A top House Republican lawmaker agrees with President-elect Trump’s assessment that the power of the Director of National Intelligence needs to be limited.
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said on CNN that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has outgrown what it was legislatively intended to be. Issa said it’s now become another bureaucratic agency that doesn’t streamline information as it was intended.
“It was very clear at the time of the enactment that it was supposed to be a coordinated, limited body,” he said.
Issa was responding to reports that Trump is looking at ways to curb DNI’s power because it gets in the way of the agencies that it is supposed to streamline. The office was created in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in order to ensure the president receives all intelligence information from one source instead of 16 different agencies.
Issa said the DNI has kept the agencies from being able to disagree with each other and is now resulting in less reliable intelligence.
“Those 16 agencies need to be able to agree to disagree,” he said. “Stovepiping is one thing, but disagreement is what you need to have if you’re going to make a decision.”
He added, “DNI has often what we call groupthink.”
The question of how DNI will operate under Trump is up in the air after the office reported Russia is responsible for hacking into Democrats’ emails before the election.
Trump’s team has seen those reports as an attempt to undermine his election victory and the president-elect summarily dismisses Russian involvement in the hacks. He’s set to receive a briefing from the intelligence community on Friday specifically on the hacking.
Issa said Trump is allowed to be skeptical, given the unsophisticated way the hackers gained access to Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails. He said the intelligence community needs to brief Trump, and lawmakers like himself, on exactly why they think Russia is behind the attacks.
“It’s all about the specifics of who was it, who coordinated it,” he said. “And, you want to build the case that it was high levels of the Russian government that made this decision.”
