Four years of investigations and revelations during the Trump years proved beyond a shadow of a doubt the Obama administration abused America’s foreign intelligence agencies, products and personnel to promote their political agendas and to target political adversaries. These abuses violated laws barring intelligence agencies from spying on Americans and squandered scarce intelligence resources that are needed to protect our nation from a wide array of foreign threats to our freedom and security.
This abuse also included distorting intelligence for political purposes. There is plenty of evidence that the Obama administration slanted analysis of ISIS to make Obama’s policies look better and rigged a January 2017 analysis of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency.
A new stunning instance of politicized intelligence analysis surfaced last month when Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe revealed an extensive internal effort to slant intelligence analysis of China to downplay its efforts to meddle in the 2021 presidential election and to avoid releasing analysis supportive of President Trump’s policies because of bias against Trump by intelligence analysts.
The Obama administration also weaponized intelligence against the Trump campaign, including “unmasking” the names of Trump officials from intelligence reports so they could leak these names to the press, leaking sensitive NSA reports to damage the reputations of Trump officials, and abusing the FISA process to spy on members of the Trump campaign.
It appears the politicization and weaponization of intelligence could worsen during the Biden administration due to calls by Biden officials and their supporters to use intelligence agencies to spy on domestic “extremists” who former CIA Director John Brennan recently described as an “unholy alliance frequently of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, Nativists, even libertarians.”
Join us on March 3, 2021 when Center President Fred Fleitz will moderate a special Center for Security Policy webinar to discuss these potential serious abuses of US intelligence agencies and threats to our civil liberties during the Biden administration with two leading experts on U.S. intelligence: Peter Hoekstra and Bill Gertz.
Peter Hoekstra was U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands during the Trump administration. He served 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives representing the 2nd District of Michigan and served as chairman and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. He is currently chairman of the Center for Security Policy Board of Advisors. “
Bill Gertz is a national security correspondent for The Washington Times. He has been with The Times since 1985. He is the author of eight books, four of them national best-sellers. His latest book, “Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy,” reveals details about the growing threat posed by the People’s Republic of China. He is also the author of the ebook “How China’s Communist Party Made the World Sick.”