Spies in the Ointment: Which Way Will FBI, CIA Swing if Trump

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To the growing anxiety about the possibility of a triumphal Donald Trump return to office, we can add yet another worry line: How would the recalcitrant former president mobilize the intelligence agencies to punish enemies and reward friends?   

With pro-Trump Republicans increasingly embracing “any means necessary” to retake control of Washington, from extreme gerrymandering to new voter suppression laws — and poised to capture Congress in the mid-terms — apprehension is growing among veterans of  U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies that bad times may be ahead for them.

The former president won’t be shy this time around about installing sycophants atop key national security organs, starting with the Defense, Justice and Homeland Security departments, along with the CIA, NSA and most critically, the FBI, intelligence veterans queried by SpyTalk agree.  The lesson he’s likely learned from his first term is not to vacillate over putting overt authoritarian loyalists into senior billets there — and to ignore the howls from more timorous aides or careerists. With an expected Republican control of the House and Senate starting in 2023, according to current forecasts, the  confirmation of Trump nominees would be a cinch, if messy.

So imagine this Rocky Horror Show of characters atop the federal government’s national security machinery:

• John Eastman or Jeffrey Clark, both of whom played major roles in the “Stop the Steal” plot to block Joe Biden’s election, as attorney general

• Bernard Kerik, the disgraced for NYPD commissioner and Rudy Giuliani pal who served as quartermaster for the GoP “war room” to overturn the 2020 election result, as FBI director 

•  Kash Patel, the far-right Devin Nunes acolyte who worked tirelessly to bury investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia, and who Trump tried to make the CIA’s deputy director, as director of National Intelligence.

• Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the pliant Michael Flynn protégé who held the intel portfolio on the White House NSC and later Pentagon, as CIA director.

• Authoritarian-loving former Trump ambassador and acting DNI Richard Grenell back as secretary of defense or White House national security adviser. 

• Marjorie Taylor Green (Q-Ga.), as director of Homeland Security

• Qanon hero and confessed liar Michael Flynn as director of the eavesdropping National Security Agency. 

Scoff, many will. It’s a long way off. Such appointments are unimaginable. But ignoring Trump’s unrelenting attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory, including inspiring a mob to attack the Capitol and maybe even murder his own vice president, Mike Pence, is willful amnesia, say…