Past US Presidents Had Expert Advisor in All Fields, Trump Fired His

President Trump has made it clear he believes his personal connection with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia can help him secure a peace deal on Ukraine.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

By Luke Broadwater and Julian E. Barnes

Reporting from Washington

New York Times

For decades, American presidents have relied on the expertise of foreign policy professionals to help guide them through tricky negotiations in high-stakes conflicts around the globe.

President Trump has taken a different approach toward such experts: He’s fired them.

Now, as Mr. Trump tries to navigate perhaps the trickiest negotiation of his presidency — ending the Russian invasion of Ukraine — he is doing so after having stripped away much of the infrastructure designed to inform him about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and to keep the United States from being outmaneuvered or even duped.

“They’re flying blind without the expertise,” said Evelyn N. Farkas, executive director of the McCain Institute at Arizona State University. She said the kinds of people who had been fired “have seen all the intelligence relating to Vladimir Putin’s intentions. They have spies on the ground. They know all kinds of information that’s gained through technical means.”

Mr. Trump has gutted the National Security Council, the collection of foreign policy analysts who have helped guide U.S. foreign policy for decades, cutting the staff by more than half. He has purged experts from the intelligence agencies because of tangential connections to a nearly decade-old investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. 

Mr. Trump has made it clear he believes that his personal connection with Mr. Putin can help him get a peace deal on Ukraine, not being surrounded by a coterie of experts whom he sees as part of a “deep state” out to thwart his agenda.

“I think he wants to make a deal for me, you understand, as crazy as it sounds,” Mr. Trump told President Emmanuel Macron of France on Monday, in a moment caught on a hot mic.

As Russia continues to pound Ukraine with missiles and drones, Mr. Trump has chosen to rely mostly on himself and a handful of close allies, including friends from the business world. His actions are part of a broader pattern in which Mr. Trump has reshaped the administration to carry out his wishes, not to debate policy or offer him independent advice.

President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin poses for the camera. Both are wearing dark suits.

Mr. Trump has stripped away much of the infrastructure designed to inform him about Mr. Putin and to keep the United States from being outmaneuvered or even duped. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

And while Mr. Trump has characterized his recent flurry of diplomacy as extremely productive, neither a cease-fire nor a peace settlement looks any closer, at least publicly. 

A White House official argued that Mr. Trump was producing results through direct leader-to-leader negotiations, rather than embracing the approach of previous presidents who relied on hundreds of researchers and advisers. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Steve Witkoff, the real estate investor whom Mr. Trump tapped to be special envoy, had spent hours speaking to Mr. Putin.

Mr. Trump has held a deep distrust for the National Security Council since the earliest days of his first term, in 2017, because he believed that its members were undermining him.

The Trump administration’s gutting of the N.S.C. was recommended by Robert O’Brien, who led the council as national security adviser during Mr. Trump’s first term and argued that its mission needed to be revamped to better carry out the president’s policy objectives.

“When we cut the N.S.C. policy staff that had become needlessly bloated under Obama by half in Trump 1.0, the N.S.C. became more efficient, stopped leaking and achieved big policy wins for President Trump,” Mr. O’Brien said.

The “rightsizing” efforts in the second term “have yielded similar results,” he said, citing Mr. Trump’s summits in Alaska and Washington. 

The purge of expertise ramped up this week when Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, announced she was stripping 37 current and former officials of their security clearances. At least three of the current officials had worked on Russian influence issues, though none were directly responsible for the conclusions Ms. Gabbard has derided as flawed.

After Ms. Gabbard revoked the security clearances, she announced that she would all but shut down the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which was established by Congress to coordinate efforts across the intelligence agencies to monitor meddling by Russia and other countries.

During the last election, the center held briefings for the news media and state officials about a variety of foreign threats to the vote. But many Republicans took offense at suggestions their supporters were amplifying Russian propaganda, and the Trump administration has proceeded to dismantle most of the efforts to monitor and warn about foreign influence operations.

Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said expert intelligence professionals were being forced out and those that remained were “sent a clear message” on what they should say.

“Vladimir Putin is sneering with satisfaction as Donald Trump, aided and abetted by his director of national intelligence, guts the intelligence community in pursuit of his political vendettas,” he said. He added that the intelligence community’s ability to perform “objective collection and analysis” was being systematically dismantled, a process that he said would “inevitably make our country less safe and less free.” 

Senior Trump administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak publicly, disputed the contention that significant Russia expertise was being lost. They suggested that the focus on Moscow over other foreign policy challenges was misguided. The purge of officials was focused on people involved in analytic work that Ms. Gabbard believes was poor, the officials said.

Steve Witkoff in a crowd of officials and members of the media. He’s wearing a dark blue suit with a purple tie.

Mr. Trump has chosen to rely mostly on himself and a handful of close allies to deal with negotiations on Ukraine, including Steve Witkoff, a friend from the real estate world whom Mr. Trump tapped to be special envoy.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Joel Willett, a former C.I.A. officer and National Security Council staff member, was among the 37 people who lost their security clearances this week. That meant he will no longer be able to work on classified government contracts.

In a social media post, Laura Loomer, the right-wing conspiracy theorist, said she had flagged Mr. Willett for signing a letter calling for Mr. Trump to be impeached in 2019 and noted that he was considering a run for the Democratic nomination for the Kentucky Senate seat being vacated by Senator Mitch McConnell, the former Republican leader.

Mr. Willett said Ms. Loomer’s social media post contained falsehoods. But he said the bigger issue was that the purge of expertise on Russia and other national security matters would make it harder for the U.S. government to advise the president. 

Mr. Willett served on the National Security Council during the Obama administration, and has looked on with dismay as Marco Rubio, the acting national security adviser and secretary of state, has reduced the size of the organization.

“We live in an age of interconnectedness and rapidly evolving global threats,” Mr. Willett said. “I, for one, appreciate knowing that my government has deep experts, highly engaged, and that the president has access to those experts to help recommend policy. But I think what we’ve seen is an administration that truly doesn’t value expertise because the president feels that he knows best about everything.”

Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed concern that the administration was losing the very experts it needed at a precarious time.

“Russia remains one of our most dangerous adversaries — interfering in elections, unleashing relentless cyberattacks and carrying out a brutal war in Ukraine,” Mr. Warner said. “At the very moment we need our best experts on the front lines, this administration is purging them for political reasons, stripping their clearances and making Americans less safe.”

At the C.I.A. a senior Russia analyst, whose name was classified, was on the list Ms. Gabbard put out. 

At the National Intelligence Council, a body that coordinates intelligence analysis at Ms. Gabbard’s office, the acting chair and his deputy were removed from their positions earlier this year, after a dispute over the intelligence community’s assessment of ties between a drug cartel and the Venezuelan government.

This week, over the objections of senior officials, Ms. Gabbard ordered the N.S.A.’s senior data scientist, Vinh Nguyen, fired.

Former officials said the firing of Mr. Nguyen would have profound implications for the N.S.A.’s ability to keep pace with China’s technological advancements in encryption, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

But Mr. Nguyen was fired simply because he worked in a senior intelligence job tracking cyberoperations in 2016, when the assessment of Russia’s influence operations on the presidential election was drafted. Mr. Nguyen had little direct role in the assessment, former officials said.

Marc Polymeropoulos, a former C.I.A. officer who once led the agency’s clandestine operations in Europe and Russia, says beyond the exodus of people, the administration’s actions carry other problems. 

“What is worrisome to me is the chill in analytic objectivity,” Mr. Polymeropoulos said.

Mr. Polymeropoulos said Mr. Trump did not want to hear intelligence reports about Russia’s bad acts and Ms. Loomer was seizing any excuse to try and get national security officials who worked on Russia ousted from the government.

“The whole idea of the intelligence community speaking truth to power is lost when it becomes so wildly politicized,” he said. “There are going to be real repercussions to all of this.”