Breaking: Trump Transition at Spy Agencies Actually Going Smoothly

National security nominees facing Hill problems, but teams meshing at CIA, ODNI

ALTHOUGH THERE COULD STILL BE SERIOUS OBSTACLES AHEAD, preparations to transfer control of key U.S. spy agencies from Biden administration appointees to the intended nominees of President-elect Donald Trump are moving forward smoothly, according to sources directly familiar with the transition process. Coming amid reports of hiccups in FBI background checks and the president-elect’s sensational foreign policy pronouncements at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, news of relative calm at the CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence seems noteworthy.

In the wake of Trump's electoral victory—solid, although not the overwhelming mandate he proclaimed—some intelligence officials, congressional skeptics and longtime spy world monitors expressed serious concerns that Trump and his appointees would set out to twist intelligence collection and reporting to serve their political beliefs and objectives, the latest which include assertions by Trump that he would like the U.S. to annex strategic but independent and/or certainly non-American countries and territories such as Greenland and the Panama Canal. Trump also refuses to rule out the US. taking over Canada and turning it into a 51st state.

Trump has also complained that transition was not going well, an assertion that aides denied.

“They told me they’re going to do everything they can to make the transition to the new administration as smooth as possible,” Trump said during his freewheeling Mar-a-Lago press conference on Tuesday. “It’s not smooth.” His complaint seemed focused on last-minute Biden executive actions, however, not the mechanics of transferring power.

Regardless of such proclaimed ambitions and inclinations of the incoming president—which also include sympathy for Vladimir Putin regarding Russia's objectives in its continuing war in Ukraine—the word from the intelligence-related frontlines of the Biden-Trump transition enterprise is that the process is proceeding appropriately, and, so far, relatively smoothly, with feathers inside key agencies not being seriously ruffled, whatever Trump and his entourage have been saying publicly.

What hitches do exist seem centered on Capitol Hill and Trump’s intent to appoint loyalist and former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as director of National Intelligence, the agency which is supposed to oversee and coordinate (and deconflict) the activities of all intelligence agencies. Republicans hoped for a fast confirmation for the controversial nominee, but her hearing has been delayed amid reports that she had failed to provide the Senate Intelligence  Committee with responses to ​”pre-hearing questions for an ethics disclosure” and that the panel “hasn’t gotten a copy of her FBI background check.”