If you thought that Donald Trump had learned the importance of keeping politics out of intelligence in light of how the intelligence community was used as a tool to attack and subvert his Presidency, think again.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired a general whose agency’s initial intelligence assessment of U.S. damage to Iranian nuclear sites angered President Donald Trump, according to two people familiar with the decision and a White House official.
Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse will no longer serve as head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, according to the people, who spoke Friday on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. . . .
Kruse’s firing comes two months after details of a preliminary assessment of U.S. airstrikes against Iran leaked to the media. It found that Iran’s nuclear program has been set back only a few months by the military effort, contradicting assertions from Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Republican president, who had pronounced the Iranian program “completely and fully obliterated,” rejected the report.
While this is a different kind of interference — i.e., rejecting the judgment of intelligence analysts because they do not parrot the administration line — from that employed by the Biden administration — i.e., fabricating intelligence, such as Russian casualty figures, in order to placate the government policy — both are dangerous.
There was a previous high-profile case… Mike Collins was fired in May 2025 by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard from his position as acting head of the National Intelligence Council (aka NIC). One of the NIC‘s primary duties is the production of National Intelligence Estimates. Collins firing occurred shortly after the NIC published an assessment that contradicted claims made by the Trump administration regarding the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which weakened a justification used by Trump to exercise wartime powers.
It is not clear if the NIE conclusion discounting the connection between Tren de Aragua and Venezuelan President Maduro was the primary reason to dismiss Collins. According to media reports in May, Collins’ firing was part of a move to address what the office of the DNI described as the “weaponization” and politicization of intelligence. Along with Collins, his deputy, Maria Langan-Riekhof, was also dismissed. Gabbard relocated the council from its CIA office to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) facilities, a change aligned with the ostensible aim to prevent politicization of intelligence.
Collins was suspect because of his ties to Michael Morell, a former CIA deputy director, who helped Hillary Clinton cover up the disaster at Benghazi, and who signed the letter from 51 intelligence professionals that questioned the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s laptop, asserting that it appeared to be Russian disinformation. Collins was also facing whistleblower allegations accusing him of political bias and deliberately undermining the incoming Trump administration.
The US intelligence community, particularly the CIA and the DNI, shares a major portion of the blame for behaving as political partisans rather than as intelligence professionals. Tulsi Gabbard’s release of documents, emails and testimony from whistleblowers surrounding the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, provided irrefutable evidence that partisan politics by the CIA’s Brennan and the DNI’s Clapper took precedence over the facts surrounding the issue of Russian interference.
As was the case with Biden, Trump appears to be engaging in the same sort of partisan pressure on analysts to support his administration’s policies regardless of what the human and signals intelligence shows. In the case of General Kruse, the firing sends a chilling message to the DIA analysts — i.e., even if they have evidence that Iran’s nuclear program was not obliterated, you may be fired if you challenge the President’s opinion. The US intelligence community, in my opinion, no longer has any credibility. It has become a full-time creature of politics.
Reprinted with permission from Sonar21.
