Trump tightens his grip on intelligence

“We now have a situation where the principal objective, evidently, of this acting DNI is to ensure that information about Russian interference and Russian preference for this particular president does not get out.” The purge of the nation’s chief intelligence overseer was swift, and emblematic of Trump’s determination to hastily quash any hint of disloyalty: Maguire had been telling staff just days before his ouster that he believed he could be nominated to serve as permanent director, according to a former senior intelligence official. Patel played a key role as a Hill staffer in helping Republicans try to discredit the Russia probe.“He’s been in all the meetings,” an intelligence official said, referring to Patel, who traveled with the president on his trip to India this week.Despite his reputation as a partisan gunslinger, in his early meetings at DNI, Grenell has been “very kind to everybody,” “very open-minded” and is “very curious but wanting to learn and understand things,” according to the official. He has asked staffers: “Tell me about this” or “explain this issue.”“People are impressed that he wants to learn,” the official said, with the caveat that “change is hard.”The president’s rocky relationship with the intelligence community and desire to purge the agencies of those deemed “anti-Trump” certainly predate Maguire’s firing. Ultimately, the agency produced nothing—and NSA turned off the faucet, too.The agencies are now gearing up for a fight over the reauthorization of key aspects of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the intelligence community to obtain surveillance warrants against foreign spies and agents suspected of operating within the U.S. Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Trump, who’s railed against FISA because of how the FBI used it to surveil an adviser on his campaign team, would threaten to get rid of it altogether if there weren’t serious reforms proposed to the law, according to people familiar with a closed-door meeting Mulvaney had with national security and other top officials in the late summer of last year. But Mulvaney ultimately got the president on board, “and it was resolved within a day or two,” the official said.It’s not clear who will be able to “hold the line” for the intelligence community, as one former CIA official put it, as Trump increasingly surrounds himself with loyalists.