The president’s decision to revoke the former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance turned his feud with his intelligence agencies into an all-out war, uniting former officials against him

For two years, Donald Trump has attacked the US intelligence community as a whole and individually on topics as various as the Iraq war, Hillary Clinton, Michael Flynn, the so-called Steele dossier and, most of all, the Russia investigation.



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Occasionally, former members of the national security state have hit back on social media. Former CIA director John Brennan has called Trump “imbecilic” and “treasonous” and memorably taunted: “Your kakistocracy is collapsing.”

But Trump’s decision on Wednesday to revoke Brennan’s security clearance turned the simmering feud into an all-out war, drawing in three generations of the country’s top intelligence officials, over the meaning of public service and the trajectory of the public good.

On one side of the fight is a president who believes in the existence of a deep state that secretly controls American life and is not-so-secretly out to get him, a supposed cabal he now threatens to expunge, person by person.

On the other side is an unprecedented collection of former top intelligence and national security officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations who have (mostly) stopped just short of saying out loud what many of them clearly believe: the sitting president of the United States is a threat to national security.

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“As so often with Trump, there aren’t historical precedents” for the clash now playing out, said Tim Weiner, whose history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, won a National Book Award.

Weiner pointed to an open letter published on Thursday in which 12 former intelligence directors and deputy directors called the revocation of Brennan’s clearance a politically motivated “attempt to stifle free speech”. By the weekend, three additional directors had signed on. A fourth, former CIA director James Woolsey, issued a statement of his own.

“People like Bill Webster – who is 95 years old and ran the FBI under Carter and Reagan and the CIA under Reagan and Bush – don’t criticize sitting presidents,” said Weiner. “People have to understand this. This is not a bunch of old spooks here.”

If you think for a moment that your McCarthy-era tactics will suppress the voices of criticism, you are sadly mistaken Adm William H McRaven

In a separate open letter on Thursday, William H McRaven, the retired navy admiral who oversaw the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, requested in solidarity with Brennan that Trump revoke his security clearance as well.

“If you think for a moment that your McCarthy-era tactics will suppress the voices of criticism, you are sadly mistaken,” McRaven wrote. “The criticism will continue until you become the leader we prayed you would be.”

Trump, of course, hit back, threatening to continue to withdraw security clearances, perhaps next from justice department official Bruce Ohr, who has caught the president’s ire because his wife was once employed by a firm that partially paid for the dossier.

“Bruce Ohr is a disgrace,” Trump told reporters on Friday. “I suspect I’ll be taking it away very quickly.”

It was lukewarm rhetoric compared with what Trump has applied in the past to the intelligence community. After the public release of the dossier, which was written by the former MI6 agent Christopher Steele and described a years-long Russian influence campaign targeting Trump, the president-elect blamed “intelligence agencies” and compared the United States to “Nazi Germany”.

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to "leak" into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany?

Trump maintains a list of individuals whose security clearance is supposedly under review. The White House has publicly announced that the list includes James Clapper, director of national intelligence under Barack Obama and director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under George HW Bush and Bill Clinton; James Comey, former FBI director; Michael Hayden, director of the CIA and National Security Agency under George W Bush; Sally Yates, former deputy attorney general; Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI; Peter Strzok, former FBI agent; and Lisa Page, former FBI lawyer.

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Trump’s aim is to scare his critics into silence, Brennan wrote in an editorial on Thursday: “Mr Trump clearly has become more desperate to protect himself and those close to him, which is why he made the politically motivated decision to revoke my security clearance in an attempt to scare into silence others who might dare to challenge him.”

But “the national security state has nothing to fear from Donald Trump except his conduct as commander-in-chief,” Weiner said.

“John Brennan clearly sees him [Trump] as a threat to national security,” Weiner said. “So do I. It is remarkable that we have to say that about a president of the United States. Trump, on the other hand, fears everything and everyone connected to the Russia investigation.

“The president of the United States is terrified.”