Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, then a US Representative, with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, March 2017
The Trump Administration cuts off in-person reports to legislators on election security, as Donald Trump tries to undermine mail-in voting and says he may not accept the outcome of November’s vote.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, a Trump political appointee with no previous experience of intelligence, notified the House and Senate intelligence panels on Friday that the briefings have been halted. Instead, there will be written reports.
An official in Ratcliffe’s office said on Saturday, without offering any evidence, that the office was “concerned about unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information following recent briefings”.
Ratcliffe implicitly criticized the process of informing Congress: “The IC [intelligence community] has provided numerous finished intelligence products spanning a wide range of threats, classification levels, and congressional audiences. While many of these engagements and products have been successful, others have been less so.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff, the chair of the Intelligence Committee, noted in a statement:
This is a shocking abdication of its lawful responsibility to keep the Congress currently informed, and a betrayal of the public’s right to know how foreign powers are trying to subvert our democracy….
The American people have both the right and the need to know that another nation, Russia, is trying to help decide who their president should be,”
In 2016 Russia interfered in the US Presidential information through disinformation, hacking, and dissemination of material to damage Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The Mueller Report and a Senate investigation have set out how the Trump campaign cooperated with the efforts, and how Trump subsequently obstructed or attempted to obstruct justice.
During Trump’s impeachment hearings, Ratcliffe — then a member of the House Intelligence Committee — supported Trump’s position of investigations as a “witch hunt” over the “hoax” of both Trump-Russia cooperation and Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election.
This year Trump has repeatedly lied about mail-in voting as fraudulent, and his political appointee Louis DeJoy has overseen the withdrawal of 671 sorting machines and sharp cutbacks at the US Postal Service.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans have blocked any funding for election security.
The Office of National Intelligence reported this month that Russia is again seeking to interfere in the election, with a campaign to “denigrate” Democratic nominee Joe Biden. China and Iran are also suspected of interventions.
At the same time, officials have countered Trump’s allegations that a foreign power is trying to undermine mail-in voting.
A “senior intelligence official” said foreign agencies are not mass-producing fake ballots: “We have no information or intelligence that any nation state threat actor is engaging in activity…to undermine any part of the mail-in vote or ballots.”
A “Politicized Effort”
During a trip to Texas, Trump reworked Ratcliffe’s claim about security of information. He provided no evidence while deriding legislators such as Rep. Schiff as “leakers”.
Director Ratcliffe brought information into the committee, and the information leaked.
So he wants to do it in a different form because you have leakers on the committee, obviously, leakers that are doing bad things, probably not even legal to leak, but we’ll look into that separately.
Schiff noted that Trump fired the previous Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, for briefings on Congress on the 2016 election interference:
As usual, President Trump is lying and projecting.
Trump fired the last DNI for briefing Congress on Russian efforts to help his campaign.
Now he’s ending briefings altogether.
Trump doesn’t want the American people to know about Russia’s efforts to aid his re-election. https://t.co/bERk44WcvQ
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) August 29, 2020
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows played down any significance of the cutoff. He said Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe will “ultimately give full briefings, in terms of not oral briefings, but fully intel briefings”.
Sen. Marco Rubio, acting chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, tried to cover Trump with the assurance that Ratcliffe “stated unequivocally” to him that he would keep legislators informed.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer countered that the cutoff of briefings is an “abdication of the Intelligence Community’s duty”, as Ratcliffe “has made clear he’s in the job only to protect Trump from democracy, not democracy from Trump”.
Pelosi and Schiff summarized:
The ODNI had requested the opportunity to brief the intelligence committees and the full US House of Representatives in mid-September and has now cancelled those briefings and said it would hold no others.
This is shameful and — coming only weeks before the election — demonstrates that the Trump Administration is engaged in a politicized effort to withhold election-related information from Congress and the American people at the precise moment that greater transparency and accountability is required.
Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates called on the decision to be “reversed immediately”: “For his administration to constrain the information being provided to the peoples’ representatives in Congress as this national security threat multiplies — especially given Donald Trump’s unprecedented welcoming of these assaults on our democracy for his own gain — is deeply alarming.”
Progs rejecting the politics of hatred and fear in order to provide a unifying vision for the country, example #1459. Love to see it.
This looks to be a good trajectory. If it escalates, bad for America, good for the world. Although it’s very doubtful that Americans have the will for Weimar-scale political violence, these things can take a life of their own. Especially in a country over-saturated with firearms and no shortage of itchy trigger fingers.