Fox News has learned that Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell is pledging, with administration approval, that the Intel community will safeguard the integrity of the U.S. electoral system. This is obviously a reaction to charges of Russian interference in the 2016 general election, though many of those charges were disproven and were eventually seen as merely anti-Trump Democrat talking points.
Fox: “A senior administration official told Fox News the newly-Senate confirmed director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center inside ODNI, Bill Evanina, will serve as the intelligence community’s leader of the ‘critical effort.’…U.S. elections are the foundation of our nation’s democracy,” Evanina said Friday. ‘We are committed to supporting this administration’s ‘whole of government’ effort to secure the 2020 election’…The senior administration official told Fox News that the change ‘represents an important improvement in simplification to the threat notification process.’ ”
Fox continued: “The Intelligence Community will continue to work in partnership with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to identify and integrate threat information. The elections team will act swiftly to deliver the timely and thorough assessments to those affected by potential malicious influence,” said the high level Trump team official.
Fox concluded, “The official stressed that the FBI retains ‘all of their law enforcement responsibilities and capabilities’ in terms of election security, as does ‘DHS maintain all of their state and local election responsibilities. This was not a unilateral ODNI decision,’ the official said, adding that the new process was ‘coordinated and approved by all agencies involved,’ including the FBI, DHS and other agencies inside the intelligence community.”
Another Trump source told Fox News, on condition of anonymity, that “the biggest complaint from the 2016 election was the lack of, and insufficiency, of briefings to campaigns and candidates… The last election speaks to itself, in terms of how much was going on, and how poorly the campaigns and candidates were kept abreast in order to protect their campaigns.”
As a former member of the Intel community myself and also a former political consultant, I can see how the merits of this proposal are apparent. The IC has the personnel and resources to do the job well. The issue is some in the IC itself. As for the FBI? Well, that question answers itself.
While the military intel services (my background) tend to be down the middle and hard analysis based, the civilian intel services tend to be highly political and subjective. The CIA and other civilian agencies are people pleasers and make an effort to put happy faces on most scenarios. This helps to keep their funding intact come budget time.
There is also the factor that, in this very partisan era, certain CIA and other civilian intel personnel have been caught up in anti-Trump partisan activities while, again, the military plays it straight. An example of the difference between the culture of the top echelons, the rank and file of all the services are loyal Americans doing their jobs well, of the civilian services and their military counterparts is the difference between Communist Party-voting Obama Intel Chief James Clapper and Trump national security adviser and former DIA General Mike Flynn.
As Joseph Stalin seems to have observed, “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.” Thus the possibility of having someone with the integrity level and loyalty to this nation of a James Clapper counting the votes may be problematic at the very least and may pose a direct threat to our political system. The Trump administration may want to think again.
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