Patel, Ratcliffe Set Up U.S. for a National Catastrophe

Today’s column is a little bit different—my friend and fellow national security historian Tim Weiner and I wanted this week to write a joint oped laying out the danger in the combined and intersecting actions and politicization of both the FBI and CIA in recent weeks. While I’ve written plenty in recent weeks about the dangers of Kash Patel and now Dan Bongino atop the FBI, the combination of the weaponization and corruption of both the CIA and FBI at the same time presents a unique, distinct danger to our country.

That both of us share these concerns should itself be alarming. Neither one of us are exactly apologists for the FBI and CIA. Tim, who earned a Pulitzer for his investigative reporting as a newspaper writer, won the National Book Award and LA Times Book Prize in 2007 for his all-but-forever definitive book on the CIA’s deeply troubled history, Legacy of Ashes. His subsequent book, Enemies, laid out the FBI’s long history of abusing civil rights and civil liberties, and he’ll have a new book this summer about the CIA in the 21st century that I’m sure will be a barnburner. But both of us believe that these two critical institutions are being corrupted right now by leaders chosen precisely because they will destroy the independence of these vital national security agencies. Here’s the warning we wanted to offer together:

Patel, Ratcliffe Set Up U.S. for a National Catastrophe
By Tim Weiner and Garrett M. Graff

Donald Trump poses a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States. The chaos he is creating raises the risk of a catastrophic intelligence failure in days or months to come. Nowhere is the threat clearer than in the fight for the soul of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.

With the confirmation in recent days of Kash Patel as FBI director, and the Sunday announcement of MAGA podcast host Dan Bongino as deputy director, as well as with Tulsi Gabbard starting work as director of national intelligence and John Ratcliffe’s earlier confirmation as CIA director, the administration’s national security leadership is set—each seemingly more dangerous and destructive to the traditions of the offices they’ve inherited than the last.

As the new FBI director, Patel has a clear mandate to weaponize the traditionally independent bureau against political enemies and turn it to serve Donald Trump’s personal agenda. It’s a vision that presents at least three distinct and identifiable existential risks for the American people. First, his vision for an agency that protects friends and punishes enemies threatens to undermine the bedrock culture of the Bureau. The attempts to uncover the names of the thousands of FBI agents and personnel who contributed to January 6th cases—a looming purge that still hangs over the bureau as Patel settles into the 7th floor executive suite at the J. Edgar Hoover building—will surely damage the core internal trust and day-to-day workings of the FBI.

The entire point of a national (and increasingly international) investigative agency is that the work sprawls far beyond a single office or case agent; as a routine matter, agents everywhere in the world are assigned to follow-up leads from other agents’ investigations, often knowing little about the background of the underlying case. Now, in an era where cases might be either politically motivated or politically problematic depending on the target, what agent will go out of his or her way to help an agent on the other side of the country? The bureau has upwards of 50,000 open criminal cases nationwide; will every agent assigned to follow-up someone else’s lead now have to investigate personally the background of the case — who the potential target is, who the defense lawyers in the cases might be, the political background of key figures? — to understand if simply following a routine assignment might be career suicide? Investigations across the country would grind to a halt—and many would never get off the ground in the first place.

Second is the very clear threat in what cases get investigated and which don’t. While it’s easy to focus how the FBI can be weaponized against MAGA enemies and anyone insufficiently political loyal to Trump himself—as Hoover once previously used to deploy it against political dissidents he saw as “un-American”—there is another side of the coin that’s equally troubling: The threat to democracy that stems from what cases the FBI will not do going forward.

While most federal law enforcement authorities overlap—the DEA, for instance, also handles many drug cases, and the Secret Service also handles financial fraud—the one area where the FBI is truly unique in its investigative responsibilities is in public corruption cases. The Patel-Bongino FBI is a green light for graft and grifting loyalists in public office to personally profit and defraud Americans with impunity—something we’re already seeing as the Justice Department moves to drop criminal corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams as a political favor.

Then there’s the third, unique, and specific threat that lies with the politicization and weaponization of both the CIA and the FBI at the same time—a situation that sets the country up for another intelligence failure on the scale of Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Patel and the Trump administration have made clear how they want the FBI to be “cops” and step away from the national security mission that has been the central focus of the bureau since September 11, 2001. In many ways, Patel seems keen to recreate the barriers in intelligence sharing that existed before 9/11 that contributed to the CIA and the FBI failing to “connect the dots” as the al-Qaeda plot gathered steam.

We know precisely where that led us last time.

Compounding the danger at home is how the administration is seeking at the same time to corrupt intelligence gathering abroad and analysis here at home. The CIA’s new director, John Ratcliffe, has a track record of twisting intelligence reporting to please the president. As the director of national intelligence for the final eight months of the first Trump administration, Ratcliffe refused to release the intelligence community’s traditional annual threat assessment, which had for three years running surveyed Vladimir Putin’s attacks on American democracy. His own directorate told Congress at the end of his short reign that he had delayed, distorted, and obstructed reporting on Russia’s election interference. Above all, he fed Trump’s obsession that Barack Obama and Joe Biden had used the CIA to undermine him.

Mike Hayden, George W. Bush’s CIA director, was so outraged at Ratcliffe’s conduct in 2020 that he tweeted: “This idiot is abusing his office by politicizing it. The head of the intelligence community should be hands off on politics. This is reprehensible!” John Sipher, a veteran of the CIA’s Russian operations, warned in the New York Times that Ratcliffe regarded the CIA as “a place to hunt for nuggets that can be used as political weapons—sources and methods be damned,” and thereby “creating a fictional narrative for political purposes.” He said that it was “child’s play to concoct any story you wish by plucking selective details from the millions and millions of pages held by the intelligence agencies. But exploiting the intelligence community in this manner fundamentally debases it—in ways the American public cannot always see.” And Bill Burns, then the future CIA director, wrote that Trump was tearing at the foundations of American government: “Taking aim at an imaginary ‘deep state,’ he has instead created a weak state, an existential threat to the country’s democracy and the interests of its citizens.”

There are already signs that the CIA is doing just that: Just days into Ratcliffe’s tenure, the CIA “updated” its assessment about the origins of the Covid-19 virus and said, with the lowest degree of confidence possible, that it now believed the virus originated in a Chinese lab—backing a theory that Ratcliffe and others in Trump circles have long favored but which heretofore has been largely resisted by US intelligence.

Trump has also imposed loyalty tests on the CIA’s top ranks. They had to tell his transition team if they had voted for Trump, what they thought about the January 6 insurrection, and whether the 2020 election had been stolen. Ratcliffe has pressed thousands of the CIA’s ranking officers to retire and cancelled hundreds of new hires. No ulterior motives here: his stated goal is to align the CIA with Trump’s view of the world.

We know from bitter experience where distorting intelligence reporting to please a president leads us. It was CIA director George Tenet’s insistence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that blazed the trail for the Bush administration’s disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, the worst foreign policy decision of our lifetimes.

Or, with the Trump administration’s current steps, perhaps we should add a caveat: The worst American intelligence disaster—so far.