Trump’s Incoming Counterintelligence Crisis
There’s no more pressing national security concern for the second Trump White House than counterintelligence – and they need to start fresh with their own team.
Donald J. Trump returns to the White House in less than two weeks. While the second-term MAGA agenda is chock-full, with migration and the border in first place, national security is looming large, rightly so. There are far graver matters for the Departments of Defense and State to tackle starting Jan. 20 than whether the United States absorbs Greenland or Canada joins the union as our 51st state.
Neither of which seems likely to happen, but serious conflict with China in Trump’s second term is much likelier than the public realizes. As I just explained over at the Washington Examiner, the Pentagon assesses that war with the People’s Republic of China by 2027 is probable, and we’re tracking to quite possibly lose it. Beijing’s top advantage in that conflict is intelligence, as I elaborated:
China’s big advantage is intelligence. The daunting extent of Beijing’s espionage against the West, especially the United States, employing both cyberespionage and traditional human spying, means that the PLA possesses an information advantage in any conflict. Industrial-scale hacking operations such as Salt Typhoon have given Chinese intelligence access to an astonishing array of American secrets, including deep inside Washington.
If Beijing is inside our secure communications, that will cost large numbers of American and allied lives and may lose us any Taiwan war before it starts. Fixing this counterintelligence disaster should be the new Trump administration’s top national security priority.
Whether the incoming Trump administration grasps the unprecedented severity of the counterintelligence crisis they’re inheriting this month remains to be seen. The lion’s share of MAGA energy towards America’s spy agencies leans more punitive than corrective, while it appears that Trump himself has a poor grasp of how the Intelligence Community works, despite having already served four years as the commander-in-chief.
Nevertheless, the need for comprehensive reform of the IC, particularly of our national counterintelligence apparatus, has never been greater than today. Such reforms require more than one presidential term to realize, since such systemic defects are decades in the making. Still, the now-ending Biden administration witnessed America’s counterintelligence concerns metastasize from serious to life-threatening, with the rise of a truly gargantuan Chinese spy threat. Trump’s four years can at least undo the worst of that damage, if the White House wants that.
Subscribers of this newsletter know just how bad the Biden years have been for American counterintelligence. The Biden White House was brimming with dubious characters, such as the top Iran guru with unsettling ties to Tehran: whether he was merely uncomfortably pro-mullah or his generation’s Alger Hiss is something the Democrats and their media wing have avoided discussions about. Unsavory Friends of Tehran so commonly embedded themselves inside Team Obama-now-Biden, including in top national security positions, that nobody found it noteworthy when a senior State Department official, a DEI darling of the administration, turned out to have been compromised by Iranian intelligence. Meanwhile, the top intelligence official on Biden’s National Security Council has been cuddly with jihadists going back to his time in the Obama White House. Neither is this all about Iran. The less we say about the Democrats’ deep problems with Chinese penetration and manipulation, perhaps the better. It’s not like the Democrats will mention any of it anyway.
Team Trump must do better if they seek to genuinely reform the Intelligence Community. If more than cosmetic changes to the IC involving retribution are desired, the incoming White House must get serious, right now. Unfortunately, signs of worrying unseriousness in the espionage arena have already appeared regarding top MAGA staffing choices, even before the inauguration.
Let’s look at the National Security Council, the White House’s focal point for national security issues. Trump’s chosen NSC boss is Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), a hard-charging Army Green Beret with hawkish views across the spectrum, especially regarding China. However, friendly NSC veterans are expressing concerns about NSC appointments in Trump’s second term. Over the weekend, Joshua Steinman, a Navy veteran who served as the NSC’s cyber guru during the last Trump administration, issued a cautionary thread on X (formerly Twitter). Herein, Steinman explained that MAGA seems not to grasp the importance of their choices for top NSC jobs.
Going public with GOP dirty laundry, Steinman advised the incoming Trump team to purge the NSC of all Biden holdovers, who will resist MAGA goals from inside the White House. Moreover, Steinman cautioned against certain appointments, in particular, the selection of Adam Howard as the senior intelligence director on the NSC:
I am hearing Adam Howard, HPSCI GOP Staff Director, former Mike Turner staffer, will be taking NSC Intel. I don't know him, or whether he has supported the President in the past, but without an operational intelligence background, you can't clean up the mess made by the current team. You must ask: is this person willing to expose IC dirty tricks targeting the President? If not, this is not a good fit.
The Intel Senior Director position is one of the most CRITICAL posts in U.S. Government. They are the President's personal envoy to the Intelligence Community, and speak with his voice. If that person isn't 100% on board with the Trump Agenda, we are in for trouble.
Steinman is correct. Howard, as the GOP Staff Director for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, isn’t a good fit for NSC intel director, since he lacks the required real-world espionage experience for the job. Howard is a creature of Capitol Hill, a career staffer and protégé of Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), the HPSCI Chair. Getting Howard appointed the NSC’s intelligence boss is widely viewed inside the Beltway as a power-grab by Turner, who seeks to control the Trump White House when it comes to spy matters, through his mini-me Howard (more than one Hill source reports hearing Turner state that he’s taking over the IC under Trump).
Politically-derived doubts about Howard’s bona fides for the NSC job were amplified by a candid assessment in Tablet by Lee Smith, who’s a stern MAGA critic of our intelligence agencies. Smith makes a compelling case that Howard is the wrong person to handle intelligence matters on Trump’s NSC. Howard appears insufficiently serious about genuine IC reform, as indicated by his apparent loyalty to America’s spy agencies over any real reform agenda.
I’ll leave fights about anyone’s MAGA-ness to Team Trump, but there are concerns beyond politics regarding the Howard appointment. Certain counterintelligence questions have appeared too. The NSC’s intelligence boss holds a critically important job that gives its incumbent access to the full array of IC secrets. That person’s “need to know” is unquestioned. Moreover, as the interface between the White House and the 17-agency alphabet soup that is our IC, the NSC’s intel director has the power to significantly shape both sides in that dialog, with profound implications for national-level policy on essentially all foreign and defense policy issues. The holder of this job must possess unquestionable loyalty to the United States.
The president also has the right to expect that the NSC’s intel director is loyal to him and his agenda. Is Adam Howard that guy? IC insiders tell me that Howard has been known to brag about his discreet connections to Washington journalists, to whom Howard has leaked U.S. Government secrets in exchange, presumably, for favors and street cred with our media elite. That’s how the spies-and-journalists game gets played on the Potomac. But is that the kind of person you want heading up intelligence matters on the National Security Council? Particularly in what’s sure to be a politically contested fight for serious reform of our broken intelligence system.
The last Trump administration had serious problems with leaks, which surged during their four years in power. If that happens again, Team Trump must not repeat its past efforts at leak-suppression by spying on Congress, which resulted in bad press and no major leakers caught. Instead, the White House should ask trusted elements in the Intelligence Community for help with catching leakers who are exposing its secrets, accompanied by aggressive use of the polygraph. That’s how the IC catches moles and traitors, it will work with leakers too. Start with the National Security Council, which traditionally producers more leakers than our spy agencies do.
So far, the incoming NSC chief Rep. Waltz has reportedly stood by the Howard appointment, at least implicitly. Whether that’s a wise choice remains to be seen. Regardless, Team Trump needs to spread the word, without delay, that people taking highly sensitive positions in the administration that enjoy wide access to intelligence secrets, should be prepared to be polygraphed, as needed.