OPINION:
President Trump’s relationship with the U.S. intelligence community has never been comfortable, but it is hardly his fault.
Mr. Trump has several reasons for his skepticism, and they are directly traceable to the intelligence community’s actions against him.
The two best examples: its formal assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election and the October 2020 letter signed by 51 current and former intelligence officials, which claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The intelligence community’s leaders at the time — CIA Director John O. Brennan, FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper — helped push the Russia hoax, based on the now disproved Steele dossier, into the 2017 assessment.
At that point, they knew or should have known of the dossier’s falsity. The 51 officials who signed the letter also should have known.
So it was no surprise that the president appointed Bill Pulte, who had served as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency for a little over a year, as acting director of national intelligence to succeed Tulsi Gabbard — an action that could have been a script rejected by Mel Brooks.
After bipartisan opposition to Mr. Pulte, the president nominated former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton to succeed Ms. Gabbard, reportedly with instructions to diminish the DNI’s authority.
All three selections — Ms. Gabbard, Mr. Pulte and Mr. Clayton — are of outsiders to the intelligence community, which seems to have been Mr. Trump’s intent in appointing them.
None of them has experience or expertise in dealing with the constant plots, counterplots and counter-counterplots that exist both within and outside our intelligence agencies and those of other governments. Those plots are essential parts of intelligence activity.
Ms. Gabbard was kept out of most of Mr. Trump’s major decisions. She was kept out of the decision process on the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. After her bizarre statement on Iran, she was kept out of that decision process as well.
On March 26, 2025, Ms. Gabbard testified on the intelligence community’s 2025 Annual Threat Assessment to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and said, “The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ali Khamenei] has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
That was obviously not Mr. Trump’s view. The U.S. attacked Iran’s nuclear weapons sites in June 2025.
Every president needs an intelligence community that delivers its best approximation of the truth at every opportunity. Mr. Trump clearly did not expect that from Ms. Gabbard, and he may not get it from Mr. Clayton if Mr. Clayton is confirmed.
He can rely on John Ratcliffe to do the job at the CIA, but Mr. Trump should go out of his way to ensure that the intelligence community has other trusted leaders.
It may be that Mr. Trump’s distrust of the intelligence community — and the flap over the appointment of Mr. Pulte — was the basis for Congress’ allowing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to expire.
Several members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have told me over the years that this provision is essential to our ability to interfere with terrorist attacks and espionage. Congress let it expire, and Mr. Trump let that failure pass without comment.
So what is the answer? Nominate and promote some of the reliable intelligence professionals we have to lead the DNI. I know a few of them, and they are as dedicated to the defense of this nation as too few are these days.
The president’s distrust of the intelligence community may not be repairable. Every president should have a skeptic’s view of the intelligence community’s findings. If Mr. Trump’s distrust can be turned into healthy skepticism, then he and the nation will do much better in the final years of his presidency.
• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.
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