it impossible for Qatar to produce and ship liquefied natural gas, the foundation of its economy. That’s exactly what happened.

 

After conducting its own war-gaming, one of the United States’ closest intelligence-sharing partners in Europe determined that a major American attack would compel Iran to hit countries in the Gulf and try to close the strait, an official in that government recently told me on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive assessment. The Americans were aware of those conclusions, according to the official, who was baffled that Trump claimed to be surprised.

 

***

 

Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were also nonplussed, and angry, when Gabbard appeared before them last month. “There seems to be a discrepancy between what the intelligence community has reported over the years and what the president has said in terms of this action” in Iran, Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, said. “And my question is, did you tell him?”

 

Gabbard avoided answering directly. But she said that the agencies she oversees had provided Trump “with the intelligence related to this operation in Iran, before and on an ongoing basis.” CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who was also present, said that he had participated in “dozens and dozens of briefings with the president,” including in the weeks before the war. He emphasized that “Iran had specific plans to hit U.S. interests in energy sites across the region.” Gabbard backed him up, noting that “this has long been an assessment of the IC that Iran would likely hold the Strait of Hormuz as leverage,” using a shorthand to refer to the intelligence community.

 

Senators were also keen to understand why one of Gabbard’s top deputies had quit his job over the president’s decision to go to war. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Joe Kent, whom Trump had nominated to run the National Counterterrorism Center, wrote in his resignation letter, a revealing statement from an official who had access to some of the most highly classified intelligence in the U.S. government. Ratcliffe told the committee that he disagreed with Kent and that Iran maintained an aspiration to build a nuclear weapon. But that is not the same thing as actually building one and preparing to use it, as Trump has claimed Iran was doing.

 

Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat from Georgia, read aloud a portion of a White House statement from the day after the war began: Trump had ordered “a military campaign to eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime.” He asked Gabbard: Had the intelligence community assessed that the threat was imminent?

 

The intelligence director, who had taken passionately anti-war stances as a member of Congress, walked an awkward line. She told Ossoff that the president is “the only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” and that doing so was not the intelligence community’s job. In fact, it is precisely the job of the intelligence community to make that determination. But putting Gabbard’s evasive characterization aside, she said that “Iran maintained the intention to rebuild and to continue to grow their nuclear enrichment capability.” What she didn’t mention: There is a world of difference between intention and imminent threat.

 

***

 

Plenty of presidents have dismissed the warnings and prognostications of their intelligence advisers, or simply not made time to hear them. When a stolen Cessna crashed on the South Lawn of the White House in 1994, some joked that it was flown by Bill Clinton’s CIA briefer, trying desperately to get a meeting with the president. At the other end of the spectrum, George W. Bush became obsessed with the minutiae of counterterrorism operations, keeping track of the various al-Qaeda members whom the CIA was hunting and killing.

 

Trump’s relationship with the intelligence community is more fraught than any of his predecessors’. As a candidate, he excoriated the agencies for their botched call on Iraq’s WMDs. As president, he has railed against a “deep state” that he claims has been out to get him for more than a decade. Trump has long said that he trusts his gut. He’ll know the war in Iran is over, he recently told an interviewer, “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.”

 

The U.S. intelligence community is neither designed nor equipped to restrain a president who is moved by impulse, emotion, and his own feelings. It can only provide him with information. When the president disregards what he’s told, or distorts it, that failure is his alone.

 

 

U.S. National Security Is Being Attacked From Within

By Kevin Carroll

Monday, September 01, 2025

 

The Trump administration is gutting America’s national security apparatus. Undoing the damage could take decades.

 

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently confirmed that the Trump administration had revoked the security clearances of 37 current and former national security officials. Gabbard even publicly circulated the names of these officials—heedlessly blowing the cover of at least one CIA case officer in the process—and baselessly accused them of “politicizing and manipulating intelligence, leaking classified intelligence without authorization, and/or committing intentional egregious violations of tradecraft standards.”

 

These moves, coupled with purges of counterespionage prosecutors and intelligence officials across the federal government, present a clear and present danger to United States national security. The result could be generational harm to America’s foreign intelligence and internal security services, leaving the country vulnerable in future armed conflicts with its adversaries.

 

Many of the officials whose clearances Gabbard lifted last week came to the attention of right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer because they earlier signed a public letter questioning President Donald Trump’s unsuccessful effort to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating Joe Biden before the 2020 election. Others were targeted for accurately warning of Russia’s attempts to covertly influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. Meanwhile, career national security personnel have been fired for reasons ranging from investigating and prosecuting participants of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots to contradicting Trump’s claim that U.S. strikes in June had left Iran’s nuclear sites “completely and totally obliterated.”

 

In apparent retaliation for his criticism of the president, former National Security Adviser John Bolton lost first his clearances, then his Secret Service detail—even as Iranian operatives were indicted for plotting to murder him for his role in the first Trump administration’s killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani. Finally, last month, the administration ordered FBI raids of Bolton’s home and office as part of an investigation into whether the former Trump official illegally shared or possessed classified information.

 

Much of what the administration is doing now is illegal, and will likely be overturned by the courts in due course. There’s good reason to believe the public and politically motivated purges violate a number of federal laws, including the Administrative Procedure Act, the Privacy Act, and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. But as a former Army and CIA officer myself, I fear the White House’s meddling in the meantime will inflict lasting harm on the intelligence community’s ability to protect the homeland.

 

First, there may be a rush to the exits within America’s intelligence, foreign, and security services by those who disagree with the Trump administration’s policies, particularly experienced personnel with vested pensions. Mid-career officials who possess the skills and work ethic to succeed in the private sector will similarly depart, leaving behind some who lack similar talent and drive. Meanwhile, years’ worth of expensively recruited, vetted, and trained probationary employees have already been dismissed.

 

Worse, who will seek to join organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency or the Foreign Service under the present circumstances? Many of the best recruits for intelligence and diplomatic work have traditionally come directly from elite colleges or graduate schools, or a few years later, from Wall Street banks and law firms, to engage in meaningful public service. This career choice always involved financial sacrifice, as well as hardship and even danger, but it also came with respect and job security.

 

But if civil servants can be fired at will—and libeled or slandered on their way out the door—why choose a modest government salary instead of lucrative, comfortable, and safe work in consulting, finance, or technology? Certainly few national security officials will now encourage their children to follow in their footsteps.

 

Second, Trump’s neuralgia about public or even private criticism by his subordinates of Russia’s Vladimir Putin or China’s Xi Jinping, strongmen whom he deeply admires, leaves the door wide open for these adversaries’ espionage services to infiltrate the U.S. government. At the same time, FBI agents are being reassigned from counterespionage duties to provide perimeter security for Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on illegal immigrants (a sizable majority of whom have no criminal record), and the Department of Justice’s counterintelligence section is hemorrhaging experienced prosecutors.

 

And counterintelligence problems can take decades to resolve. The United Kingdom’s security and intelligence services were tied up in knots for four decades over the damage done by the “Cambridge Five,” a ring of spies whom the KGB used to penetrate MI5 and MI6 during World War II and into the Cold War. The CIA and FBI are still hunting for the as-yet unidentified turncoat who, along with the agency’s Aldrich Ames and the FBI’s Robert Hanssen, fatally betrayed America’s human sources in Russia in 1985. Individuals being seeded into the U.S. government or turned within it by the Russians and Chinese now will present counterespionage problems for decades to come.

 

Finally, Trump’s unwillingness to hear from his intelligence services information that he does not like, simply because he believes it makes him look weak or wrong, as well as his willingness to fire those who dare to speak candidly, risks catastrophic failure.

 

Trump foolishly believes Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un are his friends, to the extent that he has refused to listen to reports of the growing threats they pose. The president desperately wants a massive trade deal with China, such that he praised Xi’s “transparency” during the opening days of the COVID pandemic. He is convinced U.S.-led forces defeated the Islamic State in 2017, just as he is determined to believe that a single bombing run destroyed Iran’s nuclear program in June.

 

What if multiple corroborative reports suggest that Putin plans to seize a Russophile part of a Baltic state’s territory in order to break NATO unity, thereby fracturing its Article 5 collective defense guarantee? What if all-source analysts conclude that North Korea plans to conduct an atmospheric test of a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile over the Pacific? What if a vetted source with excellent access says that China plans to blockade Taiwan and strangle it into submission?  Or what if Islamic State members from Central Asia who slipped across the U.S. southwest border during the Biden administration plan a terror attack on the homeland? What if Iran quietly continues to progress toward a nuclear weapon? 

 

Will DNI Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, or FBI Director Kash Patel present that unwelcome reporting and analysis to Trump? If they do, and the president is displeased, will Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth back their colleagues up? Given the administration’s record of revoking intelligence officers’ clearances, firing law enforcement personnel, and forcing generals into early retirement, I doubt it.