Do you trust Donald Trump? The intelligence agencies don't have a choice
Presidential candidates are traditionally granted classified briefings on intelligence; Trump's track record with sensitive material is controversial and being litigated
One of the most striking differences between the British and American political systems is in terms of transition. Although the main opposition party in the United Kingdom is usually given access to current civil servants in transition talks, this only happens in the few months before a general election (Rishi Sunak authorised officials to talk to Labour’s team in January). The Cabinet Manual only contains one paragraph on these discussions, which take place without the involvement of ministers. They are:
designed to allow the Opposition’s shadow ministers to ask questions about departmental organisation and to inform civil servants of any organisational changes likely to take place in the event of a change of government. Senior civil servants may ask questions about the implications of opposition parties’ policy statements, although they would not normally comment on or give advice about policies.
The Institute for Government set out the state of play in 2023: the talks are what parties make of them. They began in 1964, when Sir Alec Douglas-Home, that most patently decent of prime ministers, decided that Harold Wilson and the Labour Party should have an opportunity to talk to serving officials, given that they had been out of power for 13 years and few of the opposition front bench had held senior ministerial office. But, as The Economist remarked, it is an “awkward dance of hesitant approaches and furtive exchanges”. Home specified that the talks must be discreet, they must be conducted on a purely factual basis and the content must not in any way be revealed to the prime minister of the day.
In every other respect, the British system is brutal. A general election happens on Thursday, and a defeated prime minister may have to be be out of Downing Street on Friday or Saturday, by which time a new cabinet will have been appointed. Junior ministers are usually in place by the beginning of the following week. 2010 was, of course, an exception as the result was a hung parliament, but even then, Gordon Brown resigned on 11 May after an election on 6 May, with the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats having agreed a full-scale coalition agreement within days.
The United States is very different. The president is elected in November but does not take office until January, allowing a two-month transition, and there are long-established procedures for easing a new chief executive into the role. The Secret Service provides protection for “major Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates” as authorised by the secretary of homeland security, in consultation with a congressional advisory committee consisting of the speaker of the House of Representatives, the minority leader of the House of Representatives, the majority and minority leaders of the Senate and one additional member.
Since 1952, presidential candidates have also received briefings on intelligence issues. These are not access-all-areas disclosures: Michael Morell, former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, describes them in these terms:
It’s an analytic briefing, so there’s no… operations discussed, no covert actions discussed, no sources and methods discussed. It’s simply what do we see as the threats… why do we see it that way… how those threats evolved and where might they be headed?
Nevertheless, this is sensitive information. The briefings begin after the party conventions, once each has a clear nominee, which still leaves a few months between them starting in earnest and the election at the beginning of November. Morell notes that they are important in two almost opposite ways: firstly, to ensure that candidates have a general sense of the threats facing the United States at any given time; but also, “even more important [so] that you don’t say something during the campaign that actually undermines the national security of the United States”.
This year’s election is unusual in many ways, but it is also the first since 1912 in which both candidates have served as president of the United States. In that year, the incumbent, Republican William Taft (1909-13) went up against his former boss, Theodore Roosevelt (1909-09), who had challenged him unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination then founded his own Progressive Party. Predictably, both were beaten by the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. In 2024, Donald Trump is seeking to become only the second man after Grover Cleveland (1885-89, 1893-97), a Democrat, to have non-consecutive presidential terms. So both President Joe Biden and Donald Trump have done the job and know what it’s like to sit in the White House.
No candidate has ever gone into a presidential election with such a weight of litigation over his head as Donald Trump. According to a tally kept by The Atlantic, the presumptive Republican candidate is facing 91 felony counts across two state courts and two different federal districts. What is especially serious when it comes to matters of intelligence is that some of these charges, brought by the Department of Justice, relate to the handling of classified information. In June 2023, a federal grand jury indicted Trump on 37 felony charges including wilful retention of national defence information, an offence under the Espionage Act of 1917. The charges were filed at the District Court for the Southern District of Florida in Miami. A superseding indictment added three more charges.
Trump pleaded not guilty, and trial was set for 20 May 2024. However, the former president also claims that he is covered by presidential immunity, a case which will be heard next month by the United States Supreme Court but which the prosecution vigorously contests. If that fails, Trump wants the case deferred until at least after the party conventions.
All of this adds a piquancy, to say the least, to the idea of Trump, as the Republican candidate for the presidency, being given access to classified information in the form of intelligence briefings. He previously disclosed intelligence to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in 2017, during a meeting in the Oval Office, and in 2019 tweeted a photograph taken by a spy satellite of an Iranian rocket which had exploded on the launchpad. Of the latter disclosure, he told reporters, “We had a photo and I released it, which I have the absolute right to do”. This is, technically and legally, true, as the president has the ultimate authority over classification. However, America’s adversaries will certainly have made full use of the image to gain more information about the US’s capabilities.
All of this notwithstanding, Politico reported this week that Trump will receive intelligence briefings once he is confirmed as the Republican candidate after the GOP’s convention in Milwaukee in July. The authors of the article, John Sakellariadis and Erin Banco, summed up the issue slightly primly.
The decision would be in keeping with a tradition that dates back to 1952, but it would mark the first time an administration has volunteered to share classified information with a candidate who is facing criminal charges related to the mishandling of classified documents.
Quite.
One intelligence official told Politico, “I’d be afraid about giving him stuff. I mean, who knows what kind of riff he would do.” It is true that President Biden cancelled briefings to Trump as a former president in February 2021, citing his “erratic behaviour”; Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, had already called for this restriction, saying “I don’t think he can be trusted with it now, and in the future he certainly can’t be trusted”. Susan Gordon, principal deputy director of national intelligence under Trump, had written an op-ed for The Washington Post in which she had made the same recommendation in stark terms.
Neither past position nor past clearance is the basis for access to classified information—the “need to know” is. Trump will not warrant access simply because he was the president, and he cannot assert need to know for himself. He has to be granted it.
There is force and logic behind this stance, and its extension would mean overturning the convention observed since 1952 and denying Trump access to intelligence until the election. Access for candidates, like access for former presidents, is a matter of courtesy and convenience, extended on the authority of the sitting president. There is no statutory entitlement, nor is there any set form: sometimes the access is a single meeting, sometimes it is several briefings.
It is hard to refute the idea that Donald Trump is careless with classified information. His disclosures while in office may technically have been within his authority, but their wisdom can certainly be questioned. But he removed boxes of documents to his Florida home at Mar-a-Lago after he left office in January 2021, and when the FBI searched his office in August 2022, agents found 18 documents marked as top secret, 54 marked as secret, 31 marked as confidential and 11,179 government documents or photographs without classification markings. This is an unprecedented retention of material and would add to the argument that Trump simply will not observe procedures or regulations concerning classified information.
Let’s be clear at this point that no-one is suggesting Trump be denied access to information if he wins the election in November. At least, I haven’t read such a suggestion and it would be a constitutional enormity to take such a step. Provided he is the duly elected president, according to the electoral process as it stands, it is impossible legitimately to deny him access to intelligence.
There is, however, a wider context which must inform any decision on briefings and access before election day. Trump has a foundational suspicion of the intelligence community which he sees as part of the “deep state” and therefore fundamentally opposed to him and his interests. When he came to office in 2017, he appointed Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, as his national security advisor, though he resigned after 22 days; he chose a former Republican senator, Dan Coats, rather than an intelligence professional or military figure to be director of national intelligence; and he appointed Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo director of the CIA (Pompeo then appointed his former business partner, Brian Bulatao, as the agency’s chief operating officer).
It had been suggested before the election that Trump might seek to abolish the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, created in 2004. In 2018, he revoked the security clearance of former CIA director John Brennan, who had been critical of his conduct, and demanded a review of the rules governing the identification of US citizens in classified reports. In 2019, he gave the attorney general, William Barr, the power to declassify material from the 16 agencies in the intelligence community.
Trump, if re-elected, is likely to return to the idea of reforming the intelligence agencies. He will certainly seek to install supporters in key positions, partly because any incoming president would do so to an extent, and partly because that is his established track record. His appointment of Pompeo to the CIA and Flynn as national security advisor in 2017, of Steve Bannon as chief strategist and on Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff, shows he has no qualms in choosing people with slender or no qualifications for the role but who he believes will be personally loyal (though in many cases he subsequently fell out with them).
Politico has detailed the effect a second Trump presidency could have, proceeding on its assumption that the intelligence community is politicised and has “a leftist ideology that is unfair to the former president”. It notes that the former president “often publicly and behind the scenes calls into question the integrity of the agencies’ work”, and quotes a former senior official as saying:
Trump intends to go after the intelligence community. He started that process before and he’s going to do it again. Part of that process is to root out people and to punish people.
This is hardly an incredible threat. In his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland last month, Trump declared that “for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and imposters who have commandeered our government, it will be their judgment day!” He also said that “the unprecedented success of the United States of America will be my ultimate and absolute revenge”. Indeed, Freddy Gray’s cover story for this week’s edition of The Spectator runs under the simple banner of “Revenge”. He quotes Trump as saying “I will totally obliterate the deep state. I will fire the unelected bureaucrats and shadow forces”.
The intelligence community must prepare itself for the possibility—the strong possibility—of Trump winning legitimately in November. If that happens, how they have acted between now and then and how that is perceived by Trump will be hugely important. In making judgements about how far to engage with him as a candidate, it is legitimate for them to seek to avoid unnecessary antagonism of the extraordinarily thin-skinned former president. As the Politico article with which I began puts it, “the spy agencies would not want to withhold anything important from Trump—or even be perceived as playing it too safe”. They may, of course, be selective in what they reveal if they are required to brief him before the election, but, as Douglas London, a former CIA officer, told them, the community “won’t half-ass the job, but rather try to earn trust in its credibility and be as forthcoming as it can be”.
There are moral hazards here but also democratic absolutes and issues of legitimacy. President Biden is entitled to withhold any information from Trump as a candidate, and the degree to which he chooses to grant Trump access is a political decision. Under those circumstances, the intelligence agencies must, of course, follow the instructions of the administration, either not to engage, or to brief the candidate (though one can see some narrow discretion in how fully he is briefed). If Trump is elected on 5 November, and that election is fair and legitimate, then as president-elect and absolutely as president he will have the right to see almost any material he wishes, and will have the authority to classify or declassify information as he sees fit. Under those circumstances, the agencies will have to follow the instructions given legitimately by the chain of command. Those instructions may be reckless, foolish or disastrous, but it is not unconstitutional for a president to be any or all of those things.
The idea that one must rule out, however attractive it might seem, is that there can be any shading, any tacit concealment, any discreet non-compliance. That would take us into the territory of the deep state, which Trump (currently falsely) believes to be so powerful. It would be counter-productive and it would be plain wrong. I despise Donald Trump and his narrow, anti-intellectual, crude, paranoid, bloviating world view, although I have no love for Joe Biden either and, if I were a US citizen, I would be in despair as to how to cast my vote in November. If the process selects Donald Trump, however—and remember, it can do so without his winning the popular vote, but you agree to the rules when you enter the competition—then he has won, however stupid and damaging that result may be.
Trump is a demagogue and an autocrat, and I think he would abandon democracy in a heartbeat if he thought he could do so and get away with it. But it cannot be the case that we resist tyranny with another tyranny. The intelligence agencies must conform rigorously to the law and the Constitution, and they must accept direction from their political masters. If Donald Trump steps outside those bounds, then he should be pursued will all vigour. But while he uses legitimate presidential authority, he must be allowed to do so.
And anyway, he might not win. Stranger things have happened.
Trust? Hes narcissitic, mysognistoc, racist, sociopath, of course i would trust him.