They have created a special section of the Department of Justice dedicated to stripping people of their citizenship.
This is happening. And it’s never happened before.
President Donald Trump is tightening his grip on the intelligence community as part of a post-acquittal purge of career officials and political appointees deemed insufficiently loyal, and the abrupt firing of his last intel chief is only the tip of the iceberg, current and former intelligence officials say.
But it also revealed a deeper trend: namely, the steps Trump has taken to shield the public from intelligence that could be politically damaging for him, and keep the flow of information coming out of the agencies firmly under his control.
Maguire and several of his deputies were reportedly fired because an official in his office, election security expert Shelby Pierson, briefed Congress without Trump’s knowledge on Russia’s ongoing election interference, though the White House is disputing that version of events. The NSA, CIA, and Pentagon have been urged by the White House not to share information about Russia and Ukraine with lawmakers, while the “Gang of Eight” senior members of Congress were bypassed leading up to at least one major intelligence operation. And intelligence community leaders have backed out of the public portion of the annual worldwide threats hearing, fearing Trump’s wrath if their assessments don’t align with his.
“We have an enemy of the United States that is conducting information warfare against us and our executive leadership doesn’t want to hear it, doesn’t want the Congress to hear it, and doesn’t want the people to hear it,” said former acting DNI David Gompert, who said he was “aghast” at the hiring of Grenell. “We now have a situation where the principal objective, evidently, of this acting DNI is to ensure that information about Russian interference and Russian preference for this particular president does not get out.”
The purge of the nation’s chief intelligence overseer was swift, and emblematic of Trump’s determination to hastily quash any hint of disloyalty: Maguire had been telling staff just days before his ouster that he believed he could be nominated to serve as permanent director, according to a former senior intelligence official. He then learned about his firing from reporters reaching out for comment before publication, and had to call national security adviser Robert O’Brien to confirm that he’d been replaced by Grenell.
O’Brien denied on Sunday that Maguire’s firing was tied to the briefing. “Admiral Maguire’s time as the acting DNI was up in a week or two,” O’Brien told ABC. “We were looking for someone who was Senate-confirmed under the Vacancy Act. We needed a Senate-confirmed official to come in and replace him. And so we went with a highly qualified person, Ambassador Grenell.“
Maguire’s chief of staff, Viraj Mirani, and DNI principal executive Andrew Hallman, were also both told to leave their positions immediately on orders from the White House, said two former intelligence officials, despite offering to stay on board and help with Grenell’s transition. Mirani, who was chief of staff for Dan Coats when he was DNI and in his Senate office, has stayed at the agency and is considering his career options.
He’s doing all this just 8 months before the election. He is not even pretending to moderate a tiny bit — he’s telling us exactly what he plans to do.
If he wins a second term, it’s going to be a doozy.