OPINION:
Daniel Gallington’s otherwise comprehensive exposure of “The political polarization of intelligence” (Web, June 5) leaves out Jim Clapper’s change of tune from the time Mr. Clapper was director of national intelligence in 2017 to the time he became a CNN commentator in 2018. Mr. Clapper is now certain that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government made the difference in electing President Trump in 2016.
Yet in his intelligence community’s three-agency, unclassified report of January 2017, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” the agencies cautioned that they “did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election. The U.S. Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze U.S. political processes or U.S. public opinion.”
And since Mr. Gallington mentions NSA SIGINT, generally acknowledged as the intelligence community’s best source of adversary intentions, the same report also noted that “CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.” Mr. Clapper’s intelligence community conceded in the same report that “[h]igh confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong.” Listen up, CNN.
GEORGE F. STEEG
Potomac Falls, Va.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.