With each move by Trump, the U.S. intelligence community has provided a counter-narrative, putting reports, statements, and congressional testimony into the public record that unequivocally lay out Russia’s role. But Trump’s appointment of a new acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell, an outspoken loyalist who now heads the same office that published the 2017 report on Russian meddling, raises a question: Will Trump finally seek to muzzle his spies as he pushes to control the narrative in his reelection campaign?

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Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, has not yet had the chance to write his legacy in the job. But the circumstances surrounding his appointment have intelligence veterans worried that Trump wants a partisan in the job to do his bidding. It was Trump’s ongoing fixation on the Russia narrative, in fact, that got Grenell’s predecessor removed. Trump reportedly became incensed with Joseph Maguire after an intelligence official said, in a classified briefing to Congress, that Russia is again interfering in the presidential election and again has a preference for Trump.

Joshua Geltzer, who was a senior national-security official in the Obama administration, told me that Grenell’s appointment fits with a purge in the executive branch, in which Trump, emboldened by his impeachment acquittal, is determined to install more loyalists. He noted that the U.S. intelligence community has been saying publicly for three years that Russia’s interference efforts are ongoing. “So it’s nothing new,” he said. “What’s new is, Trump believes that he’s at the point where he can strangle the executive branch to keep it from saying things he doesn’t like.”

What’s especially notable about Maguire’s ouster is what reportedly made Trump so upset: the fact that the briefing in question was attended by Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, whom Trump accuses repeatedly of press leaks. (Schiff has denied this.) According to The Washington Post, Trump “believed that the information would be helpful to Democrats if it were released publicly.” The same motivation played a role in Trump’s dismissal of two key witnesses from the impeachment trial whose testimony about his conduct in withholding aid to Ukraine cut against his narrative: Gordon Sondland, who was U.S. ambassador to the European Union, and Alexander Vindman, a military officer assigned to the White House. These people not only said things that Trump didn’t want to hear. They said things that Trump didn’t want the public to hear.

It’s clear that controlling the narrative will be central to Trump’s reelection campaign. The Ukraine scandal centered on his efforts to get its president to announce an investigation into discredited allegations about Joe Biden, then the Democratic front-runner, in hopes of legitimizing the claims about Biden and weakening his candidacy. As my colleague McKay Coppins has reported, Trump’s campaign will rely on a billion-dollar effort to bombard the electorate with not just standard political ads but disinformation. And removing or at least weakening the intelligence community’s resistance by installing a partisan director would potentially help Trump in his efforts to rewrite the facts around Russia’s meddling. The DNI is the principal intelligence adviser to the president and serves as the intelligence community’s main liaison to the commander in chief. In addition to his influence over the information the president receives, though, the DNI can also influence what information is shared and collected elsewhere within the government—and, often, what reaches Congress and the public.