Senator Ron Johnson, Donald Trump and Senator Richard Shelby.
REX/Shutterstock, Evan Vucci/AP/REX/Shutterstock, Alexander Zemlianichenko/Pool/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock
President Trump took aim at the intelligence community last week, tweeting that its officials should “go back to school” after their threat assessments contradicted his rosy vision of international relations. It wasn’t the first time the president has dismissed the findings of the U.S. intelligence apparatus — last year he sided with Vladimir Putin in refusing to accept that Russia meddled in the 2016 election — and Republicans are finally starting to grow frustrated with the president’s fidelity to Fox News and foreign autocrats over the FBI and CIA.
“There’s an awful lot — there’s so much tradition, and history and complexity to some of these foreign policy issues, you have to rely on people who have been working these issues for decades,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said on Fox News Sunday. “It’s just imperative that you actually listen to, for example, the CIA chief, the director of national intelligence. These people have the real knowledge and you have to listen to them.”
Johnson also criticized the president’s plan to pull U.S. troops out of Syria, a move based on his false belief that ISIS has been defeated, which National Intelligence Director Dan Coats contradicted last week.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) talks to Chris about ISIS and the situation in the Middle East pic.twitter.com/I21GkGn1g4
— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) February 3, 2019
Over on CNN, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) elaborated on why the president’s politicization of intelligence is so troubling. “These are professional people,” he said. “The president’s briefed every day on it. He’s not an intelligence officer. None of us are. But they, the people on the front lines, the people who analyze who gather and disseminate intelligence information to our higher-ups, we should respect them. Most of the time they’re pretty much on point.”
“It’s troubling to all of us but I think there’s got to be real good communication between the President and the Director of the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence … Most of the time, they’re pretty much on point,” @SenShelby says of Trump criticizing his intel…
