The Trump factor is starting to take effect in our intelligence communities.
Reports broke recently that the Inspectors General of the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will be resigning their posts.
I suspect these are the first of many resignations we are going to see.
Fear
When people resign like this, it tends to make me think they have something to hide.
The fact that the people who are responsible for oversight are panicking and resigning, well, that makes me question if they were doing their jobs.
To that point, what would an Inspector General have to be worried about unless they were not calling out blatant violations of protocol that took place on their watch?
The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) reported, “One of the departing inspectors general, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Thomas Monheim, first took his watchdog role after Trump fired his predecessor Michael Atkinson in the spring of 2020.
“Atkinson had transmitted a whistleblower complaint to Congress that sparked Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.
“Monheim and his counterpart at the CIA, Robin Ashton, were both nominated by Biden and confirmed by the Senate in 2021 (Monheim began serving as acting inspector general the year before, during the first Trump administration).”
Trump has appointed John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard to head these two agencies, and I would bet just about anything part of the mandate for them was to seek out rogue actors and have them removed.
The same mandate will surely be given to Trump’s new FBI Director.
To put it simply… it’s time to clean house.
