____________________________________________ 5 IICC Perspectives The fourth stage, which began in 2019, was the politicization of the intelligence community. In July 2019, Dan Coats, the moderate Republican Director of National Intelligence (DNI) who had tried to keep the community free of politics, resigned. Trump made every effort to replace him with his loyalist, John Ratcliffe, who was considered "too political" even by Republican members of Congress. After nearly a year, Ratcliffe was appointed to the position, and his tenure, which lasted six months, was marked by a spike political involvement, including the publication of documents assessed as falsified that aided Trump during his election campaign. Still, though the damage caused by to the intelligence community during by Trump’s first term in office was profound—as its primary target was to gain and maintain public support rather than to protect and promote the essential security interests of the nation—it largely involved irresponsible rhetoric. Not so in the second term. Trump entered the White House in January 2021 with control over Congress and the Supreme Court, facing a weak opposition and armed with a clear action plan – "Project 2025" from the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation. This nearly thousand-page document dedicated a chapter to the intelligence community. Beyond detailing the injustices the community allegedly committed against Trump in his first term, it also included operational components: that the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) would be loyal to the president and directly subordinate to him instead of retaining their current status as a cabinet member; that a Deputy DNI be appointed without external approval processes; that the DNI’s powers be expanded; that experienced CIA officers be replaced with new personnel who would be more loyal to the president’s agenda; and that a database be created to filter out candidates who do not pass a loyalty test. The first weeks of the new administration proved it was acting according to the plan. Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman from Hawaii with no experience in intelligence work, was appointed as DNI. Due to her support for the Assad regime in Syria and her embrace of conspiracy theories justifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, suspicions arose that she was a Russian asset. John Ratcliffe was appointed as CIA director. At the end of his brief tenure as DNI, the intelligence community’s inspector general determined that he had altered intelligence assessments on China and Russian interference in the 2016 elections for political reasons. The new FBI director was Kash Patel, who had called for dismantling the civil service protections and had promoted, even in children’s books he authored, conspiracy theories portraying the intelligence community, and the FBI in particular, as part of the so-called "deep state." According to experts, his appointment signaled a significant
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