Biden will address the intelligence community for the first time as president

Washington (CNN) – Six months into Joe Biden’s presidency, the intelligence community still cannot escape politics.

Biden will make his first formal remarks to the staff of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Tuesday, a speech that comes at a time of quiet but profound change for a workforce that was hit by the fierce political winds of the Trump era.

After four years of bitter criticism from former President Donald Trump, who accused the intelligence community of “Nazi” practices and said top leaders should “go back to school,” the intelligence community has quietly tried to return to the regular work under a decidedly more conventional president.

The Biden administration has vowed to keep politics out of US intelligence and has installed high-level leaders who consider themselves far less overtly partisan than either of Trump’s last two national intelligence directors. On Tuesday, the president “will underscore the importance of intelligence gathering and analysis that is free from interference or political pressure,” a senior administration official told CNN.

However, the intelligence community has remained in the national spotlight as it investigates one of the most politically charged mysteries of the moment: the origins of the covid-19 pandemic. And in the wake of the January 6 riots in the US Capitol, the intelligence community has come under increasing pressure to track down and respond to the threat posed by domestic terrorists, perhaps the most politically challenging task possible. To imagine.

The intelligence community also remains a political target on the right, with Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson accusing the National Security Agency (NSA) of “spying” on him without evidence. An NSA review of his interceptions found no evidence that Carlson’s communications were intercepted by the agency, CNN reported Saturday. According to a source familiar with the matter, Carlson’s name was picked up in third-party communications and his identity was unmasked, meaning that others mentioned him in their communications and US officials sought to understand which American citizen was being talked about.

David Priess, a former CIA official and intelligence historian and author of “The President’s Book of Secrets“He said there is always tension between the theoretically apolitical mission of the intelligence community and the political headwinds of the time. Those tensions may have been higher during the Trump administration, he said, but the intelligence community never escapes them because of full.

“There will always be the problem that intelligence operates in a much broader political and political environment, and yet its mission is to be apolitical,” Priess said. “I don’t think anything is unique now. There have always been internal political challenges for the intelligence community.”

Focus on China

Since taking office, top intelligence leaders have tried to stay focused on reorienting the intelligence community toward the threat of an emerging China.

“All of us in the United States are in a really important time of transition in the world,” he told NPR CIA Director Bill Burns. “We are no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical bloc, especially with the rise of China. And as you well know, there is a revolution in technology, which is transforming the way we live, work, compete and fight.

“And so the CIA, like everyone else in the US government, has to take that into account.”

However, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki appeared to allude to the tensions of the Trump era on Monday. Biden during his visit “will appreciate [a la comunidad de inteligencia] for his work during what has undoubtedly been a challenging time for members of the intelligence community in recent years, “he told reporters.

“He is someone who believes in the role of the intelligence community of public officials,” he added. “He believes that they are the backbone of our government and he will certainly make that clear, but you know that I think that all of you can make the inherent contrast, I don’t think it will be a central part of his message tomorrow.”

Biden and the current Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Avril Haines, made clear in the election campaign and during the Senate confirmation process that the new administration would seek to repair the damaged relationship between the White House and the intelligence community, in particularly keeping politics out of the equation. Haines swore during his confirmation hearing that “the DNI must never shy away from speaking the truth to power, even especially when doing so may be inconvenient or difficult.”

That approach represents a sea change from the way intelligence was handled under Trump, who was outraged or outright denying information that contradicted or undermined his views on a given issue, sometimes publicly berating the intelligence community when his evaluations were different from his.

Biden Bass Pitch Shift

The change in tone from the White House is perhaps the most significant change in Biden’s six months in office, Priess said, particularly on the issue of Russian disinformation, an issue officials have learned to avoid raising with Trump.

“Because the vast majority of people in the intelligence community do not work on Russian electoral interference issues, most of the work of people in the intelligence community was not directly affected by that and they could continue to report to the undersecretary of State about Africa without necessarily feeling politicized by the fact that the president did not want to believe anything in that area about Russia, “Priess said.

But that dynamic created “a persistent stress on the system,” Priess said, “even a feeling among the general workforce that, ‘Uh-oh, we pride ourselves on being apolitical … and yet we’re being sucked into that collectively, if not personally. ‘

“That feeling seems to have disappeared,” he said.

Still, the intelligence community will have to navigate a series of thorny issues under Biden.

Republicans have increasingly taken the position that the COVID-19 pandemic likely originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, even as intelligence leaders have publicly said they have not reached firm conclusions about how the virus emerged.

And online disinformation, including the QAnon conspiracy theory, has continued to intersect with national policy on free speech on major social media platforms. As the intelligence community under Biden continues to grapple with how it should respond to online disinformation and domestic terrorism, either as separate issues or when they appear connected, some Republican politicians have characterized those efforts as an anti-conservative bias.

Intelligence work “in this area has really been in the third lane for the intelligence community,” Haines said in a recent interview with Yahoo News. “It can be perceived as we have a search [de inteligencia] purely domestic “.

“I think the challenge is to clearly articulate, both to the American people and to others, ‘This is what we are doing and this is what we are not doing, and this is what we think makes sense, and this is why.’ “, He said.

CNN’s Alex Marquardt and Natasha Bertrand contributed reporting.