The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said President Trump’s intelligence community shake-up would have a detrimental effect on the country, potentially costing U.S. citizens their lives.
Virginia Sen. Mark Warner said he had been “particularly troubled” by reports of Trump forcing the ouster of top intelligence leaders, including the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, who alerted Congress of a whistleblower complaint about Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine, and two directors of national intelligence.
“What each of these ousted intelligence officials has in common, besides a history of service to our country, is that all were punished for speaking truth to power. They were fired because they had the temerity to brief the president and Congress about threats to the United States that are politically inconvenient to Trump,” Warner wrote in an opinion piece for the Washington Post.
Warner said top intelligence officials had become reluctant to communicate with the congressional committees that oversee them out of fear of angering Trump.
“These actions send profoundly dangerous signals to career intelligence professionals. If presenting objective information about threats to the United States is treated as political disloyalty to the president, our intelligence community simply cannot function as it was intended to. The consequences of this breakdown will undoubtedly be measured in American lives,” he wrote.
