It really does not matter who is charge anymore because the Intelligence Reform Act was proposed by liars (the 9/11 Commission), drafted by fools (U.S. congressional staffers), passed by men and women who never read the bill (Congress and Senate), and signed by a light-weight (George W. Bush). On top of that it became law because of the whining and preening of the families of those killed on 9/11. An analogy to that process would find Franklin Roosevelt and General Marshall calling in the family of ordinary seaman Jones, killed at Pearl Harbor, to offer condolences and say: "You know, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, we seem to have a little trouble with Imperial Japan, please tell us what U.S. war policy should be." Following this tack, the grandchildren of Roosevelt and General Marshall would now be truckling to the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, just as both our political parties truckle to anyone who will sell us oil or lend us money.

The problem lies at base in the lying 9/11 Commission report which identified the plumbing chart of the Intelligence Community (IC) as the cause of 9/11. How many times in your life has the cause of your problems and disasters been attributable to an inanimate object? 9/11 was caused by politicians and senior civil servants who failed to act on the intelligence gathered by all components of the IC. There is no point trying to prove this here, but when the Commission's archive of documents and sworn testimony by the intelligence officers directly involved in pre-9/11 operations is released -- as was promised -- the American people will see that 9/11 clearly was not caused by the IC's organizational chart.

It also is funny, if tragic, to see how the power-grabbing but media-beloved Obama is fawned over when he suggests implementing the final corruption of the intelligence process by putting the DNI in the White House. Did Americans not learn anything from the buddy-buddy, let-me-tell-you-what-you-want-to-hear relationship between George Tenet and Bill Clinton, and latter between Tenet and George W. Bush? The more physical distance between the DNI and the president and his political acolytes the better for America and the better for the quality and security of intelligence. This is especially true in the administration of a president whose Chief of Staff left the United States in time of war to serve Israel.

Finally, the idea of giving any more intelligence-collection or covert-action responsibilities to the U.S. military is amusing in the extreme. As so many comments here have noted, DoD has had the lion's share of intelligence funding since 1945, and yet it has not managed to win a war since the late-summer of that year. I suppose there is value in consistency, however, and adding to the military's responsibilities certainly would add celerity to events: If the military is as good at collecting intelligence as they are at fighting wars, the United States can lose faster.

As usual, I am impressed by my colleagues insights, wit and strength of argument. Sadly, I am getting to be an old grouch -- like the two old man puppets grumbling in the balcony of the Muppet Show. So, here I grumble.

The Atlantic piece on the White House reaching out to the PIAB is interesting if true. It provides them some intellectual cover and buys some time to make a decision about the DNI. As flawed as the DNI is, and as much change needs to be made, this little venture is not going away any time soon.

The DNI was established under Public Law 108-458. This means it is statutorily established in the U.S. government. When you start fooling around with USG structure, you need to get the Hill involved. While I would hope the Hill would join quickly in this effort, I sincerely doubt they could even get started on considering any type of major reform in an election year.

This does leave the Executive Order route where the present rules with the force of law on a given issue. There have been a number of so-called E.O.'s over the years that effected the work of the Intelligence Community, the most famous being 12333 under Reagan. It is possible that the President might readjust mission or goals of the DNI under this rubric.

That being said, there are several large building in Tysons Corner filled with people who are under the Office of the DNI. Where do they go and what they will now do is an open question?

Let's hope we get an answer sooner than later.

Dr. Adams and I disagree on this. I would prefer the DNI job to be given real presidential support. The job already has enough budget allotment authority to control policy in the community (a community of cannibals). The problem has been that CIA has successfully woven their silken strands about two heads of state and thus avoided DNI control. The FBI did much the same thing in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. In my opinion the Republic is not served by such petty turf warfare.

God did not put the CIA in charge of the intelligence community. The pin striped Ivy League alumni of the OSS lobbied the Congress mighty hard in 1947 to have the new agency given that much power. They did this over the opposition of Truman and Marshall. They succeeded and their more average American organizational descendants gloried in the result.

I would like to see former Senator Hagel made DNI, but then, he was merely a sergeant in the infantry once upon a time.

I don't really care how much power the DNI has. The tragedy would be deep if CIA is rewarded for its intrigue by being given again the authority to bully and cripple the rest of the intelligence community.

Sydney has point his finger on a cogent question: will the new DNI be located in the White House itself or the Old Executive Office Building or the New Executive Office Building?

A couple of other questions jump to mind. Will he share an office with John Brennan? Will he share a computer with John Brennan - and does that computer 'interface' with Panetta's computer?

I leave to others more versed in the mysterious ways of Washington to assess the full signifiance of being in close proximity to the President as opposed to close e-proximity to his Blackberry.

Cheers

The flaw in the ODNI design was to allow the Secretary of Defense to retain virtual total control over that part of intel resources that fell into the DOD budget. That was a Rumsfeld demand, reenforced by certain members of Congress. The flaw in implementation was the decision made at the start not to test the limits of the budget authority provided in the statute. One year, then two years of delay in testing this authority and the game was largely over. The job would be one of coordination, at best, and the addition of a bureaucratic layer over the existing layers.

The problem may be unsolvable now. Moving it to the White House, but stripping away accountability to the Congress and budget authority over the agencies, condemns the post to near-irrelevancy. Dissolving it rewards agencies that made it impossible for ODNI to succeed in the first place. Keeping it, but appointing a strong leader, with the full backing of the President, and testing the authority over personnel and budgets is probably the least bad route, but certain woe to the poor leader who takes on this gargantuan task.

Over at National Journal's sister publication, The Atlantic Monthly, politics editor Marc Ambinder posted a story earlier today saying that the Administration is considering an overhaul of the office of the Director of National Intelligence, with the favored solution being some variation on absorbing the DNI into the White House staff. The full story is worth reading, but I've excerpted the essential sentences below:

"Obama asked members of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB)....to consider whether the next DNI needs to be incorporated into the executive office of the president and given a West Wing office....A final variant of a reinvigorated DNI would turn the position into a -- wait for it -- czar, with a small staff, who would coordinate conflicts among executive agents and who would be more or less a problem-solver. This person would not testify before Congress. He or she would not make public appearances. He or she would remain in the shadows."

Would this solution strengthen the DNI or weaken it? Would it give the DNI the access to the President the position needs, or strip it of needed independence and staff?

Was Blair the cause of his own undoing or was the DNI flawed by design?
The answer is a little bit Blair, a lot more flawed by design.

Blair took a tough job and made it tougher in two ways. The first was challenging the CIA out of the gate (over who would designate key intelligence officials abroad). Picking early fights with the CIA isn’t a bad idea. Losing early fights with the CIA is. Blair’s second misstep was his testimony to Congress after the Christmas Day bomb plot, when he criticized the Obama Administration’s interrogation decisions, seemingly forgetting that: a) he WAS the Obama Administration; and b) his recommended alternative – “activating” a special, new interrogation team – was impossible since the team was not yet operational and was never designed to interrogate suspects in the U.S. Sounding like a Republican critic of the administration was not the best political strategy. Sounding like an uninformed critic was even worse.

But those two episodes are small potatoes compared to the design flaws of the DNI and the politics that make them inevitable. The DNI was never designed for success. It was designed to try to improve intelligence coordination after 9/11 without upsetting the Pentagon too much. When the DNI legislation was making its way through Capitol Hill, the Defense Department fought vigorously behind the scenes to strip the teeth out of measures that could have given the DNI budgetary and personnel control over the rest of the Intelligence Community. Why? Because the Pentagon has long controlled 80 percent of the intelligence budget, most of the major intelligence agencies, and wanted no part of ceding that control anyplace else. And because passing legislation in our fragmented democratic system requires compromise, opponents of the DNI had a say in its creation.

We have seen this movie before. It’s called the CIA’s creation in 1947. Then, as now, existing intelligence agencies – determined to guard their own autonomy, their own budgets, and their own power -- fiercely resisted the creation of any organization with the word “central” in its title. The CIA was crippled from birth, and proved unable to manage the far-flung agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community for the next 50 years. Twice in the 1990s, Congress tried to restructure the IC to rectify this problem. Both efforts failed because the Pentagon trashed them and no president ever wants to be criticized by his military for “hurting the warfighter” even if the result is to weaken our entire intelligence system.

As Lee Hamilton once said, in Washington people live by the golden rule: those with the gold make the rules. Without iron-clad budget authority and stronger authorities over personnel, the DNI never had a great fighting chance. Without strong presidential backing, it has none.

Pushing beyond the immediate fate of Admiral Dennis Blair and some of the politically-related issues associated with that, I fear the challenge of attempting another thoroughgoing overhaul of our national intelligence apparatus paralleling the creation of the DNI structure could be rather dicey.

I agree wholeheartedly with former Intelligence Community colleague Pat Lang that the former DCI-dominated structure was tilted far too much in the direction of CIA, and that tendency often made for adverse consequences (as with some of the undue emphasis on CIA-generated human intelligence, not to mention the vigorous advocacy of same on the part of a DCI, that played such a significant role in the flawed WMD-related assessment that helped pave the way for the costly 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath). National Intelligence Officers overseeing the estimative process (most often CIA personnel still reporting regularly and in person to the DCI on the progress of national intelligence products--a privilege not accorded supposedly otherwise equivalent counterparts in other voting intelligence entities) excercised, along with the DCI, too much influence over this supposedly interagency process.

Unfortunately, commenting specifically on the fate of the DNI structure is a tad difficult because, after 33 years of federal service, I developed a rather jaded view of most all grand designs for government overhaul (inevitably politicized and adjusted to accommodate this interest and that along the way and often implemented more vigorously in one area and less in another, resulting in a measure of distortion and confusion). Likewise, the DNI concept, in its bureaucratic manifestation, imposed yet another level of intelligence bureaucracy bound to be to some degree burdensome and fleshed out its own ranks by pulling large numbers of invaluable veterans from core intelligence agencies like my own alma mater, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, undermining their own collective mission.

After creating the rather sizeable and complex DNI structure, it might be more damaging to "kill off" that approach than to attempt a vigorous review of how it can be refined and improved in place. Any further major overhauls, especially involving the entire intelligence structure amidst an ongoing national crisis, could do more harm than good.

Finally, although commenting no further than this on the forced resignation of Admiral Blair, it is all too often typical to implicitly--if not explicitly--place the blame on one individual for failings of a variety of structures and other, lesser individuals throughout a structure. That clearly has happened in this case, to some degree. The concept of "the buck stops here" can be healthy, but too little beyond the removal of the individual holding the proverbial buck is too often viewed as a panacea for a plethora of collective malfuntions that frequently remain insufficiently addressed, even though claims frequently are made that a helpful review of those other, more profound problems surely will be undertaken with the needed openmindedness and skill.

It is premature to claim that the DNI system does not work and that it should be scrapped. We live in complex times. Those in political positions that expect these sorts of systems to bat 1000 just don't get it. One of the things I am hearing in the media is that "Admiral Blair failed to connect the dots". Where were the genius political masters when the dots needed connecting? Part of the problem of connecting the dots is that the dots are spread all over the place and the data systems do not seem to be up to the task. Let's not have another round of "reform" to assuage the political. Lives are at risk. The national security of the country is at risk.

It is time to take a hard look at the whole system, not just the top leadership. Some of the weakest links can be found elsewhere. A top to bottom review might be required, but not at the risk of getting too much in the way of important business that needs to be done 24-7-365. Again, the place to look may not be in the big offices, but in the small ones with the underpaid and overworked, and underappreciated worker bees toiling to try to find the dots.

Admiral Blair is a hero. He made serious sacrifices for this country over his career and he should be respected for it.

I would rather have someone such as he in a difficult situation than the political types that infest this city with their pseudo theories of how to make everything perfect.

In my opinion it is better that the director of the CIA is not also head of the intelligence community as he used to be. In those days the National Defense Acts of 1947 and 1958 created a situation in which the CIA could use that situation to serve its own interests at the expense of all the other parts of the intelligence community. They did this by control of the instruments of "community" coordination. The DCI/CIA controlled the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and thereby CIA was able to nominate from among its own nearly all the National Intelligence Officers (NIOs) and drafters of National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). NIOS are the most senior subject matter experts of the intelligence community and NIEs are the agreed upon truth of the US Government on any given subject. In the human intelligence collection (HUMINT) field it was a commonplace for the DCI/CIA to use the power of community "coordination" on human source registration to seize control of human assets recruited by other agencies. The justification was usually a "prior interest" in the man. Similarly, operational plans were often "discovered" by the DCI/CIA to have been something CIA had been/were going to do. Examples of such abuse of power were legion but these examples suffice here.

Why was this important? Why not have just one intelligence agency? Why was this a bad thing for the United States? Well, the truth is that CIA is a civilian agency that does not do so well with military subjects or foreign military personnel as it would like the public to think. It also does not do so well with para-military operations/ guerrilla warfare as it would like the public to think. in fact, when it has found it necessary to deal with foreign military officers it has often "borrowed" officers from the US military or recruited former Army Special Forces or Marines to do the heavy lifting. I have a decoration from CIA to illustrate my knowledge of that history.

In my opinion the country's business involving the military aspects of intelligence and special operations is best taken care of when the operators involved are embedded in Defense Department organizations that have a full range of staff planning, logistics and expertise. The previous dual function of the DCI/CIA interlocking directorates was not conducive to that process.

CIA understandably would like to regain lost functions and power. Their skills in recruiting friends in Congress and the media have been heavily engaged in preparing for that day of restoration. I think the country is better served by the existence of a separate Director of National Intelligence (DNI). A level playing field is conducive to better play.

Dennis Blair was guilty of nothing in either commission or omission. He tried to get Panetta and the CIA under control? What a crime! He is supposed to be their boss. Their "crime" was in resisting him in the traditional path of Washington style Byzantine court politics.

If the president had supported Blair the outcome would have been very different.

Without first hand knowledge of the ins-and-outs of the turf battles within the intelligence establishment, there is no way to interpret what the stakes were or to anticipate the practical implications of Admiral Blair's firing. So one must make do with impressions drawn from observed performance and public utterances. Here are a few.

1. The intelligence establishment lacks coherence - organizational or operational. Exhibit number one is the shadowy army of mercenaries that the CIA has mustered to conduct its own war in FETA and NWFP of Pakistan. Cobbled together by an unsavory character whose CIA past seemingly outweighs the official reproaches he has received, and Leon Panetta's promise months ago to disband it, they act without coordination with the Pentagon's various special force outfits or even the latter's knowledge of what mayhem they are up to. There is reason to doubt that anyone in the administration outside of McLean is 'in the loop' - even the White House. There are myriad other exhibits on record.

2. The so-called reforms that created the position of Director of National Intelligence consolidated nothing. It just added an administrative layer to an already diffuse and under-supervised slew of outfits while providing fresh terrain for cut throat bureaucratic politics. The current set-up is surpassed only by the Department of Homeland Security as an exemplar of muddled, mindless response to a question of governmental competence.

3. Personal rivalries and institutional chauvinism were probably the mainsprings of the conflict. So nothing at all is resolved by sacking Blair and replacing him with another old hand from one of the tried and true intelligence organizations.

4. The notion that Blair's fate was sealed by the fiasco associated with the "fruit-of-the-loom" bomber is risible. After all, the CIA, FBI, State Department and God only knows who else also failed to do their jobs with elementary skill. The only thing more worrying than that multiform failure has been the so called 'fixes' that have been trumpeted. Let's recall the reaction to the revelation that our $60+ billion intelligence apparatus uses retro software that cannot identify an individual with a unique 14 letter name when a consular official mistypes one vowel. John Brennan, now chief of counter terrorism at the NSC, solemnly pledged to Congress that it never will happen again since steps were being taken to add 300 analysts to some taskforce or other. More cost-effective would be a phone call to Amazon or E-bay to get the name of the people who designed their software.

5. There is no adequate oversight, supervision, monitoring or coordination of the intelligence establishment. Hence there was a crying need for the Obama White House to take matters in hand in January 2009. Instead, one of Obama's first acts as President was to rush over to the CIA to convey personally his assurances that all those folks there were doing a heck of a job, that they were under-appreciated, that no one would be penalized or chastised for anything and that they had a friend in the White House. The appointment of the intelligence novice and Washington insider Panetta as Director, with the correct expectation that he would be a ferocious protector of the agency, sealed the deal.

The sad truth is that the President doesn't have it in him to take charge, to crack heads, to fight for something because it is necessary. Moreover, he obviously doesn't see that there is a problem with American intelligence – other than a public relations one. Mr. Obama reflexively respects and defers to every establishment - be it Wall Street, the oil cartel, the Pentagon, the health industry or the intelligence world. He flees from the very idea of disturbing or offending them. No amount of failure will change that.

For want of a President with a more acute sense of responsibility and some intestinal fortitude, we are fated to ricochet from one intelligence crisis to another.

The problem was we never got the reforms right to begin with. The problem is not that we did not give the DNI enough authority. The problem is that we muddled the position by giving the DNI operational as well as supervisory responsibilities. The law saddled the DNI with running the NCTC, the ISE and a bunch of other initials as well. Thus, the DNI had a “day job” of being the intelligence advisor to the president and coordinating the Intelligence Community as well as a ton of “side jobs.”

Meanwhile, the Obama administration exacerbated the problem by putting politics first—and running everything through a small, elite clique in the White House.

Frankly, I am surprised the wheels did not come off before now.

In the final year of the failed Nixon Administration a wit said that, “Richard Nixon was the dead mouse on the kitchen floor of America that no one wished to pick up.” Given the resignation of Admiral Dennis Blair from the post of Director of National Intelligence (DNI), you have to wonder the same about the whole concept of the DNI.

Blair is the third DNI in less than six years. Amb. John Negroponte and Adm Mike McConnell, Blair predecessors, were both highly experienced government players. Both appeared to be glad to get out of the job. And, if you believe the rumors, dozens of people under both Bush and Obama Administrations have turned down the job.

So, what is making this DNI job so tough that it makes senior bureaucrats tremble? Most simply, the legislation that created the position in 2004 was fatally flawed. D.C. is about power, position and money. Beside a great title, the DNI has none of the three.

Contrary to the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, the Congress created an underpowered beast that had little control over the 16 members of the sprawling U.S. intelligence community. He could control little if any budget. He could only provide guidance over some programs and he could appoint few of the seniors running the supposedly overseen organizations. In short, he had a nice title.

Blair, as with others before him, attempted to press out of this little box and make something of the DNI besides controlling the President’s Daily Brief. He pushed to shuffle around a few funds from agency to agency. He moved to recommend or have co-approval for appointments to some positions. And Blair pressed to provide strategic guidance to the members of the Community. Every move chaffed and no one in the IC was particularly happy.

With Blair’s resignation, the time has come to ask whither DNI – keep it, kill it or modify it. Unlike some of my friends, I am not so inclined to kill it. The position does serve a purpose – just not the one that everyone tries to use it for. I think we are simply asking for too much from the position and the person occupying the head job. The DNI is a Hyundai that people keep trying to make into a Porsche. Let’s make it a good Hyundai.

First of all, let’s simply set aside the notion that the DNI is going to be fixed soon or easily by anyone. From a Congressional standpoint, it is worth a few hearings and no more during an election year. Second, no one on the Hill likes to admit making mistakes especially during an election year. So, for now, let’s understand that this issue is going to be touched until 2011 at the earliest. Third, and this one are crucial – reforming the DNI is not a political winner. It is good governance. But, you are not going to run your campaign on it. No, in Washington, politicians want intelligence to stay quiet, stand aside and do its job.

As for the DNI position itself, we need to understand that it is no more than a titular head and really more of a coordinator’s job. And there is nothing wrong with that. The IC is a sprawling, massively large group of individual institutions residing in places as diverse as DOD, Energy, and the Homeland Security. The contracting community serving it is equally as large. And the work it is doing securing our homeland and our interests oversees is crucial.

As coordinator – or perhaps Coordinator of National Intelligence – the DNI could continue a role at which it is getting quite good. While not very sexy, there does need to be coordination over how the IC buys big technology. There does need to be some sense made how you develop and hang on to thousands of IC personnel; especially the flood of young people who arrived since 9/11. There is a need for a sensible budgeting structure that looks beyond one year and tries to establish program and budget priorities. There is a need for someone who can study over the horizon problems that could affect American intelligence like new, breakthrough technologies or new fields of battle like cyber space.

In the final analysis, we should not kill off the DNI. The men who tried to govern as Directors were good people caught in a badly constructed position. The next DNI should be a CNI – a coordinator who is not superior to the other IC leaders, but someone who can help them speak with one voice about given issues like threats to America and do their jobs better with higher level, longer range thinking and planning.

Admiral Dennis Blair’s selection as the Director of National Intelligence 16 months ago gave many of us increased confidence in the Obama national security team. He had years of experience dealing with national security issues. As a combatant commander, he had managed a large organization. And without a political background, he could be a straight-shooting professional who would rise above politics and just focus on keeping the country safe.

A variety of semi-leaks have mixed with speculation on the reasons that Blair was asked to leave. Some indicate that he was not politically savvy enough for the job and was outmaneuvered by CIA Director Leon Panetta. Others relate to his excessive bluntness in answering questions during congressional hearings. Still others say that he was made to take responsibility for recent intelligence lapses which failed to detect the Christmas Day and the Times Square bombing attempts.

It seems likely that Blair was not political enough for this White House and that he chaffed under the micromanagement of National Security Council staffers. In fact, several intelligence officials have been frustrated at the NSC’s insistence on controlling -- and even denying -- briefings to Congress. Press reports point to NSC control of many day-to-day intelligence operations as well. Plus, many in the intelligence agencies have been left shaking their heads at the disclosures of sensitive information by the White House and Justice Department for tactical political reasons. It would be little wonder that a smart, no-nonsense military officer like Blair would not fit into that partisan, tightly-controlled approach to national security.

Blair’s resignation reignites controversy about the position of the DNI as well. A number of commentators question whether anyone can do the job and even whether we need to have a DNI at all. The position was created largely because the 9/11 Commission found that the 16 different intelligence organizations were not working together adequately to meet the country’s needs. The DNI was intended to be the conductor of the intelligence orchestra. But the Director has limited authorities, partly as a result of legislative compromises to get the bill passed and partly as an intentional decision to see how the position would develop.

The case for having a director for the intelligence community is a persuasive one. The 16 organizations which comprise the community have a variety of cultures, specialties, and priorities. Without a central manager, it is very difficult to shift spending from one agency to another, for example. Someone must consider the whole enterprise.

Just a few days before Blair’s departure, the chairs of the 9/11 Commission again warned Congress that not enough progress has been made toward integrating the community (nor in straightening out congressional committee jurisdictions) leaving the country more vulnerable than it should be to the increasing diversity of terrorist attacks.

It seems pretty clear to me that if we are going to have a DNI, he must have the authority to do the job asked of him. Otherwise, this office is just another layer of bureaucracy. It is appropriate for Congress to reexamine the Intelligence Reform Act to see whether the DNI should be given more explicit powers and perhaps a fixed tenure, such as the FBI director has. The goal should be to have a strong DNI who brings a professionalism that rises above the politics of the moment. Without a strong, effective DNI, our intelligence efforts will not be as successful as they could be or as we need them to be.

But the fact remains that even with enhanced powers, no DNI will be able to do the job without the support of the White House. If the White House fails to back the DNI, the 16 agencies know that they have little to fear and can go their own way. If the NSC is going to do the job of the DNI and run the intelligence community out of the White House, they should be confirmed by the Senate and called to testify before Congress, just like other executive branch employees.

As Lee Hamilton and Tom Kean testified last Wednesday, “The burden is on the President to clarify who is in charge of the Intelligence Community and where final authority lies on budget, personnel, and other matters. In our estimation, we need a strong DNI who is a leader of the intelligence community.” I agree.

Attorney General Eric Holder has launched a hostile takeover of our nation’s terror-fighting policies. Admiral Blair’s ouster should come as no surprise to those of us who have watched this takeover.

In many ways, Blair’s resignation was a foregone conclusion. First, he faced a statutory stumbling block—Congress gave him all the responsibility to stop terrorist attacks but not enough authority to actually force the changes needed to reform our Intelligence Community. Then Blair made the strategic mistake of speaking out publicly against Holder’s wrongheaded decision to Mirandize the Christmas Day bomber—a blunder that gave Abdullmutallab’s coconspirators a five-week head start to cover their tracks.

Unfortunately for our nation, with Holder acting as the de facto leader of our Intelligence Community, there are much more dangerous implications than just forcing a good public servant out of a job.

With Holder at the helm of our nation’s terror-fighting policies, gathering life-saving intelligence is taking a back seat to building a case for prosecution.

Prosecution should be a part of our counterterrorism strategy, but it should not dictate our strategy.

By allowing the Attorney General to act as though he is in charge of our Intelligence Community, this Administration has sent the message that prosecution victories are more important than collecting intelligence to save American lives.

It’s time for the Administration—and Congress—to to change the message and affirm that keeping Americans safe from future attacks is our top priority.

Congress must first act to give the new DNI all the authority he needs to do the job.

But, because it won’t matter if Congress empowers the DNI if our nation’s terror-fighting strategy is still being run out of the Department of Justice, the President must reverse course and make clear that the DNI—and not the Attorney General—actually runs the Intelligence Community.