Former CIA chief Michael Hayden wrote that President Donald Trump's attacks against the intelligence community were damaging. | AP Photo Ex-CIA chief: I don’t envy Mike Pompeo

The relationship between President Donald Trump and the intelligence community he oversees is historically weak, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden wrote in a New York Times op-ed published Thursday morning, “marred by assertions that the administration has tried to both politicize and marginalize intelligence gathering.”

Hayden, a top intelligence official under the administration of former President George W. Bush, has been one of Trump’s most outspoken Republican critics dating back to his candidacy last year. He has previously called the president “incompetent” and, as noted in his Thursday op-ed, Hayden signed a friend-of-the-court brief that criticized Trump’s travel ban as making America less safe.


Noting Trump’s willingness to throw his intelligence community under the bus and blame it for leaks that have already proven damaging to his administration, Hayden wrote that “I can’t remember another White House so quick to dismiss those agencies’ judgments or so willing to discredit them as dishonest or incompetent.”

Hayden pointed to Trump’s frequent attacks against the intelligence community, which have frequently taken the form of posts to his Twitter account, as being especially damaging to the relationship between the two. At various points, Trump has likened behavior he suspected his own intelligence community of demonstrating to that of Russians and Nazis.

Trump has also, Hayden said, written the word “intelligence” into “accusatory quotation marks, a kind of dog whistle that equates intelligence assessments with news reporting that the president condemns as ‘fake.’”

Beyond dismissing it and blaming it for his administration’s troubles with leaks, Trump has also at times sought to politicize an intelligence community that takes great pains to remain apolitical, Hayden said.

As an example, Hayden pointed to Trump’s travel ban, which he suggested was instituted without the input of CIA Director Mike Pompeo or anyone else within the intelligence community. But “even more troubling,” Hayden said, are reports that the White House ordered the intelligence community to work backwards from the order and create a justification for it, something the former intelligence official labeled “a corruption of a healthy process.”

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“I don’t envy Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Coats. They have to run complex enterprises and produce quality intelligence even as they push back against an administration that has questioned their officers’ integrity, has been casual in its use of intelligence and is not above calling on intelligence professionals to provide political cover,” Hayden wrote, referring to Director of National Intelligence-designate Dan Coats. “They must push back hard, because whether Mr. Trump appreciates it or not, he, and the country, need an independent intelligence enterprise, not a compliant one.”