Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) and other GOP senators were quite frustrated when President Donald Trump paused his nomination of federal prosecutor Jay Clayton for national intelligence director in order to keep MAGA loyalist and Acting Intel Director Bill Pulte in the position longer despite his lack of experience. “I’ve never been asked to slow a nomination down before,” Thune noted. And according to former Rep. Jane Harman (D-California), the United States is facing a dangerous intel crisis that continues to worsen.
Harman, writing for the conservative website The Bulwark, warns, “The threat picture is getting demonstrably worse. And the U.S. government is doing the opposite of what would be required to keep up.”
During her decades in Congress, centrist Blue Dog Democrat Harman was known for her heavy focus on intel and national security. Harman, now 81, served on the House Intelligence Committee before chairing the Homeland Security Committee’s Intelligence Subcommittee. And the California Democrat, in her early July article for The Bulwark, lays out some reasons why U.S. intel is in trouble during Donald Trump’s second presidency.
“On June 14,” Harman explains, “the Congress let Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expire. It is the most productive foreign intelligence collection tool the United States has, but Congress refused to reach an agreement to extend it — and the president made its renewal hostage to an unrelated voter-ID bill…. Add to that the president’s installation of Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency with no national security background, as acting director of national intelligence, after pulling his nominee, Jay Clayton — who is generally viewed as qualified — to extract Senate confirmation of one of Trump’s personal lawyers for an unrelated post.”
Harman continues, “Pulte is now running the U.S. intelligence community without a hearing, without Senate confirmation, and without meaningful congressional oversight…. So where is Congress in all of this? AWOL.”
The Five Eyes intel alliance — which includes the U.S., the UK, Australia and New Zealand — recently issued a warning about the threat of major cyberattacks that, Harman notes, “could shut down a regional power grid, ground a national air-traffic control system, take a missile-defense radar offline, or corrupt the financial databases on which the American economy runs.”
Without Section 702, according to Harman, U.S. intelligence “will have a harder time tracking the type of catastrophic attack the Five Eyes warned about.”
“The Five Eyes have told us, in plain language, that the attack window is measured in months,” Harman writes. “Confirm a serious DNI. Reauthorize Section 702, clean. Restore the intelligence community’s access to the tools it needs to defend us. Stop being a bystander as our Constitution and our intelligence architecture are dismantled together.”