Trump’s Intelligence Chief Offers a Timely Reminder: Trump Is a Liar

Joseph Maguire undercuts Trump’s smear of the Ukraine scandal whistleblower.

Donald Trump

Evan Vucci/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Just about every day Donald Trump busts a norm—a norm of politics, a norm of governance, a norm of decency. This never-ending fusillade makes it is easy to lose sight of his individual acts of lowering (or demolishing) standards. Yet on Thursday morning, Trump’s top intelligence official presented a stunning reminder that Trump has violated what ought to be an important principle: A president should not brazenly lie and make shit up.

Yes, I know, Trump does this All The Time. And everyone—the media, Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and citizens throughout the land—have become inured to his audacious prevarications. Often, his false claims are directly contradicted by his own hirelings. (Case in point: Virtually all of Trump’s top national security appointees have stated they accept the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia covertly intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump, though Trump has repeatedly discounted or dismissed this finding.) Yet it still is important to push the pause button when one of Trump’s senior advisers publicly undermines Trump’s demagoguery and offers evidence that Trump is a doesn’t-give-a-damn-about-the-truth deceiver-in-chief. And that’s what happened when acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire appeared before the House Intelligence Committee for a fiery hearing focused on Trump’s latest scandal: the president’s alleged attempt to muscle the Ukrainian president to produce dirt he could use to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and to harm Joe Biden.

The subject, of course, was Maguire’s handling of a complaint sent by an unidentified intelligence official to the inspector general for the intelligence community that accused the president of abusing his office for political purposes and that claimed White House officials tried to bury evidence of this misconduct. It’s this controversy that has finally pushed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to declare that House Democrats were transforming their multiple investigations of Trump into an impeachment inquiry. Since this story emerged days ago, Trump has been fighting back in his usual manner of denying reality and disseminating false narratives and charges—that is, gaslighting. And a key component of his counter-attack has been denigrating the anonymous whistleblower.

Trump has brutally gone after the whistleblower in a series of tweets. He questioned his or her loyalty, asking, “Is he on our Country’s side”? He called this member of the intelligence community “highly partisan” and suggested this person was part of a conspiracy mounted against Trump by Democrats and the media. In a tweet citing a Fox News analyst, Trump accused the whistleblower of spying on him by secretly listening to his conversation with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. (Trump was suggesting the whistleblower had committed a criminal act.) In another tweet citing another right-wing commentator, Trump essentially said the whistleblower was part of a cabal mounting a malicious and seditious effort against him. And Trump retweeted a conservative activist who claimed that the intelligence community’s inspector general had concluded the whistleblower had a “political bias” against Trump. (The IG found “some indicia of an arguable political bias on the part of the Complainant in favor of a rival political candidate” but nevertheless determined that the whistleblower was credible.)

That is, before the whistleblower’s complaint was released on Thursday morning, Trump had mounted a robust smear campaign against this unknown person, pronouncing him or her a rat-fink and a traitor who was out to get Trump—a person whose complaint could not be taken seriously.

At the Maguire hearing, the acting DNI was asked about the whistleblower—whose identity remained a secret. Is the whistleblower a “political hack,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the committee queried. Maguire replied, “I believer the whistleblower is acting in good faith.” Schiff followed up: “You don’t have any reason to accuse them of disloyalty to our country?” Maguire provided an unequivocal response: “Absolutely not…I think the whistleblower did the right thing.”

In other words, there was no basis for Trump’s denunciations of the whistleblower. 

Later in the hearing, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) returned to this subject. She asked Maguire, “Do you believe the whistleblower was spying…on the president?” Maguire answered, “I believe the whistleblower complied with the law and did everything they thought, he or she thought was responsible under the Intelligence Community Whistleblowers Protection Act.” Referring to one of Trump’s tweets, Speier continued: “Do you believe the whistleblower is on our country’s side?” Maguire replied, “I believe that the whistleblower and all employees who come forward to the [intelligence community] IG to raise concerns of fraud, waste, and abuse are doing what they perceive to be the right thing.” That was a careful answer, but surely no endorsement of Trump’s claim that the whistleblower was engaged in treasonous action. 

Speier then asked Maguire if Trump had asked him to share the identity of the whistleblower. “I can tell you emphatically no,” he said. And had anyone else in the White House or Justice Department done so? “No,” he said. 

So if Trump and the White House did not know the whistleblower’s identity, how could Trump question this person’s loyalty, blast him or her as a partisan plotter, and accuse the whistleblower of spying? You know the answer: Trump doesn’t need facts to mount a smear campaign. (Did Roy Cohn?) Trump concocts phony conspiracies and misleading narratives all the time. (Remember birtherism?) When caught in a misdeed, his first instinct is to attack and vilify, the truth be damned. After all, when has Trump been held accountable for such malfeasance?

The Ukraine scandal is yet another indication that Trump places his private interests over public service and recognizes few restraints when it comes to abusing the power of his office. And this instance of his lies being revealed by the man who runs the intelligence community for Trump signals yet again that Trump is a serial fabulist. In days past, a president caught in such blatant lying might actual suffer consequences—at least, a few pokes in the media and perhaps even within his own party for besmirching a US government official. These days, this Trump lie is just another piece of straw in one huge haystack. Trump’s intelligence chief tells us that Trump is a liar—and though the contradiction has drawn media attention, Trump’s action is hardly covered as outrageous. That’s a sign of Trump’s victory in his war against the norm of honesty. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate