President Trump is supposed to be in command of the vast resources of the U.S. intelligence community, but so far he has shown himself unable — at least publicly — to use the authority to root out leakers or get to the bottom of alleged surveillance of his transition team.
Mr. Trump has made a priority of stopping leaks from the intelligence community and he’s accused President Obama of having Trump Tower’s “wires tapped” during the campaign, but White House officials refuse to acknowledge any steps taken to address those pressing issues.
Instead of an internal investigation, Mr. Trump called on Congress to probe the leaks and the alleged spying.
Mr. Trump directed the Justice Department to track down leaks, which included revealing intercepted communications involving the Russian ambassador to the U.S. that resulted in the firing of Michael Flynn as national security adviser, as well as the content of the president’s phone calls with leaders of Australia and Mexico.
It took House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes to uncover information that Trump transition team officials were caught in U.S. surveillance operations and their identities “unmasked” in intelligence reports.
The “unmasking” or revealing of identities of U.S. citizens picked up incidentally in the course of intercepted communications could violate federal privacy laws.
The reports were circulated, according to Mr. Nunes, within the 17 intelligence agencies that Mr. Trump now controls as commander in chief.
“It was helpful for the president to know that the investigation, as he had asked for, was starting to bear fruit,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said when pressed about the propriety of Mr. Nunes sharing the information with Mr. Trump.
The administration’s pursuit of leaks and information about surveillance ordered under the Obama administration have been complicated by the ongoing FBI probe into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to meddle in the election, an investigation reported underway for the past nine months.
Beyond the Justice Department, however, the president should be able to review data and analysis produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and intelligence operations inside the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.
“The power flows from the executive, form the commander in chief to the intelligence community and that is an immense amount of power,” said former CIA intelligence analyst Aki Peritz, a senior fellow at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security.
Mr. Peritz said that he did not believe that the intelligence community was going rogue, that there was a conspiracy to undermine the president or that Mr. Trump had no control over the agencies.
Still, he said that there were limits to any executives’ ability to manage a massive spy network.
“He can do a lot of things,” Mr. Peritz said. “The power — this is what I think a lot of people are concerned with — the power comes from and is derived from the executive branch. But people are people and if they feel there is malfeasance going on, then they sometimes take actions into their own hands.”
The president’s ability to use the intelligence community has been hampered by his “antagonistic if not hostile approach to intelligence services,” said Phillip Lohaus, former Department of Defense intelligence analyst now at the American Enterprise Institute’s Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies.
“This is a good example of a larger issue of how intrenched bureaucracies have an inclination to resist changes or issues they are uncomfortable with,” he said.
Meanwhile, the president has faced intense scrutiny about every move related to intelligence gathering and claims that the Obama administration targeted him for surveillance.
Mr. Spicer was questioned Thursday by reports about whether the White House supplied Mr. Nunes with the information about spying on the transition team in order to back up Mr. Trump’s claims, which have been widely disparaged by the news media.
“I don’t know that that make sense,” he said at the daily White House briefing. “I don’t know why he would come down here to brief us on something that we would’ve briefed him on.”
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
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