Why Trump Defrocked 50 National-Security Officials

On Monday, in one of his first acts as president, Donald Trump defrocked 50 high priests of U.S. national security. Now deprived of their clearances, if they want to know what’s happening in the world, they are reduced, like the rest of us, to reading the newspaper, and waiting for the president to blurt out nuclear codes over brunch at Mar-a-Lago. Once out of government, these former officials usually keep their clearances so they can return to government, or to civilian contracting work that involves government secrets, without friction, and so they can learn secrets and give advice informally. Removing these clearances is petty and personal. But it is Trump’s decision to make, and in a week of wacky and unexpected executive orders, it is one of the easier to defend.

The order singled out former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton for special dishonor. Trump accused Bolton of making money by publishing a memoir “for monetary gain” before the intelligence community could scrub his text of classified material. In a separate and remarkably spiteful action, Trump rescinded Secret Service protection for Bolton, former Trump State department official Brian Hook, and former Secretary of State and CIA director, Michael Pompeo. The FBI has accused Iran of trying to kill all three men. Trump often expresses his distaste for those who tried to give direction and discipline to his first term. It is nonetheless shocking to see him come to power and, as one of his first acts, ensure that if Iranian assassins wish to take out his former advisers, they’ll soon have a cleaner shot. Americans who work in national security assume that the government will protect them against vengeance from terrorists, no matter what. They now have reason to believe that this protection is a conditional perk, like a nice parking space, that can be taken away for talking smack on CNN.

Bolton bemoans the removal of his protection detail. Because he is not a dummy or a hypocrite, however, he has not questioned Trump’s ability to take away his clearance. A clearance, unlike the ability to live without fear of assassination, really is the president’s to grant or withdraw at will. The first conversation I ever had with Bolton (whom I profiled for this magazine in 2019) was 18 years ago, about the awesome power of the president to classify, declassify, and determine who can read classified material. This power is almost without limit, Bolton said. (The president cannot declassify certain information about nuclear weapons. Other than that, the power is his.) The president then was George W. Bush, and Bolton, fresh from service as Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, vigorously defended the expansiveness of his old boss’s powers.

[Read: John Bolton will hold this grudge]

Trump is miffed at Bolton for going on cable news to call Trump an idiot. The suggestion that Bolton’s memoir is, as Trump claims, “rife with sensitive information” is both hypocritical, given Trump’s own irresponsible information-security practices, and hard to believe, given the fact that in the four years since it was published, no one has suggested that any specific revelations have compromised national security. The real victim was Trump’s ego. Bolton did, however, publish before getting permission to do so, and anyone who has had a security clearance knows that dodging the review is a violation not just of the letter of one’s clearance conditions but also of the norms and instincts inculcated by the culture of national security. If Bolton expected to keep his clearance after that, then maybe he is a dummy after all.

The other 49 laicized national-security officials had signed an open letter (always a bad idea) that declared in 2020, right before the presidential election, that the now mostly confirmed story of Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” A computer technician in Delaware said that Hunter had dropped off the laptop for repair at his computer shop in 2019. Hunter never retrieved it. It contained images of him in states of undress, apparently doped up, and in acts of sexual congress. The contents were so sleazy that even if the laptop were a Russian hoax, which it was not, the hard drives should have been power-washed, submerged in isopropyl alcohol, and thrown into an active volcano purely as a sanitary measure. The former president’s son also appeared in emails to be seeking to profit off his father’s office. The evidence for corruption never amounted to enough for a charge to stick. But because no one could figure out any other reason a Ukrainian oil company would want Hunter on their board, the suggestion of influence peddling seemed plausible.

The intelligence professionals who signed the letter (which was drafted by former CIA Acting Director Michael Morrell) warned readers that they did not know whether the laptop’s contents were “genuine or not,” and said they had no “evidence of Russian involvement,” only suspicions. The signatories included former directors of the NSA, CIA, and the Office of National Intelligence, and many others with long and distinguished service to the United States. These figures provided intelligence and analysis to presidents, generals, congressmen, and others. The core of their job—the reason anyone listens to them—is devotion to an almost priestly ethos of analytical rigor. They speak only after marshaling all available resources to find all the facts that can be known; they deliver briefings based on everything they know—not just the facts they like—and without political tilt or opinion. The public never gets classified briefings. Those who have clearance to get them are meant to be confident that when the briefers speak, they speak with authority, clarity, and dispassion. The experience should be like listening to a great trial lawyer. You should wonder why anyone would bother disagreeing.

[Read: Why Hunter Biden’s laptop will never go away]

Why these titans of intelligence were willing to risk their hard-won credibility on the possibility that Hunter Biden might not be a slimeball is deeply mysterious. Even considering their caveats, somehow they signed and published their letter without due diligence and without the slightest consideration that Hunter was, in fact, prone to shady behavior. No doubt they felt that the laptop story was urgent, because it could affect the election in a few weeks. But their job was to seek facts and judge them with restraint. In this case, minimal fact-seeking would entail asking the Bidens if the sordid laptop was real, and restraint would entail not venturing wild accusations. The letter does not suggest that the authors asked the Bidens—although they certainly could have, since (according to a 2023 House Intelligence report) the letter originated with a call to them from Antony Blinken, then a Biden-campaign official and later secretary of state. Did the Biden team lie about the laptop, or claim Hunter had no memory of it? Or did the authors never even bother to inquire if it belonged to Hunter? In either case, the letter exhibited extremely shoddy analytic craftsmanship. Some signers of the letter had access to classified briefings, and could have asked their old colleagues in the intelligence community whether the laptop was a Russian hoax. In 2023, House investigators asked James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence and one of the drafters of the letter, why he did not ask for a briefing. “Because I didn’t want to be tainted by access to classified information,” he told them.

That won’t be a problem anymore. Because they were excessively generous to one candidate over the other, the letter signers left the impression that they were on the Democratic team—and, moreover, that they would lower their standards in order to influence an American election. Connoisseurs of irony will note that the CIA has, historically, had few scruples about influencing foreign elections, and will ask why they would hesitate to influence an American one. But to influence even a foreign election takes approval from the White House, and to influence a domestic one is flagrantly illegal. Like Bolton, these signers should have known that they were violating a deeply ingrained taboo. If they did not know that Trump, a man too petty and unrestrained to realize that vindictiveness is a sign of weakness, would punish them as soon as he could, then they too are not as intelligent as I thought.