Many in Washington have griped about the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—but few would have imagined weakening that office until Tulsi Gabbard was appointed to lead it.
The war over the war continues—this time at the Office of the Director National Intelligence (ODNI).
A largely redundant layer of bureaucracy was created within America’s intelligence community in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Following those attacks by al-Qaeda terrorists, the Bush administration and a congressional commission determined that a lack of coordination between the various intelligence services was to blame for the United States’ failure to prevent the attacks.
Accordingly, the federal government pursued a range of reforms intended to ensure a 9/11-type event would never happen again. These included the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS); the reassignment of multiple agencies, including the United States Secret Service and the Coast Guard, under the control of DHS; the creation of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA); and, perhaps most interestingly, the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)—an intelligence agency created to oversee all of America’s other intelligence agencies.
Many of these reforms have proven to be both unpopular and inefficient. For instance, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), the head of the CIA, now reports to the ODNI instead of directly to the president. The ODNI was created to break down “silos” in the intelligence community, which many argued helped to create favorable conditions for al-Qaeda on 9/11. In practice, however, most experts believe that the ODNI did more to confuse the byzantine intelligence collection process than it did to help it.
Nevertheless, the DNI has remained a key job in the intelligence community. While there were gripes behind-the-scenes in DC about that office, few would have ever imagined weakening or shuttering that office at all. That is, until Tulsi Gabbard was named as the Trump administration’s ODNI chief—kicking off a firestorm of debate about the office’s future, both within the government at large and within the Republican Party.
Tom Cotton Is Out for Blood
One of the elected officials in Washington who suddenly has a problem with the ODNI is Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark). Philip Wegmann at Real Clear Politics reports that Cotton, the neoconservative chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, introduced legislation designed to reduce the size (and influence) of Gabbard’s ODNI. According to Wegmann, the bill calls for the capping of ODNI’s workforce to just 650 people and the transferring of key responsibilities to other intelligence agencies—notably the CIA.
Interestingly, this all came about following Gabbard’s decision to take over the composition of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), which had previously been a longtime CIA responsibility. In fact, while the CIA has traditionally been responsible for the PDB, that task was supposed to have been transferred to the ODNI’s office back in 2004, when the agency was created and given precedence over the CIA. Previous ODNI leaders simply deferred to the CIA for the PDB as a matter of course. Gabbard, a natural disruptor and a longtime critic of the CIA and other American intelligence agencies, wanted to finally take the job over, as per the letter of the law that created the ODNI in the first place.
After Gabbard did that, however, Cotton swooped in and began calling for the reduction of the ODNI’s size and span of control.
Trump and Gabbard Have Fallen Out over Iran
This is especially pertinent today because the intelligence used to justify US involvement in the 12-Day War between Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran likely did not come from the US intelligence community. Nor was it validated by Gabbard’s office before it was disseminated to the president and his national security team.
Instead, the supposed evidence was almost certainly derived from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the world’s nuclear watchdog group, who then employed a Palantir-built artificial intelligence (AI) predictive modeling system called “Mosaic” to determine the nuclear weapons capabilities of Iran. It was Mosaic that used over 400 million data points to predict that the Iranians were surging production forward on multiple nuclear devices—any of which could threaten Israel, the Arab states, or even the United States. That model was shared with Israeli intelligence, which then sent the information directly to CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s office. Ratcliffe, a political appointee with deep ties to the Israeli lobby in the United States, is believed to have propagated that information directly to the White House—bypassing Gabbard’s office entirely, as well as the rest of the IC.
Once that information—presented not as a computer model predicting an outcome based on metadata analysis, but as actionable intelligence—was given to Trump, the forty-seventh president believed it, and made preparations to strike Iran accordingly.
From there, Gabbard and Trump had a slight falling-out over the intelligence. Her agency had assessed two months before the war began that Iran had abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons in 2003. Israeli intelligence, based on Mosaic’s predictive modeling, said otherwise. Because Gabbard was not on the same page, Trump did not let her attend the Camp David meeting the weekend before the war began, and kept her at arm’s length during the conflict—even going so far as to undermine her publicly.
Gabbard Is Fighting for the Soul of Trump’s Presidency
Clearly, all is not as it seems between ODNI, Congress, and the White House. Gabbard is set to present her own plan. As Real Clear Politics reported recently, “The topline of that reorganization includes manpower, money, process, and structure.”
One must be aware that Cotton’s proposed legislation is not happening in a vacuum. We are told that Cotton was skeptical of Gabbard’s nomination to become ODNI. Cotton represents a wing of the Republican Party that is very much on the outs in the age of Trump—the wing that supported the Iraq War, for instance—and Cotton is not only speaking for himself or his own preferences. Cotton’s bill clearly gives greater power to the CIA, which has been threatened both by Trump’s presidency generally, as well as specifically by Gabbard—as evidenced by her decision to take over the PDB.
In essence, there is a fight occurring behind the scenes in Washington for control over America’s complicated national security state. It is also being waged for the soul of Trump’s movement—which was founded at least in part on opposition to foreign wars of choice. Now that movement risks being hijacked by those same neoconservatives who support those wars. The next weeks and months will be decisive for the MAGA movement as it relates to the IC. And they will also be key for determining how long Tulsi Gabbard remains at her post as ODNI.
About the Author: Brandon J. Weichert
Brandon J. Weichert, a Senior National Security Editor at The National Interest as well as a contributor at Popular Mechanics, who consults regularly with various government institutions and private organizations on geopolitical issues. Weichert’s writings have appeared in multiple publications, including the Washington Times, National Review, The American Spectator, MSN, the Asia Times, and countless others. His books include Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His newest book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine is available for purchase wherever books are sold. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
Image: Shutterstock / Maxim Elramsisy.
