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DonViejo

(60,536 posts)
Wed Apr 14, 2021, 11:13 AM Apr 2021

Intelligence officials reassert their role post-Trump


By Katie Bo Williams, Kylie Atwood and Zachary Cohen, CNN

Updated 5:12 AM ET, Wed April 14, 2021

Washington (CNN)The last time the top three intelligence officials testified in front of Congress, they were publicly criticized by the President, who lashed out at them in a series of tweets calling them passive and naive and saying that they should "go back to school."

The incident in January 2019 epitomized the antagonistic relationship between then-President Donald Trump and the US intelligence community and showed the degree to which intelligence leaders were marginalized under Trump. It also put a temporary halt to what had been since 2006 an annual ritual of the heads of the CIA and the FBI and the director of national intelligence going before Congress to speak openly about the biggest threats facing the US.

That drought will come to an end Wednesday with the resumption of the so-called World Wide Threats hearings before the Senate and House Intelligence committees, the mere occurrence of which demonstrates how the professional intelligence community is reasserting itself under President Joe Biden.

While Trump was in the White House, multiple sources tell CNN, the intelligence community was forced to walk a political tightrope, calibrating its assessments -- or sometimes withholding them altogether -- to avoid the wrath of a mercurial president who was prone to bristling and ignoring politically inconvenient information. This was particularly true whenever the assessment related to Russian interference in US elections, a topic that officials learned to avoid raising with Trump.

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https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/14/politics/intelligence-officials-reassert-post-trump/index.html
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