Sen. Ron Wyden criticized Donald Trump's team for "trying to discredit the entire intelligence community." | AP Photo How Democrats became CIA defenders

President-elect Donald Trump’s continued dismissal of intelligence agencies and their conclusions about Russian hacking has put Democrats in an unaccustomed role: defenders of the CIA.

It’s a shift that may signal a new congressional alignment once Trump moves into the White House in January: Democrats, who have spent years criticizing the spy agency’s role in imprisoning and interrogating terrorist suspects during the George W. Bush administration, are now taking the CIA’s side against an incoming president who refuses to take regular intelligence briefings. And they’re getting backup from some top Republican lawmakers, who are joining their calls for a congressional investigation into the CIA’s reported conclusion that Russian hackers deliberately tried to sway the presidential election to Trump.


For both the CIA and many Democrats in Congress, the new alliance is a turnaround from years — even decades — of bad blood.

“When you have someone like Trump who is so contemptuous of the intelligence community … [who] is so contemptuous of the whole enterprise, I think you will have Democrats coming to the defense of the CIA,” said Greg Thielmann, a former Senate Intelligence Committee aide. “Whereas before the Democrats were kind of automatically — on a lot of issues — in the role of critic of the intelligence community.”

The sparring between the CIA and the Democrats became especially ugly during the past decade as the Senate Intelligence Committee pursued an investigation into the clandestine agency’s Bush-era use of torture, leading to the release of a 2014 report concluding that the agency had repeatedly lied to Congress, the White House and the public. CIA officials also acknowledged that their employees had snooped on computers used by committee staff members — an admission that came only after the agency accused the committee staff of accessing documents not cleared for release.

That feud was “ultimately poisonous,” said Patrick Eddington, a former CIA analyst who later worked on as a Hill staffer on intelligence policy.

But over the weekend, even the CIA’s most vocal Democratic critics on Capitol Hill sprang to the intelligence community’s defense after Trump and his transition team disparaged news reports about the agency’s secret assessment on Russian election hacking.

“. @realDonaldTrump 's transition team is now trying to discredit the entire intelligence community,” tweeted Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), perhaps the CIA’s most persistent foil on the Intelligence panel.

“How can you serve as commander-in-chief while running a political campaign against your own intelligence officials?” added Wyden, who has previously blasted the CIA for its “culture of misinformation.”

The White House also defended the CIA’s apparent conclusions.

"You didn't need a security clearance to figure out who benefited from Russia's malicious cyber activity,” press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday, describing the government’s intelligence officers as “patriots.”

The quick support for the CIA may herald a new era in the agency’s relationship with Democrats, as Congress hurtles toward launching an election hacking probe that will have the two working side-by-side.

“There are some things that need to be repaired on both sides,” said Mieke Eoyang, a former House Intelligence Committee staffer who’s now the vice president of the National Security Program at the center-left think tank Third Way.

“The old Russia hands who have been ignored for the last 15 years — who have probably been screaming loudly inside their [secure facilities] — it feels nice to be paid attention to,” she added. “Now they’re getting their day in the sun.”

Democrats have wrangled with the CIA off-and-on for most of the agency’s existence.

Even Harry Truman, the Democratic president who created the covert agency in 1947, warned 16 years later of the CIA’s creeping power. He insisted that the agency had been founded simply to collect raw intelligence reports from across the sprawling government.

“For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment,” Truman wrote in a 1963 Washington Post op-ed. “It has become an operational and at times a policymaking arm of the government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.”

A dozen years later, Senate Democrats went hard after the CIA in the wake of the Watergate scandal, establishing a select congressional committee to investigate its constitutionally questionable activities. The so-called Church Committee, led by former Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), issued damning findings that drove Congress to pass legislation heightening its checks on the government snooping.

The Democrats once again hit a nadir in their CIA relationship over a fractious past decade. Starting in the mid-2000s, the Senate Intelligence Committee started looking into reports that the agency was destroying video recordings of its interrogations of terrorist suspects. Staff members eventually found that the interrogators had used “enhanced” techniques such as waterboarding and extreme sleep deprivation. The report spurring the committee to launch a full investigation into potential CIA uses of torture.

The years-long battle over the committee’s report was marked by Democratic allegations that the agency was dragging its feet, and perhaps even intentionally undermining the congressional probe. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and then-Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) both called for CIA Director John Brennan to resign over the agency’s spying on committee staffers.

“I think that the level of trust between the committee and the director has hit a new low,” Heinrich told reporters at the time.

“A very dark day in U.S. intelligence,” said Theilmann, who worked on the Senate Intelligence panel from 2005 to 2009.

Eddington, the former CIA analyst and Hill staffer, called it “clearly the most contentious thing between the Congress and CIA … since the Church Committee.”

In 2014, the committee released a 525-page summary of the 6,770-page report, which current and former top CIA officials criticised as slanted and potentially damaging to the agency’s ability to do its job.

Despite all the hostility, former intelligence specialists on and off Capitol Hill didn’t express surprise that Democrats are now quick to defend the agency against attacks from Trump and his allies.

“There’s irony in it, of course,” Thielmann said, but not necessarily hypocrisy.

Among other benefits, widespread trust in the CIA would help Democrats gather support for a congressional probe into the election hacks that may have helped tilt the election against Hillary Clinton. They also want to build pressure on Trump to retaliate against Russia for its alleged digital meddling in the election.

Trump has shown little interest in going after Moscow over its cyber mischief, repeatedly disavowing the Obama administration’s formal accusation in October that Russia had deployed hackers to “interfere” with the U.S. election.

The rejection has led the president-elect’s critics to fear that Russian hackers will have free rein under the Trump administration.

The White House revealed on Friday that it had directed the intelligence community to review all election-related hacking going back to 2008 and issue a report on its findings before President Barack Obama leaves office.The report could also generate more public information that Trump’s critics could use to hound him over any reluctance to strike back at Kremlin-directed hacking.

Beyond any political expediency in upholding the CIA’s integrity, intelligence experts say Trump has simply forced Democrats to become champions of the intelligence wing.

Even the Intelligence Committee’s staunchest CIA critics believe in the overall value of an intelligence-gathering apparatus that is removed from politics, people who have worked on both the House and Senate intelligence committees told POLITICO.

“This extreme hostility toward the intelligence community induces [Democrats] to rally around and protect at least the overall functions that the intelligence community is pursuing,” Thielmann said.