Every White House, indeed every department and agency within the gargantuan U.S. government, has a separate entity dealing with the media on a daily basis. The press officers, communications directors, and spokespeople are paid handsomely by the American taxpayer, but in most cases, they earn every cent of it. Representing the government to reporters who fire out questions and demand answers every hour of every day is a never-ending and exhausting task that can quickly turn into a battle royale between journalists seeking the truth and administration officials defending their work. There’s a reason why White House press secretaries rarely last more than two years: the job sucks the life out of you.
However, there are some positions in the bureaucracy where dealing with the press can impact the credibility of the agency that you work for. The nature of their work is so consequential to the health and welfare of the country that the people conducting it can’t waste a single second of their time with public relations. Professionals, operatives, and analysts in the intelligence community all fall under that category, which is why a Washington Post story over the weekend about officials in President Trump’s administration officials asking intel analysts to back them up is so troubling.
When the FBI refused to talk to reporters about the inaccuracies of previous stories detailing a Trump-Russia connection, the White House approached members of Congress and the intelligence community to do the same thing According to the story, two of those intelligence officials agreed to call several media outlets at the administration’s urging in order to bat down previous stories that suggested some kind of duplicitous relationship between Trump campaign officials and the Kremlin. The attempt at damage control worked: the newspaper published the quotes and the effort helped water down allegations of a Trump-Russia conspiracy, at least for a short time.
There isn’t anything unusual for intel officials to speak anonymously in order to clear up a story or correct the record. But generally most of these press interventions are decided internally, either as an attempt to protect an ongoing operation in the field or as a way to assure security services that may be partnering with the CIA or NSA that whatever is being reported is inaccurate or baseless.
What the story outlines, however, is something different from what we usually see. Instead of an internal decision made by senior leadership in the national security bureaucracy, we have White House partisans calling up intelligence analysts and requesting that they get journalists on the phone in order to push an administration narrative. In short, the White House political staff have asked analysts whose very work depends upon impartiality and non-partisanship to double as executive branch spokespeople.
Press Secretary Sean Spicer has fought the idea that the White House did anything wrong in approaching the intelligence community. In his mind, all the administration did was tell reporters to direct their questions to the people who have the full story in order. Yet we are somehow supposed to ignore the other side of the story, that these analysts were pushed into speaking with these very same reporters in order to corroborate the talking points put out by White House.
The men and women of the intelligence community are some of the best that the United States has to offer. Their work shouldn’t be tainted with any politics seeping out of Washington. Note to President Trump’s staff: you have a whole press apparatus to wage war on the media. Use them.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a fellow at Defense Priorities. His opinions are his own.
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