Gabbard should step down as director of national intelligence

OPINION:

Ever since the Russia hoax, President Trump has had a fraught relationship with our intelligence community.

In 2018, he went so far as to side with Russian President Vladimir Putin against a U.S. intelligence community assessment that found Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Mr. Trump. He said he believed Mr. Putin’s denial that Russia interfered as much as he believed our intelligence assessment.

Mr. Trump’s relationship with the intelligence community hasn’t improved since then. Nor should it.

As recounted by Rowan Scarborough on this page, then-CIA Director John O. Brennan, then-FBI Director James Comey and then-Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper helped push the Russia hoax, based on the now-disproven “Steele dossier,” into the 2018 assessment.

Messrs. Brennan and Comey are now reportedly under Justice Department investigation for their conduct in the Trump Russia hoax.

Every president needs an intelligence community that brings him the unvarnished truth, regardless of whether he agrees with it, every day. Unless a president gets intelligence he can believe in, policymaking is just guesswork. Mr. Trump, quite evidently, has no confidence in our intelligence agencies.

Which brings us to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

Ms. Gabbard was an unusual choice for the post by Mr. Trump. She had no experience in the way intelligence is gathered or how it is analyzed, other than the incidental information she received as a member of the House Armed Services Committee. She is an intelligence gadfly and has proved to be a bad choice.

In March, Ms. Gabbard testified to Congress on the latest annual threat assessment, saying the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

This is clearly not Mr. Trump’s view. He wouldn’t have ordered U.S. B-2s to strike Iran’s nuclear weapons sites unless his view was the direct opposite of the annual threat assessment.

Worse still, at about 5:30 a.m. EST on June 10, two days before Israel attacked Iran, Ms. Gabbard posted a video to her X account warning that “political elite and warmongers” are “carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers” and that the world is “on the brink of nuclear annihilation.”

Mr. Trump was outraged. He said, “I don’t care what she said,” and “my intelligence community is wrong.” On June 21, U.S. B-2 stealth bombers attacked Iran’s three principal nuclear weapons sites.

It’s puzzling that Ms. Gabbard has stayed in her position after such a public humiliation.

There’s more. This spring, an intelligence assessment undercut Mr. Trump’s claim that Tren de Aragua, a hyperviolent Venezuelan gang, was operating inside the U.S. at the behest of the Venezuelan government. Though Ms. Gabbard fired two senior career officers who oversaw that report, the damage was done. Mr. Trump’s efforts to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport the Tren de Aragua members sank because of it. (There is plenty of evidence that Mr. Trump was right and the report was wrong, but none of it was made available to the courts.)

Ms. Gabbard clearly has to go, but who and what can replace her to give Mr. Trump confidence in his intelligence community?

Mr. Trump needs to appoint someone like CIA Director John Ratcliffe as director of national intelligence. In Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Ratcliffe served as DNI and had Mr. Trump’s confidence. He apparently still does, but Mr. Ratcliffe should be kept in place for one reason, which I’ll get to in a minute. Mr. Trump can find another John Ratcliffe outside the ranks of current and former CIA and FBI employees.

He needs to do so quickly.

Once Ms. Gabbard is gone, the “what” comes into play. Our intelligence community badly needs reform. The director of national intelligence, a position established after the 9/11 attacks to oversee the entire intelligence community, has grown to be a useless bureaucratic layer on top of it.

Instead, the CIA should be on top, gathering the products of all 18 of our intelligence agencies into a useful source of information for the president. Make it a truly “central” intelligence agency. No one could bemoan the death of the DNI’s bureaucracy, but that will require legislation from an often-uncooperative Congress.

More can and must be done. We are facing intelligence and counterintelligence challenges from at least China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Does U.S. Cyber Command have the assets necessary to conduct an offensive cyberwar and reduce those threats? Does it have an offensive cyberwar doctrine that will allow it to defeat those threats? It must, and the public needn’t know about it.

What else will it take to turn Mr. Trump from his “my intelligence community is wrong” statement to confidence in that community? That may be known only to Mr. Trump, but the elevation of the CIA to coordinating all intelligence agencies would help. The rest will be up to Mr. Trump.

• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.