Donald Trump has been beating up the Intelligence Community from the jump…
(We might want to include the Pentagon in part of this….)
Mad that they never trusted his association with Russian leader Putin….
They and the FBI have been getting abused and ignored….
Joe Biden has worked with them for 8 years on the inside….
And…
Decades from the outside in Congress….
Things will go back to some sort of normalcy….
(Expect a number of people who left under Trump to return under Biden)
BTW?
Expect TONS of leaks even more there have been already about Trump to come out if Trump is a loser and leaves the Presidency …
(Biden is already getting National Security briefs again…He probably listens a LOT more than Trump…Reports are that Trump seldom gets his…)
…what initially seemed like mere boredom — which demoralized intelligence officials but could potentially be managed by including pictures and charts in briefings to hold the president’s attention — later morphed into something the officials saw as more sinister: an interest in wielding intelligence as a political cudgel. Whether selectively declassified by spy chiefs he installed for their loyalty, or obscured from congressional and public scrutiny if it conflicted with his preferred narrative, intelligence became just another weapon in the president’s arsenal.
Trump’s actions, and the endless partisan battles over the Russia probe and impeachment, have left the intelligence community bruised and battered. Former Vice President Joe Biden’s advisers and allies in Congress are already thinking about what a heavy lift it will be to restore morale inside the agencies, legitimacy on Capitol Hill and public trust in the intelligence community’s leadership should Biden defeat Trump in November, according to more than a dozen people close to the candidate.
“This will be among the most important things a President Biden would need to do—and that he’ll want to do—immediately,” said Tony Blinken, who served as deputy secretary of state and deputy national security adviser under Barack Obama and is a top adviser to the Biden campaign. “I know from several conversations with him about this that he has deep concern about what has been done to the IC these last several years in terms of the politicization, and repairing that starts at the top with the president.”…
…
The Biden campaign has been considering a couple of veteran national security hands who could serve in senior intelligence roles in a Biden administration and hit the ground running to repair what they see as the damage Trump has done to the intelligence community over the last four years, people familiar with the internal discussions said. Among the names is former acting CIA director Michael Morell, former Obama national security adviser and close Biden confidant Tom Donilon, former Obama deputy national security adviser Avril Haines, former Deputy NSA Director Chris Inglis, and former deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Robert Cardillo.
“There is no question that Biden and his team will have an urgent task in restoring faith, trust, competence, and morale in the intelligence community,” said former NSA general counsel Glenn Gerstell, who retired earlier this year. “It’s going to be a huge effort.”….
…
Biden served on the Senate Intelligence Committee for a decade before entering the White House and was rarely seen in his West Wing office without a copy of the PDB under his arm, his former aides said.
He is the “diametric opposite of Trump” in that respect, said a former senior administration official. In a 2009 speech for the swearing-in ceremony of Leon Panetta as CIA director, Biden said, “The most important thing for this job, in my view … is to give the president of the United States the unvarnished truth, not what he thinks the president may want to hear.”
image….prospect.org