As we now know, the reason that Donald Trump appointed an inexperienced, Trump loyalist named Richard Grenell as acting Director of National Intelligence—replacing former director Joseph Maguire—boils down to a fit of pique. Trump was reportedly furious that Maguire’s election security czar, Shelby Pierson, briefed House members on the latest U.S. intelligence. That intelligence confirmed Russian plans to interfere with the 2020 election; specifically, efforts to ensure that Trump is re-elected. That was something that Trump most emphatically did not want revealed to the American people.
Trump wanted to hide that information from the American public because it directly contradicted the lie that he and his administration have been pushing since his election: The Russian government’s efforts to sway the 2016 election are a “hoax,” perpetrated by Democrats and the “fake news” media. This denial has endured, despite the clear and unambiguous findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and countless others in the intelligence community, who have exhaustively documented the sophisticated and widespread Russian infiltration of both social and news media in order to ensure Trump’s election in 2016.
The Grenell appointment is intended to place the finger of one of Trump’s most vocal and rabid supporters on the spigot where information gathered by our intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the NSA normally flows. With Grenell in place, that information can be filtered, sanitized or otherwise manipulated by Trump for political ends.
Grenell has zero experience in intelligence, has never worked in any capacity for a U.S. intelligence agency, has zero experience in managing government agencies, and is most prominently known for sending a series of demeaning tweets about the physical appearance of Democratic women. Prior to this appointment, he was “serving” as the U.S. ambassador to Germany. As Jonathan Stevenson, a senior Fellow for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and former member of the National Security Council, observes in the New York Times, it was a role in which, by any objective standard, he failed miserably.
A day after taking office as ambassador, Mr. Grenell admonished German companies to stop doing business with Iran, overstepping the basic boundaries of his diplomatic role. The following month he told Breitbart News that he wanted to empower “conservatives throughout Europe,” impugned the “failed policies of the left,” and characterized Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of Austria, then in a coalition with a far-right political party, as a “rock star.” Last year he directly threatened German companies involved in constructing the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline with sanctions.
Grenell also has the dubious distinction of being the only Director of National Intelligence to have represented, through his public affairs consulting firm, a corrupt Moldavian oligarch (described as Moldova’s “leading” human trafficker) who is now banned from entering the United States for systemic corruption. Even worse, Grenell authored multiple op-ed pieces in major mainstream publications defending this oligarch or deliberately painting him in a positive light, without disclosing the fact that Grenell had once worked for him.
The considered opinion of many in the intelligence community who have spoken out regarding this appointment is that Grenell is not only incompetent and wholly unsuited to this task, but that his appointment portends potentially disastrous consequences for the coming election, as he was placed in this position specifically with a view towards hiding Russian interference from the American public. Stevenson minces no words: “Mr. Grenell’s appointment as the country’s highest-ranking intelligence officer looks intended to ensure that any U.S. intelligence assessments and warnings of Russian meddling in the 2020 election are downplayed and withheld from Congress, if not completely suppressed.”
That’s certainly bad enough, but in the context of the position in which he has been placed, the potential consequences of this buffoon’s presence at the pinnacle of our combined intelligence agencies are even more terrifying. Stevenson notes that Grenell’s brief tenure as “ambassador” indicates he doesn’t even possess the bare rudimentary skills necessary for anything remotely resembling “direction” or management of any agency, let alone one which coordinates and supervises the entire US intelligence apparatus. Even worse, Stevenson adds, “Evidence shows he can’t even do his basic job: An extensively sourced 2019 profile in Der Spiegel indicated that he generally ignores the factual dossiers prepared for him at the embassy.”
It’s important to understand what the job of DNI entails in order to appreciate just how reckless this appointment is, and just how much contempt Donald Trump holds for Americans in making it. The Director of National Intelligence post was specifically created by statute in 2004. The Director serves as the head of the entire U.S. intelligence community, and is tasked with directing and overseeing the National Intelligence Program, defined as all intra-agency intelligence programming in every area except military and tactical collection and employment of intelligence for our armed forces. The Senate ordered the DNI to "establish objectives and priorities for the intelligence community and manage and direct tasking of collection, analysis, production, and dissemination of national intelligence."
One of the most important responsibilities of the DNI is to produce the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), a “daily summary of high-level, all-source information and analysis on national security issues produced for the president and key cabinet members and advisers.” This document is prepared by the DNI director, with input from our intelligence agencies and provided directly to the president and designated members of the president’s cabinet on a daily basis. Though the DNI is a new position, the PDB has been a standard fixture provided to each American president since 1946. Prior to 2004, the preparation of the PDB was delegated to the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) who also served as the head of the CIA. A primary reason the DNI role was created was as a response to the failure of our intelligence agencies to anticipate and assess the threat that ultimately culminated in the Sept. 11th attacks by Al Qaeda against U.S. targets in New York City and Washington, D.C.
The PDB’s primary function is to alert the president (and if necessary, our armed forces) to potentially life-threatening crises. In fact, the apparent failure of former President George W. Bush to pay heed (or even pay attention) to one of these PDBs presented to him on Aug. 6, 2001, is widely understood as one of the reasons this country was taken utterly by surprise on Sept. 11, with devastating and horrific consequences. That brief, titled “Bin (Laden) determined to strike in US,” preceded the attacks by 36 days.
Of course, there is no law that says a president must actually “read” the PDB. And in Donald Trump’s case, of course, we have a president who may be constitutionally or congenitally incapable of reading anything beyond a one-page memorandum. So Trump, unlike all previous presidents, has opted for an “oral” version of the PDB. So not only must the DNI be equipped to synthesize the complex narratives of seventeen specialized US intelligence agency, Grennell must now have the faculty of distilling that brief into an oral presentation—all in order to inform this president of the facts he’ll need to call upon in defense of U.S. homeland from attack, if necessary.
As CNN contributor David Andelman noted, the grave responsibilities afforded to the DNI by their very nature demand an extraordinarily adept and experienced type of individual.
He or she must be a mediator, bringing often-conflicting people and ideas together to reach a consensus or at least a viable menu of choices for the president's final decision on life-or-death matters. But above all, this individual must be deeply conversant with the arcane language and practices, sources and methods that make up the core mission of the intelligence communities.
Richard Grenell is none of those things. He has shown himself to be little more than a partisan political operative and an occasionally virulent, Trump-spouting “bomb-thrower” on Fox News, lacking even the most basic knowledge or even the basic personality traits associated with the demanding and critical duties of a DNI. His pathetic tenure as German "ambassador"confirms that he does not even understand, much less possess, the necessary objectivity, tact and critical acumen which is essential to that position. What he will be doing is political, screening and burying potentially embarrassing intelligence and prioritizing Trump’s personal political whims and vendettas instead.
His role, in short, would be to transform and weaponize the product of our intelligence community—not in the interests of protecting Americans, but in the interest of protecting Donald Trump. Even assuming there is enough competence left in the Trump administration to comprehend and address something as important as, say, a nascent terrorist attack on American soil, we can now expect that any assessment that might bespeak or imply negligence on the part of this administration will be fairly scrubbed away and buried. The potentially far-reaching and deadly consequences of such a wholly unqualified person like Grenell being placed in a position to oversee and manipulate the recommendations of our intelligence agencies are terrifying, to say the least.
Trump’s cavalier, dismissive and insulting attitude towards U.S. intelligence has been on display since the day he took office. His routine appointments of extraordinarily incompetent and unqualified persons to head our federal agencies are by now an established, deliberate trait of his administration. Yet up to this point, Trump hadn’t so callously disregarded the safety of the American people in favor of his own interests in such a direct and obscene manner.
The appointment of Grenell shows just what how self-interested and self-dealing Trump’s priorities are, and how far he will go to subvert the institutions of our government to achieve them, without the slightest bit of care or attention paid to how disastrous they could turn out be for the country.
Put very simply, Trump Just. Doesn’t. Care.