The next Director of National Intelligence, whoever replaces Tulsi Gabbard in the role, should use the position to eliminate it entirely. That is the argument of Fred Fleitz, vice chair of the America First Policy Institute’s Center for American Security and former National Security Council Chief of Staff, CIA analyst, and House Intelligence Committee staff member, who joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to make the case for a fundamental restructuring of the American intelligence community.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created in 2004 following the 9/11 Commission’s recommendation that a coordinating authority be established to ensure intelligence agencies shared critical information and prevented the kind of siloed failure that allowed the September 11th attacks to go undetected. Fleitz said the ODNI has instead become a sprawling bureaucracy with approximately two thousand employees, its own expensive headquarters in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, located right down the street from CIA’s campus at Langley, and a structure that duplicates rather than coordinates the existing work of the agencies it was meant to oversee. He said when he served on the House Intelligence Committee staff after the ODNI’s creation and the committee held a hearing on North Korea, so many officials showed up representing competing intelligence community offices that there was literally not enough room at the witness table for all of them, their aides had to wait outside, and it was unclear at the outset of the meeting who was actually in charge. He said he was interviewed twice by Trump for the DNI position in the first term and told the president directly that he had visited the Tyson’s Corner headquarters and did not know what all those people were doing.
He said John Ratcliffe’s current role functioning effectively as the president’s top intelligence adviser, essentially reviving the old model of the CIA Director serving that function before the ODNI was created, proves that the pre-9/11 structure worked and can work again. The solution he advocates is a consolidation back to that model, with the CIA leading the intelligence community and the ODNI’s bloated administrative structure dismantled. He invoked the Gordon Gekko moment from Wall Street, the speech where Gekko says he cannot figure out what all the vice presidents do, as the frame for what Trump needs to apply to the intelligence apparatus.
Beyond the structural waste, Fleitz said the ODNI has been politically hostile to Trump and has contributed to the chronic leak problem that has plagued American intelligence for years. He said intelligence agencies revealing internal assessments through press leaks effectively tells adversaries what the United States knows and thinks about them, which is a counterintelligence disaster. He noted that China and Russia do not hold public hearings where their intelligence agencies present open assessments of threats they see from the United States, and questioned why the annual unclassified worldwide threats briefing exists at all.
On the CIA whistleblower who recently testified before a Senate committee that Anthony Fauci directed the intelligence community’s reassessment of COVID origins, Fleitz said Ratcliffe is focused on that issue. He expressed surprise that a CIA spokeswoman publicly condemned the whistleblower, calling it a miscommunication, and said he has been writing for several years about how intelligence analysis of COVID origins was slanted to support the Biden administration’s preferred narrative, with people who had contrary assessments being silenced rather than allowed to contribute to the analytical process.
On the broader question of accountability for intelligence community officials who participated in the 2016 Russian meddling assessment, the censorship of social media content through government-industry partnerships documented in the Twitter files, and the broader effort to sabotage the first Trump presidency, Fleitz said John Brennan handpicked the analysts who wrote what he called a slandered intelligence assessment attributing 2016 election interference to Russian state direction, and that Brennan was almost certainly taking his direction from Barack Obama in doing so. He said he does not expect the people most responsible to face criminal accountability, and that the most realistic outcomes are public exposure of what happened so it cannot be repeated and removal from government of anyone still serving who participated. He said Gabbard and Ratcliffe have done significant work declassifying documents that show what actually happened and how those assessments were manipulated, and he hopes that process continues under whoever leads the intelligence community next.