When Intelligence Bows to Power
Trump's war on analytic integrity
The U.S. intelligence system was built to deliver hard truths to presidents, not affirm their instincts. Donald Trump is eroding the very foundation that makes American intelligence effective—and trustworthy.
Speaking truth to power, providing U.S. presidents with non-partisan, deeply researched intelligence analyses, is America’s original contribution to intelligence. As former CIA historian Donald Steury noted in a 1994 tribute to a man who was there at the onset, Sherman Kent was “perhaps the foremost practitioner of the craft of analysis in American intelligence history.”
Kent, a Yale University history professor, was one of the distinguished scholars who were recruited by the legendary William Donovan to conduct “research and analysis” for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Until his retirement in 1967, Kent played a leading role in developing the culture of intellectual rigor that marks the Central Intelligence Agency’s analytic directorate to this day. In 2000, the CIA established the Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis, where incoming CIA analysts are schooled in the critical importance of continuing the tradition of intellectual honesty, no matter which political party controls the White House. Honoring this tradition has become a very dicey proposition, to put it mildly, given the politicization that has afflicted the Executive Branch, including the U.S. intelligence enterprise, since Donald J. Trump first sought the White House in 2016.
Early in Donald Trump’s second term, May 13, 2025 to be exact, two very senior American intelligence analysts, the Acting Chair of the National Intelligence Council and his deputy, were fired because they were in charge of the NIC when a report about the Venezuelan Group Tren de Aragua upset the president. Trump had asserted that Tren de Aragua was working directly for the Venezuelan government, and the NIC report, correctly, contradicted Trump’s assertion. Because the NIC report directly refuted Trump’s claim, the NIC leadership was perceived as somehow politically disloyal to Trump.
Even worse, other officials from the intelligence community are being threatened with criminal prosecution for their diligence in uncovering the many ways that Russia’s Vladimir Putin, himself a former intelligence operative, has played Donald Trump over the past decade.
Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, came to her job with a reputation for obsequiousness towards Putin. Gabbard, like Trump, has even inferred that former President Barack Obama is a traitor. Pressed during her Senate confirmation hearings last year, she promised not to favor Russia if confirmed. But in March, Gabbard’s office, releasing its unclassified 2026 Annual Threat Assessment, dropped the ODNI’s previous mentions of Russia’s continuing intelligence operations aimed at dividing the American electorate, while helping Trump. None of the Senate Republicans who voted to confirm Gabbard has expressed any chagrin.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe talks a better game. Writing last December in the CIA’s online publication, Studies in Intelligence, first nurtured in the 1950s by Sherman Kent, Ratcliff penned a glowing tribute to William Webster. The only man to have led the CIA and the FBI, Webster had recently died at age 101. Ratcliff rightly noted that Webster personified integrity and loyalty to our Constitution.
Although he denies it, Ratcliffe has a record of politicizing intelligence that dates to 2020-2021, when he was Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. Ratcliffe raised concerns when he privately shared cherry-picked intelligence files with congressional Republicans who were supporting Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. As John Sipher, a former CIA station chief in Moscow (and a member of The Steady State), observed in a New York Times Op-Ed, such moves had raised concerns about Trump’s aim to create “a politicized national security apparatus that can serve as a personal weapon for the president.”
More recently, as Trump’s current CIA chief, Ratcliffe has released selective intelligence documents aimed (unconvincingly) at portraying former CIA Director John Brennan and former director of the FBI James Comey as having presided over a “corrupt” and “politically charged” process involving their investigations of how Russia’s leader had favored Trump in his 2016 presidential race against Hilary Clinton. One revealing example: Ratcliffe went on Fox News last August, smiling broadly as he told host Maria Bartiromo that US intelligence had long known of a “Hillary Clinton plan to falsely accuse Donald Trump of Russia collusion, to vilify and smear him.” Imagine how Putin must have enjoyed seeing the head of America’s CIA infer that Hillary Clinton, not him, had interfered in an American election!
One can easily imagine the choice words that Sherman Kent, who, despite his Ivy League credentials, was known to have a salty tongue, would have had for Ratcliffe’s and Gabbard’s political posturing. And Kent surely would have recognized the difficulties in trying to speak truth to a narcissistic president like Trump, who boasts that he trusts his gut more than expert analyses.
Kent would surely have been deeply shocked at Gabbard’s response when asked by lawmakers whether American intelligence had warned Trump that Tehran posed an “imminent threat” to our country. “The only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the President.”
Kent had warned in his 1949 seminal Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy: “When intelligence producers realize that there is no sense in forwarding to a consumer knowledge which does not correspond to his preconceptions, then intelligence is through.”
Greg Rushford is a former senior congressional aide (defense & intelligence) and a former Washington-based journalist who specialized in the nexus between national security and global trade politics. He is a member of The Steady State.
Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.