Lawfare Daily: What's Happening at ODNI?

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who's questions she cannot predict.

It's the law fair podcast. I'm Natalie Orpat, executive editor of Law Fair, with my colleagues, senior editor Mike Feinberg, and public service fellow Julia Curley.

“The apparatus for selectively declassifying information in order to hurt the President's”

political enemies and help his ally's election chances in the upcoming midterms has already been created. Today we're talking about the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,

or ODI. What it does, what inspired Congress to create it in the first place, and why recent

developments are undermining its mission. Okay, so Mike and Julia, we're here to talk about what's been going on in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is a mouthful in which is why we call it ODI instead, and you recently wrote a piece for us in Law Fair. But before we get into the substance of what you spoke about there and also just broadly what you're thinking about what's happening right now, I want to start at a very, very zoomed

out-level, which is to ask each of you to help sort of demystify what we mean by intelligence. This is something obviously spoiler alert to folks who are not familiar with ODI and I, but ODI and I in fact oversees quite a lot of intelligence-related things, including what is known as the intelligence community, which is also not self-explanatory despite the terms. And it seems to me there's sort of a definitional question of intelligence that's not quite as

obvious as it may seem, and both of you had illustrious careers in this area, so I'm going to rely on your expertise. Mike, let me start with you, just define intelligence for us. So, entire terms have been written trying to answer that question, and if you got 10 practitioners

“in a room, I have no doubt you'd get at least 11 separate opinions, but I think the easiest definition”

about which almost everybody would agree is that intelligence is the collection and analysis of information, both public, private, open source, government-restricted, that is gathered, reviewed, and disseminated to policy makers in an attempt to make them more informed about their decisions, particularly in the world of international affairs. Now, there are andcillary activities that relate to that, there are covered actions, there's espionage investigations, but I think at its root,

intelligence is simply the general term we give to the obtaining of information about our adversaries and our attempts to figure out what is true and what is not and enable policy makers to make better decisions. Okay, Julia, quick, do the thing where you disagree with Mike and explain it completely otherwise, or you can agree and just tell us what else you think. Oh, I agree, sort of putting it algebraically, you know, it's raw information plus secrets plus context plus analysis of what

the policy maker needs to hear based on what they're already working on or the policy agenda in front of them, so it's information made relevant for a policy maker in the maximum possible way. One way to think about the process is there's a lot of different metaphors, the phrase cycle is used

you know, a policy maker is going to have a question, and the intelligence community is going to answer that question almost in a funnel-like way. They're going to gather as much information as they can from human sources, from intercepted signals, from geographic changes, from electronic measurements, and they're going to get as much information as they humanly can to answer the policy makers question. And then they're going to compare the different sources of information against each

other, separate the signal from the noise, and sort of distill what's most important into an

analytic product that is going to answer the policy maker's question. And then inevitably, the policy maker will have follow-up questions, and the process is going to be getting again. It's not really something that ever ends, it's just something that is constantly iterative.

“Mike was getting at something, I think, there that's important, which is that intelligence”

is just like a document, it is also a profession, and a way of approaching analytic problems. And so we'll get that into that, I'm sure, when we talk about politicization, but there's a very strict code, and we train people, what the pursuit of intelligence meaning and analysis is for rather than simply the conveyance of the last report of information. Okay, that's really helpful, and I think the structure that you are both describing of

the interaction that is between policy makers and the intelligence community, that's this profession that, as with other civil service in federal government, tends to go through multiple administrations. I know both of you served multiple administrations of different political parties,

“and that's pretty common as it is in other federal agencies. But there is, you can see immediately”

the tension point and the room that may exist for politicization just in the fact of that connection between policymakers and intelligence community professionals. But one thing that occurs to me sort of teeing up that possibility of politicization, but also to get at the question of the iterative cycles you're talking about. It seems to me also that maybe the challenge there is the policy makers may ask a question that proves to be a completely irrelevant question, right? It's the wrong

question. It's not even a question, really. They're thinking from policy maker brain, and there's a real translation process to go through coming from the long process it takes to gather and analyze intelligence and turn it into a product that can be useful for policy makers. We'll get into

“this when we're talking about what's happening with ODNI right now. I think it's useful context,”

but can I have each of you in turn maybe starting with you might just talk about that tension point? Yeah, I think in a normal functioning administration, which our country has had for the overwhelming majority of its history, and we should note, the intelligence community is not that old. This is a

post-World War II creation for the most part. It's never really been that big a problem.

When I say a policy maker has a question, they are generally not asking about whether they should do course of action. They are asking, what are going to be the immediate consequences if I am bark on to X? What are going to be the second and third order consequences? I'm not thinking about. The intelligence community is generally, and like look, there are over a dozen agencies with hundreds of thousands of people staffing them at various times that play into this. But generally speaking,

the intelligence community has traditionally been good about not getting over its keys and only providing analysis based on known facts and answering discrete questions. There have been times that has not occurred, and there have been really deleterious results, and one of those times was actually half the reason, or at least a strong influence on

YOD and I was created. But there's always been good equipoys between policy makers and the intelligence

community about the sort of things the intelligence community can do. The community, we should be clear, has not been shy when a policy maker generally asks a question that is not something they can

intelligence community and the political actors to whom it reports that has always at least since

the mid to late 70s kept those tensions in check. Okay, Julia, what are your thoughts on that tension? Yeah, so I serve as a president's daily briefing, PDB, briefer in the first Trump administration, and one of your jobs is to take raw questions that come in from a policy maker and translate it into a question that the intelligence community can answer with integrity and objectively, and it isn't always, you know, the policy maker trying to manipulate intelligence,

“but you have to be able to put it in a form for which the intelligence community has been set up”

to answer credibly back to the policy maker. It's often very clear what the preferred answer from the policy maker would be. It's not normally a problem because of the way the intelligence community is set up and the strict values that we inculcate and are analysts to still speak truth to power despite obvious policy preferences, and that's really what is breaking down now.

Okay, so let's turn to that in a second. Let's just quickly do a primer on what ODNI is.

So we've previewed that it came out of a very difficult period, a sort of rupture in the intelligence community, which of course happened around 9/11. But Mike's starting with you, can you just talk

“through the origin story of ODNI, what was this catastrophe that led to its creation?”

Well, it wasn't just a catastrophe. It was also a debacle. The catastrophe were the attacks of 9/11, and in the aftermath of those attacks, you had a real bipartisan effort. I hate the phrase blue ribbon panel, but it does apply here to determine what were the missteps that the United States made, which could have prevented or at least mitigated the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and also resulted in the death of an entire airliner full of citizens over

a Pennsylvania field. And the report is hundreds of pages long. We're not going to distill it in 30 seconds,

but one of the most important findings of the commission was that, frankly, and I'm speaking

“locally here, that FBI and the CIA weren't talking to each other in any matter that could be described as”

efficient or consequential. And as a result, information gathered overseas about Alcada was not making its way to people in charge of domestic security, and the stuff that the FBI was finding domestically in terms of like odd behavior by people. It was looking at was not necessarily making its way to the CIA. So you had each agency with half of a jigsaw puzzle's pieces, but they're not in the same room trying to put it together collaboratively. And one of the recommendations to mitigate this

sort of behavior that the 9/11 commission came up with was the creation of a director of national intelligence who was going to have oversight of the entire intelligence community, which contains the FBI, the CIA, but also the national security agency, national geospatial agency, all of DOD's various intelligence agencies. Like it's you're hurting cats, and they're endeavor before being a central node to which all those cats reported. So the 9/11 commission determines

we need to create a director of national intelligence. Now, while this bill is being legislated, drafted, debated before it's finalized, you know, on the other side of the world, the United States has invaded Iraq. And the invasion of Iraq was not without controversy. And in order to justify it on the world's stage into the American public, the Bush administration really focused on the potential that Iraq had stockpiles, weapons, and mass destruction. We all know this turned out

not to be the case. And President Bush via executive order establishes another commission, popularly known as the WND commission, which has a couple tasks, but it ultimately in practice ends up trying to figure out, was the intelligence process

Iraq more of a justification. And some of the answers to that question are now public, some of them

“are still classified, but there were a number of missteps in the intelligence cycle in intelligence”

analysis and delivery to policy makers that might not have provided a wholly objective view on whether Iraq was actually stockpiling WMDs. So the commission doesn't finish its work prior to the creation of ODNI, but its ongoing work is very much in the atmosphere while the bill that creates ODNI, the intelligence reform, and terrorism prevention act of 2004, is being finalized. So once ODNI is created, although the immediate impetus was the 9/11 attacks, it's actual mission

and the first projects it takes up are very much informed by what the WMD commission is finding.

And for the first couple of years, it works fairly well. There was an initial attempt to get

“Robert Gates to serve as the first director of national intelligence, and he declined.”

The second individual they approach was John Negreponde, a career foreign service officer who had also worked in capacities in the national security council, and he is not a figure without controversy. I want to be crystal clear about that. He over saw or was involved in a lot of anti-communist operations in Central and South America in the 80s about which there have been several and credible allegations of human rights abuses. But he's also an incredibly savvy

bureaucratic knife fighter for lack of a better term. And his inclinations, his instincts about institutional politics are incredibly astute, and he gets victories where he can in terms of

“getting ODNI respected by the rest of the community, and there's other fights he chooses not to pick,”

and won't get to one of those later. But he does a really good job of just steering the ship for its initial period in a manner that does not throw too many sharp elbows at the nows of

city area agencies. And his successor very much does the same thing. The third director of national

intelligence, I would argue in our peace argues, makes a number of strategic and tactical decisions that unfortunately burn a lot of that political capital. But that happens later. Okay, yes, I want to talk about that. Julia, I want to come to you first to just explain a little bit what that role looks like in practice. So as Mike was describing it, you know, there was a pretty clear purpose for which Congress created ODNI. And that was to learn from the lessons

of the mistakes that had been made with respect to missing the incoming attack on 9/11 and also what happened in the lead up to the warning rock. But what does it actually look like that what role is ODNI playing to what extent is that? Is it consistent with the sort of broad goals that Congress had in putting it together as well as the sort of input that Mike was describing from the commissions? Yeah, so one of the duties that only the DNI is performing is coordinating

the entirety of the intelligence community. Before the DNI was created, before 9/11 and the Rock WMD Fiasco, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency had as one of his duties, the coordination of the broader intelligence community. Quite rightly, Congress found that the CIA director had neglected that part of his duties in favor of focusing more on the day-to-day activities of the CIA. So appointing a dedicated figure whose primary job is to oversee the entirety

of the intelligence community as one of the main things that distinguished the DNI from the previous arrangement. Day-to-day, the DNI's primary responsibility is to oversee the budget, the prioritization of intelligence collection. The DNI also has a couple of units that report directly to them, the NCTC, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the National Counterintelligence Center as well,

president's senior intelligence advisor, and underneath that is the PDB, which also belongs to the

“ODNI and the National Intelligence Council, which belongs directly. So you have the senior most”

products, both the day-to-day intelligence feed to the president, and the more long-term, national intelligence estimates, the deeper analytic products, also fall under the DNI. Okay, so I promise we will get in a moment to more recent events, but while I have both of you and in the sense that you are representing careers from different agencies, one piece of it, which you both mentioned, that I find really interesting is the extent to which what the commission

had found is that there were major cultural differences and practice differences between agencies. And of course, that's normal. The same tension exists between other departments that have to coexist and work together on things. One can think perhaps of the state department and the Department of Defense, who are often on the ground together and thinking very differently about what their goal is there. Also DOJ, when doing extraterritorial actions. But it's not an

in substantial thing, and I'll confess that I'm particularly attuned to it because in my capacity representing a guantanamo detainee, the clashes between the CIA and the FBI in the course of the early war and terror, we're really significant and are actually still playing out in court right now. So I want to hear a little bit from both of you about the effectiveness of ODNI, of the DNI in particular as an individual, in sort of helping to play a translation role to

you know, I don't think I don't mean to say that there are conflicts necessarily, but there are different cultures, different practices, different methods. So what did ODNI and DNI

“him or herself do to help facilitate more coordination among these many, I believe it's 17 different”

intelligence community members? Michael, start with you. I am very much of the opinion that the DNI's influence on interagency relationships was fairly minimal. What the DNI and ODNI did very successfully

for its first decade, decade and a half, maybe, was standardized language and processes.

You know, the example we cite in the piece is there is an intelligence community directive that functionally says words have meaning and if we're going to say something is likely or highly likely or unlikely, we have to be using the same language as each other. So we're going to actually assign numerical percentages to all of those terms. It's that sort of stuff, which is more logistical and administrative that anything else, that the DNI really excelled at. I would gently push back against

your characterization of the relationship between the FBI and CIA. There were certainly very visciferous disagreements about detainee interrogations and what was appropriate in that context. But I came into the intelligence community after 9/11 and there were individual one-off disagreements I would have with my counterparts at a relevant CIA station or at CIA headquarters when I was at the Hoover Building. But in general, it was a good relationship. It is culturally very different

and I mean that in the purest sense of culture, in terms of education, demeanor, just CIA and FBI, there are different types of places. So there are cultural differences, but in terms of being two unique work horses, they were almost invariably operating in concert and pulling in the same

“direction when I was there. But I don't think that was due to the DNI. I think that was due to”

if you'll pardon the language, everybody realizing after 9/11 we had to get our shit together

or Americans could die. And that is a much more powerful motive to cooperate than any bureaucratic

infrastructure you overlay on top of the pre-existing relationship. So I give you an example of the role of the DNI, so just in the analytic world, the overwhelming majority of PDVs that go to the president are authored by CIA. But the institution of the PDV belongs to the DNI to oversee and this

not share information or not coordinate its analytic products with the rest of the intelligence community.

“And so what the DNI is doing through these products like the PDV in like national intelligence”

estimates is forcing the conversation. So it's very least minority or dissenting voices can be heard and will get to the customer, the policymaker. And this is of course one of the fundamental breakdowns that we're seeing where the DNI is not playing this role of ensuring that inconvenient information dissenting views are reaching the ultimate policymaker. Do your current managed services really help run your operations or are they just running in circles? Running isn't enough anymore.

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“Okay so I think that's all really really helpful context. Let's shift now to a little bit more”

of a modern take. So we've gone through the early 2000s. DNI as you said, Mike the the first two did

pretty well have generally a good reputation for the early days of getting this brand new agency off the ground. The story gets a little more complicated from there and you go through this in your piece. But I wonder if you can give a quick overview of the years leading up to where we are now and where we will focus on after this, which is the second Trump presidency. But what was happening? What were the trend lines before we get to where we are now? So during the Obama administration,

“the third director of national intelligence is named it's Admiral Dennis Flecker. And he is a long-time”

public servant, a patriot, a flag officer, but he is not as politically savvy as his predecessors. And there are a number of debates where ODNI is fighting with other agencies, particularly CIA, sort of I don't want to say for supremacy, but over discrete patches of turf. And one of the debates that gets out to the media is who should have the final say over the United States is principal intelligence representative in any given foreign country. This is a role that had

always been performed by CIA chiefs of station, who are obviously chosen by the director of

central intelligence. But Blair decides he's going to go to the mat in order to get that approval to come under ODNI, not CIA. And I'm simplifying a lot of it for the sake of time, but he loses that battle. And it'd be clear, like this is something that his predecessors also wanted. They just realized it was unlikely to ever happen. And if they tried to get this in any sort of public way, a political loss for ODNI that early in its existence could have real reputational

harm. Not with the public, but with respect to the intelligence agencies that the D&I is supposed to oversee. So Negro Pondate doesn't pick this fight. McConnell doesn't pick this fight. Dennis Blair does. And the director of central intelligence at the time is Leon Penetta. Now I don't have insight information on this, obviously. But Leon Penetta is a career senior democratic political operative. There is skepticism about him when he gets name to the director of central

And by virtue of his long history in the Democratic Party, I mean, he was, he was in the Clinton administration. He worked in Congress for ages. He's close with both Vice President Biden and President Obama. And there's just no way given the dynamics and the political capital of the agency that Leon Penetta is going to lose this fight. And Dennis Blair does lose and ultimately leaves the administration having realized he just doesn't have the juice with the White House

“that ODNI needs. And this gets reported on. I think the most reporting was in the Atlantic,”

although the major papers also played a role. And DNI does lose a lot of prestige. It's very clear that when it comes to gathering foreign intelligence abroad, CIA still runs the game.

And ODNI never really recovers from that perception. They're still involved in coordination,

they're still involved in analysis, they're still involved in promulgation and delivery of information to policymakers. But they're never going to be an operational equity. They're never going to actually have to say in what's happening on the ground overseas when to be frank American spies are trying to steal secrets. And operations are what capture the attention of both the

“public and senior policymakers. And to be clear, that's not a good thing. Like when policy makers”

get obsessed with operational possibilities, you get things like the Bay of Pigs and the invasion of Iraq. And just ODNI doesn't recover. Trump comes in and you have more, as you do in many cabinet

departments during his first term, you have more turnover than was ever intended for ODNI in the DNI role.

A number of individuals served either as permanent DNI's or acting under him. He elevates it to a cabinet level position, which it was not initially. So you'd think that would get some prestige. But you know, this has been widely reported. Trump, he likes to cherry pick the information that is delivered to him. And as a result, it is very hard for anybody to stay in the position for a particularly a long time because they're bound if they're doing their job to upset him and his aids.

And unfortunately, the interregnum that we have during the Biden administration turns out to be just that. And Trump comes back to office and he ends up naming Tulsi Gabbard, somebody who's despite her military service, whose interactions, reputation, credibility, and own credulousness with respect to the intelligence community is what I will politely term as idiosyncratic.

Okay, Julia, let's talk about the beginning of the first Trump administration. You were there

through the first Trump administration, the Biden administration, the second Trump administration. What happened that was a rupture to the extent it was? How much did you see this interregnum that Mike was just talking about? Yeah, I would add a couple of thoughts just on top of him of why the institution is so historically weak. Among the reasons are that most of its officers have been secunded from other agencies. They're on detail. And ultimately, we'll be

returning to their home agencies who will be in control of their future promotions. And then second, the direct units that do report to the DNI are somewhat duplicative of units at CIA and FBI who are in the lead on operational matters. And so the DNI at best has been the middleman, sometimes a necessary middleman, but ultimately not the ultimate source of the information.

“So I think that it's fair to ask how much harm this weak institution can do. And especially”

after it was cut down to about 1,300 staff by Tulsi Gabbard at the beginning of this administration. And it has been criticized for a couple of decades now for lacking sufficient authorities over the Department of Agencies that it is supposed to be managing. And so I think that what is happening now is that you had a historically weak institution and with a lot of authorities and the idle hands

ascension to the role, we saw the DNI immediately being used in a political fashion to fashion intelligence

“to fit the president's political desires, whether that is to support his policies or to punish his enemies.”

At the beginning of the administration, I was serving in the White House as a senior director for intelligence programs and it felt to me immediately to begin asking out the request from this new

administration. First among them was a request from the Homeland Security Advisor for an assessment

of Trento Laragua and whether it was being directed by the Venezuelan regime to invade the United States. This was the legal predicate for the Alien enemies act and it was obvious which direction that the administration hoped the assessment would come down on. I tastered out and of course the answer that came back from the NIC was quite the opposite and in a public spat between the DNI and the head of the NIC, the head of the NIC was fired for providing the answer that the policy

maker did not want to hear. And just to clarify, the NIC is the National Intelligence Council

and which actually does report to the DNI. So there was this public spat that you're talking about

us between a boss and their subordinate, right? Correct. This was the DNI declaring that her direct support in it was a part of a deep state conspiracy of sabotage trying to bring down the president when they directed the head of the NIC to rethink the assessment and when the the officer who is one of the most respected officers in the intelligence community refused, they had him walked out and publicly fired, sending a message to all of the analysts both at DNI and across the intelligence

“community that that would be how the administration would handle the senting views. And I think”

it's important to focus on this because it really did set this example set the climate for which the subsequent acts by the DNI should be seen. Okay yeah let's talk about some of the next events that really made the news and I'll just note obviously I have no internal knowledge whatsoever

having never been part of these communities but it did strike me as very notable that there was

as much information getting out publicly. A lot that we we know historically at least there have been plenty of instances where there there's been not to minimize it but drama within ODNI and tension between the agency is individually and DNI on the other side and we've touched on some of that somewhat but a lot of that wasn't in the public eye the way that things were earlier in this administration and as they continue to be. So I want to talk about one other instance that we covered

very closely at LaFair which was Gabbard's presence at the Fulton County election hub where the FBI seized ballots in connection with an investigation that they said was had been ongoing and we

“remarked at the time at LaFair how incredibly unusual and I believe unprecedented it was for a”

director of national intelligence to be involved with this law enforcement operation. I'll come to you on that one Mike I know we had conversations at the time and I believe you wrote about this. In addition to being unusual and unprecedented it was completely inappropriate and I'll explain why. So so much of how the intelligence community is now structured is a direct result of a series of hearings conducted by the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike and Rockefeller commissions in

the House that attempted to stop the use of intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies from being essentially political weapons. So a lot of restrictions were placed on what the CIA could do domestically. What the FBI could do politically. There were attempts to put guardrails on the road to make sure that the people who have the power to surveil, manipulate and can find American citizens did not do so except for reasons of national security and criminal enforcement.

And Gabbard being at a criminal investigations attempt to seize evidence takes a sledgehammer to those norms. And her justification doesn't hold up. What she says in public is that

intelligence, which are a group of individuals throughout the country that serve as many DNIs

for their region. And she points out that Dom DNIs are the special agents and charge or assistant directors and charge of the primary FBI field offices in those regions. So that's entirely appropriate for me to be at an FBI crime scene or evidence processing scene because

“the special agents and charge report to me. But she leaves out a really important caveat,”

which is that if you look at the most technical of the org charts, hell, if you look at Wikipedia, the FBI itself, as a whole, is not a component of the intelligence community. It's the FBI's national security branch. In other words, the counterintelligence counterterrorism in a couple other divisions report to the intelligence community. The criminal investigators, the public corruption investigators, the white collar investigators, the violent crime investigators, they're not

part of the national security branch. And a lot of this has changed under Trump. But basically,

she is claiming in authority that has nothing to do whatsoever with what was going on in

“full town. Now at a certain point, they make the argument that maybe there is foreign influence”

in the election. Okay, cool. If that's the case, she has a role. But that role doesn't shouldn't come into focus until after they've analyzed the evidence they've gathered and determined that there actually is a foreign player in this state of affairs. Having the DNA to crime scene or scene forever, that's processing is just inappropriate. And it's also really to be blunt stupid.

The DNA is now at a scene where evidence is being gathered for a criminal investigation,

that turns her into a potential fact witness for any attempts to suppress that evidence or any ultimate trial. And you do not want the DNA who has access to all of the nation's secrets to be put in the position where she is testifying an open court before a criminal defense attorney whose questions she cannot predict. So this was just a force to begin with and her later explanations did absolutely nothing to clear up the confusion. Okay, that's good context as well because it

seemed very unusual and it has helpful to know exactly how and why. So and I suppose I should say, since we have been talking with the throughline of concerns about politicization that probably obvious to most of our listeners, but each of those very unusual phenomena that we just mentioned do seem to have quite a political valence to them. Let's talk though in the last little bit of time that we have about the last part of your piece, which is that Tulsi Gabbard has since

resigned her position as DNA. We do not yet have a new nominated, or we haven't nominated DNA, we do not have it confirmed to DNA, but we do have an acting DNA and that is spillpulti, who has no intelligence experience to speak of, which seems to be a blatant violation of the statute that set up ODII. But setting that aside, he also has a track record of having referred cases to DOJ for prosecution of people perceived to be Trump's political enemies, and that included

several instances of alleged mortgage fraud. We've covered these cases a lot in law fair,

“so I won't reiterate them, but let's talk about given the limited, but important, obviously,”

role that ODII plays, but we've talked about sort of the restricted role to some extent. If we have this person now, Bill Palti, who is in charge of ODII, who doesn't have that fluency of intelligence community background understanding, you know, even knowledge of the vocabulary, let alone the sources, methods, etc. How worried do we need to be, that someone with this sort of background and track record is here and only in an acting capacity? Julie, I'll start with you.

We should be very worried. And just to add to Mike's points about the Fulton County

directed to participate in the investigation by the president, who has been quite open about what

the purpose of that investigation is to manufacture evidence about or to discover evidence about voting fraud. The president has been quite clear about the purpose for both the investigation in Georgia, but also his reasoning for promoting Pulti into the position, which is to declassify information, which substantiates his own allegations about voter fraud and how the elections in 2016 and 2020 were either not manipulated in his favor or manipulated against him and his DNIs have been given

that marching order in order to generate that kind of information to support that verdict.

“And so, I think that if we look at the underlying powers of the DNIs that can be weaponized”

in favor of the president's political enemies, we should be worried about several things.

First, in this case in Georgia, puts a spotlight on it, the use of intelligence powers domestically.

So, through the national intelligence priorities framework, the DNIs gets to set what the community is collecting on. And so, she could turn it into an apparatus, aligning and prioritizing collection toward White House priorities, which in the recent new counterterrorism strategy, issued by the White House, pledges the rapid identification of domestic groups with possible foreign connections identifying institutions, so-called, like Antifa

and other radical groups and trying to identify their membership in the United States.

“The DNIs has the authorities to direct intelligence, which could claim that individual groups”

are foreign directed, which unlocks a whole different set of tools for use against these groups,

including domestically. We saw the importation of the kind of counterterrorism tools that have been used in the war on terror into the Western Hemisphere with the designation of a criminal group, Trendel Oragua, as a foreign terrorist organization, and you could see the DNI laying the predicate for doing that against other groups, including domestic groups in the United States. Last, I would point to the DNIs ability to set the rules for buying commercially available

information, information collected by private companies on the location, browsing history, social media records of American citizens. So, a loyalist could direct the intelligence community to use its resources to target people, purchasing information, that what otherwise need a warrant to obtain, creating a potential n-run around the Pfizer process and 702, which is of course also being held up in a manner by the administration. Okay, Mike, I'm giving you the last word. I'm sure

you're going to use it to tell us that you are not nearly as worried as Julia and everything will be just fine. No, this is an audio only podcast, but I will say if the listeners could see me, they would know that my hair is actually on fire. I'm quite worried, and I'm worried for a reason that I very much fear is not getting enough attention in public. The DNI has access to pretty much all of the intelligence holdings of the United States save for some very specific compartments

that are big at listed, but even then, like the DNI getting access is literally just a matter of asking. The DNI also has the authority to declassify information in part or in a whole, and when you have a really in-depth analytic product or a finding on something like foreign influence, even if the finding is that there was no foreign influence, you can still declassify it in an bridged partial manner in a way to give the impression that something is a miss, and Tulsi Gabbard

was quite good at doing this. She would declassify partial files, partial reports in a manner that

“made it look like elections were fraudulent or, you know, I think there's still a live debate about”

the COVID lab leak among certain parties, but I guarantee you which she released about the origins of COVID were not the entire file. And in doing that, you can really miss lead the public. It's essentially the United States government doing its own disinformation campaign for the benefit of the administration. And I think I hope the public and the media will be extremely skeptical of any de-classified

everything and say that everything will be fine. No, just to amplify Mike's point on this,

“the apparatus for selectively declassifying information in order to hurt the president's political”

enemies and help his allies election chances in the upcoming midterms has already been created. We have had information coming out that there is a task force being set up under the ages of the DNI to selectively release information to the public about ongoing foreign interference in U.S. elections and the individuals that have been named as part of this task force are all

individuals who have been engaged in these kind of selective and politicized releasing of information

in the past back to 2017 and 2016 through different concretionally run investigations under Devon Nunes. We now have an election operative who is going to serve as Bill Poltis Chief of Staff being installed within the ODINI and Trump has already in public said that Poltis has the authority to declassify quote whatever he wants and he thinks that Bill will do precisely that. And so we already have at our disposal, all the information we would be very concerned that this would

be happening and we also have information that the FBI has reassigned up to 260 officers and authorized overtime for the purposes of surging support to local elections related investigations in Atlanta. So this is an ongoing already occurring effort to lay the ground works for accusing certain parties in the upcoming elections to have received some sort of shadowy foreign support and trying to delegitimize individual elections if the president deems it to be politically

inconvenient. Okay, unfortunately we're going to have to leave it there on that pessimistic note which I unfortunately share with you for the record. But I want to thank you both for helping to explain all of this and to really give some context to why all of this is so troubling and dangerous. So thank you, Mike and Julia for joining.

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