Inside the US intelligence community, a deep wariness about a second Trump administration has set in, stoked by memories of the antagonistic relationship the nation’s spy agencies had with Donald Trump the last time he was president.
But when news broke Tuesday evening that Trump had selected as his CIA Director John Ratcliffe, the former director of national intelligence, some career officials were cautiously optimistic, seeing Ratcliffe as a largely professional and potentially less disruptive choice than some other former officials believed to have been under consideration.
“As good as it was going to get,” said one intelligence official.
“Relief over alternative names suggested,” said another.
“It could have been a lot worse,” said a third intelligence official.
Current and former officials also cautioned not to assume that the intelligence community is uniformly opposed to Trump. Across the 18 agencies that make up the intelligence community, including a wide swath of its thousands of analysts and operators, there are plenty who support him and likely welcome his return.
“The IC is not a monolith,” one former senior official said.
Still, there remains a simmering concern that Trump will run roughshod over bureaucratic norms and cultural traditions. Broadly, multiple career officials told CNN, a sort of fatalism has set in across the community.
Analysts and other employees “know what we’re in for,” said one official.
“We did this before,” said still another at a different agency.
Some officials are worried about their jobs under a president who has vowed to “clean out” the intelligence community. Others fear Trump will put America’s national security at risk by doubling down on what some career officials saw as a cavalier approach to America’s most closely-guarded secrets, including his decision to hoard boxes of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
And then there’s just the stress of working for Trump: For a federal bureaucracy used to a deliberately, sometimes maddeningly slow process for setting policy, Trump’s habit of tweeting major national security decisions during his first term often made for a chaotic and unpredictable work environment.
Officials famously struggled to keep his attention during briefings. It was “exhausting,” said one official who worked under the first Trump administration. Some federal employees may decide it’s simply not worth it and quit or retire.
There is “no question” that there are “plenty” of intelligence officials who “would rather there be a different POTUS to brief,” said one of the officials.
“We are committed to ensuring a smooth transition,” said one CIA official.
‘Would he stand up to Trump’
Some career officials had feared that Trump would name Kash Patel as CIA director. The former Republican Hill staffer rose to prominence during the first Trump administration, and worked to declassify intelligence related to Russia that Trump believed would expose wrongdoing in the intelligence community.
Patel has remained outspoken about his deep skepticism of the integrity of the IC and may yet find a role, according to one former administration official who has remained in contact with Trump’s orbit.
In naming Ratcliffe, the former official said, Trump still made it clear that he remains obsessed with his grievances toward the IC, in particular the assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 campaign in an effort to get Trump elected.
Ratcliffe was among a cohort of Trump officials who aggressively sought the release of intelligence related to Russia and the FBI. The effort alarmed career officials who feared exposing the intelligence community’s precious “sources and methods” for gathering information and even some of Trump’s political appointees, including then-CIA director Gina Haspel, pushed back on pieces of the campaign.
Some officials have been nervous that the president-elect may seek to resume that effort and are now closely watching who the president chooses as director of national intelligence, as well as the CIA’s deputy director — a role that requires no Senate confirmation.
Ratcliffe at times seemed to walk a middle ground on the issue. In December 2020, when he was the director for national intelligence, then-Attorney General William Barr worked with him to dissuade Trump from declassifying at least a subset of the intelligence related to Russia, arguing that it would damage national security, CNN has previously reported.
“He turned out to be better than expected at ODNI, in that he took interest in the affairs of the community [and] he seemed to want to lead and not be controversial,” said one former official. “He didn’t come in wanting or intending to damage the intelligence community.”
But in a profession where intelligence professionals view their jobs as “speaking truth to power,” especially to the president, there’s worry Ratcliffe could succumb to shaping the anaylsis in a way Trump would prefer.
“Would he stand up to Trump, or other voices?” the same official asked. “That’s where I have doubt.”
Trump officials broadly believe that an entrenched bureaucracy of career civil servants — meant to follow the policy direction set by political appointees — has grown too powerful, complaining that officials frequently stepped beyond their remit to slow-roll or stymie directions from then-President Trump simply because they didn’t like them during his first administration.
“You have people in the way who are purposely not doing what’s being asked of them or not trying to implement the president’s policies because they personally disagree with it,” said one former official who worked with Patel during the first Trump administration.
For some inside the intelligence community, of course, those officials were providing an important check on a president disinterested in following either norms or laws.
Telling Trump ‘war stories’
Memories of the tumultuous first Trump administration remain fresh in the minds of many career officials. One senior intelligence official said some veterans in his office told “war stories” on the morning after the election.
On several occasions, Trump alarmed some career officials with how he handled classified information — not just with his decision to keep top-secret documents at his Florida estate after he left the White House.
In 2017, he was accused of disclosing highly-sensitive Israeli intelligence to top Russian officials during an Oval Office session. In 2019, he tweeted a classified image of an Iranian rocket launch site taken by one of America’s most exquisite satellites — a demonstration of the kind of capability the intelligence community seeks assiduously to keep a mystery to America’s adversaries.
He was known to reject assessments that didn’t fit his own worldview, most famously refusing to entertain the consensus judgment of the community on Russian involvement in the 2016 election, and as a result, US intelligence officials simply briefed him less often on topics that they knew would ignite resistance.
Current and former officials who served during his first administration say they are deeply concerned that a return to that approach will lead allied nations to share less information with the United States; and to the politicization of analysts’ assessments, traditionally meant to offer judgments untouched by political calculus.
And some fear what they say is the relative inexperience in the intelligence community of the new CIA director. Ratcliffe, a lawyer and a member of the US House until 2020, served less than a year as the director of national intelligence. He replaces Bill Burns, a career State Department diplomat with decades of experience working hand-in-glove with the intelligence community on sensitive issues like Russia and the Iran nuclear deal.
But for much of the workforce, multiple current intelligence officials serving in roles ranging from mid-level to senior told CNN, the more immediate concern is their jobs.
Trump has promised in his second term to “clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus,” which he is expected to do by reclassifying a large portion of the federal civilian workforce to make it easier to fire them — an effort commonly referred to as “Schedule F” for the new employment category he sought to create at the end of his first term.
“People are just really worried about them cleaning house, about people losing jobs, about Schedule F and how far that will go,” said one former senior intelligence official who is still in touch with former colleagues.
That fear poses a potential risk not just to individual federal employees but also to national security, the former official and another senior US intelligence official said. If analysts start to “self-censor” for fear of angering the president and losing their job, it could lead to the kind of bad analysis, missed warnings and faulty logic that officials refer to as “intelligence failures,” these people said.
The classic example is the IC’s incorrect judgment after September 11, 2001, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction — now often pointed to by intelligence scholars as the natural consequence of the politicization of intelligence. That assessment became the Bush administration’s predicate for the war in Iraq.
CNN’s Alex Marquardt and Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.