And so the purge continues. Some of us used to think, or hope, that President Donald Trump’s campaign of “retribution” would prove brutal but short, leaving American statecraft bruised but functional. The news flow suggests a different direction. As Sen. Mark Warner puts it, “when expertise is cast aside and intelligence is distorted or silenced, our adversaries gain the upper hand and America is left less safe.”
Warner, a Democrat who is vice chair of the senate’s intelligence committee, was referring to the firing of Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The DIA is the Pentagon spy outfit that concluded in an initial assessment after the American bombing of Iran in June that the strikes had probably set back Tehran’s nuclear efforts only by months. That contradicted Trump’s narrative, in which he had “obliterated” Iran’s program. Goodbye, Kruse.
His fate is just one instance in a pattern that began as soon as Trump returned to the White House. For months, his administration has been ridding its national-security apparatus, diplomatic corps and other executive-branch cadres of anybody it deems potentially “disloyal,” often on the advice of MAGA conspiracy theorists who aren’t even in government, have no expertise, and think grounds for termination should include such things as, say, service in the administration of Joe Biden.
The witch hunt doesn’t have to entail termination. In another act of vicarious vengeance, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, just revoked the security clearances for 37 people currently or formerly in government, in many cases ending their careers. Their sin was involvement in an assessment which the intelligence community made in 2017 (and which the Senate intelligence committee later validated) that Russia had meddled in the American election of 2016. Trump calls it the “Russia hoax.”
In that way, Gabbard yet again sacrificed scarce and even unique expertise to please the president. For example, one of the 37, Vinh Nguyen at the National Security Agency, was a specialist in data science and cyberthreats, and specifically in the artificial-intelligence contest with China. The folks in Zhongnanhai must be popping baijiu corks.