Another community that may see its existence in its current configuration at risk is the intelligence community, as explained by Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes in Lawfare:
The U.S. intelligence community is on the verge of a crisis of confidence and legitimacy it has not experienced since the 1970s. Back then, the crisis was one of the community’s own behavior. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s the intelligence community used its secret powers of surveillance and other forms of government coercion—often but not always at the behest of its political superiors—to spy on and engage in operations against Americans for political ends. At that time, politicians really did use executive branch intelligence tools to seek to monitor and harm political enemies, and exposure of that reality nearly destroyed the intelligence community. The problem was Hoover’s illegal wiretaps, bugs, and break-ins, and his attempts to annihilate Martin Luther King and others; it was NSA’s and CIA’s domestic espionage and propaganda operations; it was Richard Nixon’s many dirty tricks.
The community survived because it entered a “grand bargain” with Congress and the American people in the 1970s. And it is that very grand bargain that today’s crisis now threatens.
Today’s crisis is sparked by allegations, both by President Trump and by some House Republicans, of political misuse of the intelligence community by the Obama administration. Whether the allegations are entirely false or turn out to have elements of truth, they put the intelligence community in the cross-hairs, since some of the institutions that are supposed to be key legitimators are now functioning as delegitimators. After all, entirely appropriate investigations of counterintelligence can easily look like inappropriate political meddling, and if the President and the House Intelligence Committee chairman are not merely not defending the intelligence community but are actively raising questions about its integrity, the bargain itself risks unraveling.
In a sense, we’re seeing the effects of small variable changes on a non-linear system. A couple of politicians shouting that the intelligence system is being used for political purposes doesn’t seem like much, does it? But the power of the intelligence systems – and its past abuses by Hoover and, later, Nixon – is such that it makes folks sensibly nervous.
And that makes sense when solid evidence is presented. And that’s the problem here, isn’t it?
There’s no evidence. More from Ben and Jack:
This basic system survived even the Snowden revelations. Many people found Snowden’s disclosures of vast intelligence collection shocking. But though Snowden disclosed many technical legal problems with this surveillance, as well as some controversial legal judgments signed off on by the executive oversight apparatus, it also showed that the the problem of politically motivated surveillance simply didn’t exist. None of the thousands of pages of NSA revelations pointed to anything like the venal activities of the 1970s and before.
But, as we know, all it takes is a baseless accusation that happens to play to folks’ preconceptions in order to generate doubt, or even certainty; many will not follow up with an objective review of the matter, whether it be through partisanship, lack of time, or lack of tools. This is heaven for the unscrupulous power-seeker – which is the best category for anyone on the Trump team, from Trump on downwards.
Ben & Jack pin their hopes on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and indeed the Founders designated the Senate as the home of the great defense of the Constitution – home to politicians who should take the long, wise view (Senator McConnell doesn’t seem to understand that, but there are more Senators than McConnell, fortunately). They also note that the Senators in charge are Republicans – an important political step. If Republicans find their own President is in cahoots with the Russians, it’s hard to call it a political lynching by the Democrats. The final word from Ben & Jack:
Don’t underestimate what’s at stake here, which is not just the fate of the Trump presidency. What’s at stake is the entire structure of legitimacy we have built for the intelligence community in the post-Watergate era. Because if the President and the House Intelligence Committee Chairman can discredit an investigation of foreign interference in an American election and collusion with that effort by the president’s campaign by alleging improper political misuse of the intelligence authorities by the prior administration, if leaking FISA intercepts is an accepted way to go after a political opponent, and if nobody can credibly say who’s telling the truth and who’s lying, then the grand bargain has truly failed, with consequences that are hard to fathom.
Here’s the thing. Suppose Trump succeeds in his claims that the intelligence systems are politically tainted. Think about it.
The current systems would have to be dismantled.
Now we’re operating blind in a very dangerous world.
Then they’d have to be reassembled. Because we’d need intelligence. But you can bet that the new designers would not be highly principled men, concerned about their country. Because the GOP has already proven that it puts party above country.
Who would be the new Hoover? And who would he persecute?
Hated minorities?
Lesbians?
Your brother?
Yourself?
Hatred is not rational. Don’t sit their nodding in approval at these thoughts, because you might be the one in front of the Select Committee on un-American Activities. It may take a generation or two before the right people come together to remake an intelligence system into a the non-political force it should be – and apparently already is.
