When Joseph Maguire had the audacity to brief Congress about Russia’s efforts to help Donald Trump to reelection, he was promptly sacked as acting director of national intelligence. Like many ousted administration officials before him, Maguire apparently didn’t fully grasp that whatever the job description typically came with his role, his actual duty was to protect the president and his fragile ego above all else.

Maguire’s replacement, Trump loyalist Richard Grenell, evidently understands the contours of his position better. According to the New York Times, Grenell’s office on Tuesday backtracked on the intelligence community’s previous assessment that the Kremlin was working to support Trump, telling lawmakers that Moscow is actually not “directly aiding any candidate’s re-election or any other candidates’ election” and has given no indication it intends to do so. That conclusion runs counter to previous warnings by the intelligence community, but has been the president’s conviction since 2016, when Russia indeed sought to sow chaos and mistrust by working to get Trump elected. Trump has repeatedly denied needing any outside help to win the White House, and has been infuriated by anyone in his orbit suggesting otherwise, as Maguire found out.

Grenell, Trump’s handpicked acting DNI replacement, appears more sensitive to his boss’s concerns. In addition to overseeing his office’s reversal, he didn’t even show up to Tuesday’s briefing with House lawmakers, “citing apprehension about his preparedness to address sensitive subjects that tend to upset the president,” sources familiar with the matter told the Washington Post. (In a statement to the Hive, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence noted that “ODNI did not communicate to Congress at any point that ADNI Grenell would participate in election security briefings scheduled for Mar. 10. FBI and DHS are the lead in charge of securing our elections, and the IC is participating in today’s briefings in support of that mission. The IC is focused on detecting and countering foreign election-related threats. ODNI will be represented at the briefings by NCSC Director Bill Evanina.)

By protecting Trump’s precious feelings, of course, the administration is failing to protect America’s elections. Before his own unceremonious ouster, former director of national intelligence Dan Coats cautioned that the “warning lights are blinking red again”—that Russia was continuing the meddling campaign from 2016 into the 2018 midterms and the 2020 election. But Trump’s enablers repeatedly undermined efforts to do anything about it, for fear of crossing the president. Election security “wasn’t a great subject and should be kept below [Trump’s] level,” a senior administration official recalled then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney telling ex-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen ahead of the 2018 election. “The lack of presidential guidance to address this as a national problem impedes the ability” to carry out a more effective initiative, a former U.S. intelligence official said ahead of those elections.

For Democrats, Tuesday’s briefing was yet another step toward insulating Trump at the expense of the integrity of America’s elections. “From what I read in 2017 and was briefed on, Democratic Representative Mike Quigley told the Times, nothing has changed on what the Russians are doing.”

This article has been updated.

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