| | | Trump’s Unqualified Hires Are Making America More Vulnerable to AttackThe most serious jobs. The most unserious people.
Gabriel Schoenfeld
Jul 30, 2025
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard listens during a cabinet meeting at the White House on April 10, 2025. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
THE TALIBAN, NEARING THE FOURTH ANNIVERSARY of their bloody return to rule in Afghanistan following the U.S. withdrawal, regularly deny that they are giving sanctuary to terrorist networks. “We strongly reject the claim . . . suggesting that foreign groups are present in Afghanistan or that any threat emanates from its territory,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid tweeted in June. But such denials are lies. As analyst Bill Roggio noted in response, the Taliban has long made this claim “despite the fact that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups have used the country as a base of operations and continue to do so.” Roggio summarized the publicly available evidence of terrorist groups and leaders training in Afghanistan.
The terror menace to the United States from Afghanistan—and from many other ungoverned locales across the Middle East and Africa—remains a clear and present danger. 1 In the face of such a threat, America’s first line of defense is intelligence. It was the failure of American intelligence to “connect the dots” that led to the catastrophe of 9/11. How does American intelligence stack up today?
The good news is that the post-9/11 reforms of the U.S. intelligence community and its eighteen component agencies improved many of the weaknesses that allowed that attack to slip through. The bad news is that the current leadership of key agencies under the Trump administration paint an alarming picture of underqualification, poor judgment, bad character, and outright nuttiness.
At the top of the organizational chart is the director of national intelligence (DNI), a position occupied by Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who flipped from progressive left to Trumpist right. Gabbard, not to put too fine a point on it, is a kook, whose grasp of reality appears tenuous. She regularly repeats Russian propaganda talking points, or goes beyond them, including most recently the claim that findings of Russian interference in the 2016 election were a treasonous hoax engineered by Barack Obama and high-ranking officials in his administration. (This claim has been shredded by Cathy Young in The Bulwark.) It is plain that Gabbard’s attention has been far more focused on remaining in Donald Trump’s good graces than countering international terrorist threats.
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Over at the CIA the position of director is occupied by a former Texas congressman and prosecutor, John Ratcliffe, who previously served as DNI for the last eight months of the first Trump term. Ratcliffe has a reputation as a grownup in the room—and perhaps he is one, but when it comes to Trump 2.0 the term “grownup” is relative.
Ratcliffe was selected for high-ranking intelligence posts in no small measure because of his outspoken defense of Trump during his first impeachment. But Ratcliffe himself is ethically challenged, having baldly misrepresented his role as a prosecutor in a terrorism case. A 2015 press release on Ratcliffe’s House website stated: “When serving by special appointment in U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation, he convicted individuals who were funneling money to Hamas behind the front of a charitable organization.” Similarly, a 2016 post on his campaign website saluted his “special appointment as the prosecutor in U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation, one of the nation’s largest terrorism financing cases.”
ABC News, among other news organizations, looked into these claims:
ABC News could find no public court records that connect Ratcliffe to either of the two trials for the case. Former officials directly involved in the decade-long Holy Land Foundation investigation could not recall Ratcliffe having any role, and four former defense attorneys who served on the cases told ABC News on Monday they had no recollection of Ratcliffe being involved with any of the proceedings that resulted in the convictions of their clients.
Lately, Ratcliffe has been using his position to butter up the president he serves, releasing an internal agency analysis of the 2016 election that purportedly shows that Democratic appointees “manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals—all to get Trump.” But the analysis in question says nothing of the sort. Ratcliffe, a man of low integrity, has not been issuing intelligence; he has been peddling propaganda.
Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, respectively the deputy director and director of the FBI, standing awkwardly together at Bongino’s swearing in. (FBI.gov)
ALONG WITH THE CIA, the FBI remains the premier counterterrorism organization in the U.S. government. But it is headed by two former podcaster clowns, Kash Patel (director) and Dan Bongino (deputy director). “They get a kick out of playing dress-up and acting tough,” a veteran FBI agent ousted by them told the Atlantic. “But they actually have no idea what they’re doing.”
Patel, a conspiracy theorist, is the author of a children’s book, The Plot Against the King. It tells the story of a wizard named “Kash” who helps the noble hero “King Donald” foil characters like “Hillary Queenton” and “Comma-la-la-la.”
Bongino has also been a prolific purveyor of conspiracy theories, including most notably conspiracies involving the late child predator Jeffrey Epstein. Patel and Bongino have, together with Attorney General Pam Bondi, devoted thousands of FBI-agent man-hours to scouring the voluminous files generated by the Epstein case reportedly looking for references to Trump and other notables. At the same time, a large fraction of FBI agents has been diverted from the agency’s core crime- and terror-fighting mission to assist ICE in its immigration roundups as part of Trump’s mass deportation initiative. There is scant evidence that under Patel and Bongino terrorism is getting the FBI attention it urgently requires.
The Department of Homeland Security, another agency with a significant counterterrorism role, is run by Kristi Noem, the former governor of South Dakota. Noem brings no relevant counterterrorism experience to the office. Indeed, her experience in foreign affairs is scant, and includes the false claim—which later had to be retracted—that she met with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un.
Noem has focused DHS almost entirely on mass deportation of immigrants. As part of that effort, she has traveled to El Salvador to tour, flashing a $50,000 Rolex, the notorious CECOT prison where Venezuelans deported from the United States. were being incarcerated and tortured. Noem is evidently not particularly well-versed in the Constitution: In congressional testimony, she defined habeas corpusas “a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.” Is there any way to be more wrong? Whatever one makes of Kristi Noem and her antics, counterterrorism does not appear to be on her agenda.
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Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism, in the White House on June 26, 2025. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
OVER AT THE WHITE HOUSE, there is a slot called senior director for counterterrorism, which is occupied by Sebastian Gorka. You might remember him from the first Trump term, but let me refresh your memory. Gorka is an immigrant from Hungary with links to the Hungarian far right. According to the organization Human Rights First,
Credible investigations from multiple media outlets continue to suggest that during and after his career as a Hungarian policy adviser and politician, Sebastian Gorka . . . maintained ties to, and voiced opinions supportive of, extreme-right and antisemitic Hungarian groups and political parties. Additionally, during this time, Gorka wrote opinion pieces for news outlets widely known for their antisemitic views.
Human Rights First goes on to cite chapter and verse:
In 2007, Gorka co-founded a short-lived Hungarian political party, the New Democratic Coalition (UDK), with two former senior-ranking members of Jobbik, a political party the Anti-Defamation League has described as “openly anti-Semitic” and the U.S. State Department has labeled “extreme ethnic nationalist.”
Perhaps even worse, if from another direction entirely, is the fact that prior to assuming his White House counterterrorism role, Gorka was working as a scammer hawking fish oil pills. “Sebastian Gorka here for Relief Factor,” he said in a television advertisement. “First of all, let me say I have never before endorsed a pain reliever, but when Pete and Seth Talbott, the father-and-son owners of Relief Factor, asked me to endorse their 100 percent drug-free product, I absolutely couldn’t say no.”
It is this misfit who is Donald Trump’s closest counterterrorism adviser.
The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 took the U.S. government completely by surprise. Despite significant investments and improvements in security over the past twenty years, the United States is still vulnerable. Constant vigilance by the U.S. intelligence community is the thing that offers our best chance at keeping at bay a repetition of a 9/11-scale attack. But the key counterterrorism agencies of the U.S government are not led by America’s best. Indeed, they are led by some of our worst. If catastrophe strikes again, the address of responsibility will not be hard to find. |
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