Historically, the CIA has learned to satisfy the individual presidents it serves, though always with the quietest understanding that the “first customer” would not abuse courtesy. Bill Clinton’s famous fluent schedule made it difficult for him to attend daily one-on-one briefings. (When a man in a stolen Cessna 150 plane crashed into the South Lawn of the White House in 1994, the deadly joke around the CIA was that it was the agency’s director, Jim Woolsey, trying to hold a meeting get with the president.)
However, Clinton read his information material. George W. Bush, whose father had been a CIA director, married his wife six mornings a week – although the fame did not result in his paganism in the August 2001 briefing entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in. US “. Obama also took daily briefings for most of his presidency; Lisa Monaco, his homeland security adviser, earned the presidential nickname Dr Doom for her innovative counter-terrorism updates. The briefings were a ritual by which the intelligence community made the matter implicit to itself as something that transcended partisanism and worked on a time scale outside of bare presidencies.
It was inevitable that some adjustments would prove necessary for Trump, beginning when he was in government. The interests of the new president were primarily economic, a field that was never the strong grip of the intelligence community. Under Trump, intelligence officials learned to increase “our econ briefing game,” as one of me told me.
But the culture clash also posed serious problems. Trump was accustomed to cutting deals and sharing gossip on his private cell phone, often out loud. He enjoyed being a billionaire, to whom he would “show off some of the things he thought were cool – the capabilities of various weapon systems,” repeated one senior senior administration official. ‘These were super-rich guys who would not give him the time of day before he became president. He would use that game as currency he had, that they did not, and did not understand the implications. ‘Trump also provided his President’s Intelligence Advisory Board to wealthy entrepreneurs who, when informed by one intelligence officer, “would sometimes make you uncomfortable” because on occasion “their questions were related to their business dealings, ”this individual recalls.
The chairman of that advisory board, Stephen Feinberg, is co-CEO of Cerberus Capital Management, which owns DynCorp, a major defense contractor that has won several lucrative military contracts. Feinberg was a friend of the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whose expanded role in the new administration also caused unrest within the intelligence community. “His attitude,” repeated one former Kushner intelligence official, “is similar to that of his father-in-law, who always thought that people who did not try to be rich, but instead went into public service, were inferior.” There were obvious security issues that Kushner did not think he had done, that “the Chinese ambassador and his minions would have gone without wandering around the West Wing,” repeated one senior administration official. (The White House disputes this. “No foreign nationals are allowed to roam free in the West Wing,” McEnany said in a statement.)
Once in the administration, Kushner and an aide showed up at Langley’s headquarters – striking in their fit suits – for a meeting to learn how the CIA works. The agency complied, but afterward, according to one attendee at the meeting, concerns arose within the agency about Kushner’s potential conflicts. His complex international business interests, such as his evolving friendship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, had raised serious concerns among officials responsible for issuing security clearances. A further concern, said another former intelligence official, “was simply his cavalier and arrogant attitude that ‘I know what I’m doing’, without a cultural understanding of why things are classified, would endanger our intelligence. “
Trump publicly claimed not to know much about Kushner’s security clearance problem. But in fact, the president “made a big deal out of it and tried to pull all kinds of strings and go around the system,” one former official recalled. Another former official said, “I would hear the president say, ‘Just do it, just give it to him.’ “I’m not sure he understood what it really meant. He made it sound like Jared was just trying to join a club.”
