Abandoning the “back the blue” pro-police movement, former President Donald Trump claimed on Saturday that the FBI and Justice Department have become “vicious monsters.”
Trump’s charge is a repugnant one for any politician to make, let alone a former president. The fact is, the FBI is federal law enforcement. We need FBI agents and other members of the FBI’s professional staff to be on their game, not watching their six worried that charged-up Trump supporters may commit violence against them. With the threats of organized crime, domestic terrorism, unprecedented Chinese espionage activity, and the always-present risk of overseas terrorist groups taking their fight to our homeland, the FBI has a ton on its plate. To attack the FBI, an indispensable institution for national security, is just tremendously irresponsible and should be condemned by all members of the GOP. Thus far, however, what we hear from most prominent Republicans is…crickets.
This disdain for our own national security matters.
For one, our allies are watching the unfolding Mar-a-Lago situation very closely. Bilateral liaison relationships are critical in the intelligence business, sometimes just as important as America’s unilateral operations. The sharing of information occurs on a vast scale between intelligence services. This centers on friendly foreign governments supplying intelligence information from their most sensitive agents and their communications intercept capabilities on counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counterintelligence. Our friends help keep us safe by sharing their secrets with us, assuming that we secure said secrets just as if they were collected by the United States.
So will the Mar-a-Lago situation have an effect on these sharing arrangements?
Likely not at present. The Biden administration has no doubt reassured our partners that our document-handling procedures are tight. Our allies also know that Trump’s overall disdain for the intelligence profession was a historic aberration. Still, our allies surely worry about whether Trump will return to the White House. And if that seems likely to happen, I would expect the spigot of the most sensitive information to be turned off. For the British government to withhold intelligence from the U.S. would be unprecedented in our special relationship. Yet I fear that is exactly what would occur under a future Trump presidency. London could not in good faith expose its own agents nor capabilities knowing that Trump might again treat those treasured secrets as his personal toys. But an end or significant restriction in intelligence sharing would affect national security in ways most Americans do not appreciate.
Take the intelligence document related to French President Emmanuel Macron that was discovered at Mar-a-Lago. I don’t envy the U.S. Embassy in Paris’s predicament. While the French people don’t really care about their leaders’ extramarital affairs or sexual preferences, they may care very much about how this information may have been collected. If it was based on U.S. intelligence agents inside the French government or communications intercepts of French government officials, we could have a major scandal on our hands.
What should happen now?
Well, back to my original point: We should back the blue. The FBI needs the space to do its jobs. The GOP attack dogs need to stand down. But we shouldn’t obsess over details as yet unclear. Take the intelligence cover sheets found at Mar-a-Lago, for example. The discovery of these cover sheets has led to wild speculation, with some unfortunately linking these cover sheets to reported losses of U.S. intelligence community reporting sources. Let’s take a deep breath.
I think here of the legendary character Omar from the TV show The Wire. The wily drug dealer with a moral code once said, “On this caper, the more we learn, the less we know.” Hopefully, there are file numbers on the cover sheets that can lead to a forensic examination of what documents were actually behind them. But until the facts are gathered and presented, we won’t know if this was a historically mismanaged departure from the White House, with serious obstruction attached, or something far more nefarious.
Marc Polymeropoulos is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. A former CIA senior operations officer, he retired in 2019 after a 26-year career serving in the Near East and South Asia. His book Clarity in Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the CIA was published in June 2021 by HarperCollins.
