A Turning Point for the Intelligence Community
August 16, 2025
By: Joshua Yaphe
Can the intelligence community come to grips with the myths that it has created about itself?
The Trump administration seeks to hold the US intelligence community accountable for its part in a coordinated political effort to mislead Congress and the American public about President Trump’s relationship with Russia. Even if the full range of evidence remains largely classified, the prosecutions never go beyond grand jury indictments, and the American people eventually tire of the story, the ramifications will nonetheless be profound.
It is the type of thing that happens once in a generation, like the 9/11 Commission, in which senior intelligence officials (former and possibly even current) will be held to account in full public view. It will send a signal that, even within the intelligence community, leadership must be about taking personal responsibility, and institutions cannot simply deflect criticism by hiding behind bureaucratic organizational reform.
Coordination and Collusion
There is undoubtedly an enormous amount of documents yet to be viewed by the public, from draft versions of assessments in which different analysts hash out differences of opinion in their edits to the reviews by higher-level managers seeking to translate the instructions of agency heads. Most of the correspondence surrounding the issue will probably never be declassified, due to the understandable need to protect sources and methods. However, a clear pattern is emerging from the documents released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard this summer, and to date, there is no evidence that the documents are inauthentic or inaccurate.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/a-turning-point-for-the-intelligence-community
