Is Trump’s CIA Telling Him the Truth about Putin?

If past is prologue, Trump is not really listening to anybody who really knows Putin and Russia

Let's face it: if President Trump were getting any candid briefings on Vladimir Putin and the Alaska Summit from intelligence advisers, he never would've scheduled it—especially on such notice. Anybody who knows anything about Putin and Russia knows that the upcoming summit is a made-for-TV triumph for Putin, who’s been all dressed up with nowhere to go but China ever since he invaded Ukraine in February 2022. 

Trump insists he can make “a deal” with Putin.

I suppose he’s talking real estate—trading away Russian-occupied territory for ... what?—a halt in relentless Russian airstrikes on Ukrainian cities and civilians, one that will all but certainly turn out to be temporary? 

What Trump apparently doesn't understand is that Putin is not interested in "peace," he wants all of Ukraine—and perhaps more, such as other former USSR states like Lithuania. 

Evidently that’s not what his special envoy to Putin, real estate mogul Steve Witkoff, who has no discernable expertise on Russia, said after returning from there last week. According to the Wall Street Journal, Witkoff said Moscow was prepared to withdraw from the southern regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange for full control of Donetsk Oblast. “The next day, he presented a different claim—that Putin would withdraw and freeze the front line, and that during a third call, he said the Russian leader wanted Ukraine to withdraw from Donetsk in an exchange for a ceasefire,” Newsweek reported.

All this without Ukraine’s approval.

Truth to Power

Who’s going to tell Trump the truth? Certainly not Tulsi Gabbard, the nominal head of all U.S. intelligence. “Even before Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump and secured his nomination to become director of National Intelligence, she was known as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda,” The Independent noted when she was nominated in February. “In almost every foreign conflict in which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed against the U.S.”—from Syria to Ukraine and stops in-between. In June, she fired the top two leaders of the National Intelligence Council who contradicted Trump’s accusation that Venzuela had “invaded” the U.S. via the Tren de Aragua criminal gang.

Gabbard’s latest claim to infamy is ginning up a baseless, not to mention outrageous, treason investigation of President Obama and some of his aides over their investigations of Russia’s covert interference in the 2016 elections—findings that were corroborated by Trump’s own Justice Department special counsel in his first administration and a Senate Intelligence Committee probe chaired by now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio.  Alas, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, whose charter demands he tell truth to power,  joined Gabbard in trumpeting the conspiracy rubbish.

So as Trump prepares to sit down with Putin in Alaska, there’s plenty of reason to worry that U.S. intelligence leaders aren’t telling him the unvarnished truth about the Russian leader’s intentions, tactics, and disinformation strategies.

The question is not hypothetical. In his first term, Trump had a strained relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies, publicly dismissing their conclusions on Russian election interference and, at times, siding with Putin’s denials—most infamously at the 2018 Helsinki summit. Those moments rattled career intelligence officials, who were accustomed to presidents treating their assessments as the bedrock of national security decision-making.

At this week’s Alaska meeting, the stakes are even higher. The war in Ukraine grinds on, European allies are on edge, and Putin has mastered the art of shaping negotiations to his advantage. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and multiple European leaders have warned Trump that Putin’s goal is not peace, but a settlement that cements Russian control over captured territories.

Publicly, Trump’s team has described the meeting as a “listening exercise,” a phrase that may sound diplomatic but also hints at a possible risk: that Trump will give Putin’s version of events as much—or more—weight than his own intelligence briefings—if any, by recognizable Russia experts, most of whom have been ushered out of the administration. 

“It is safe to say that Trump has no policymaker who knows Russia and Ukraine well,”says former U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria Eric Rubin.

“The National Security Council, which normally coordinates summit preparations, has faced major cuts: in May, dozens of specialists were dismissed. Last month, the State Department cut more than 1,300 employees, including analysts on Russia and Ukraine,” noted the New Voice of Ukraine, a Kyiv-based independent digital news site.  “Key administration positions responsible for relations with Moscow and Kyiv remain vacant…”

The intelligence community almost certainly has a detailed profile of Putin’s negotiation style, his leverage points, and the Kremlin’s internal thinking on Ukraine. Have Gabbard or Ratcliffe allowed them to bubble up to Trump? If so—and, frankly, it’s doubtful—has Trump bothered to listen to them? The real question is whether those insights will be delivered to Trump in a way he both hears and acts upon. If the Alaska summit produces statements echoing Kremlin talking points—or if Ukraine is excluded from follow-up negotiations—it will be a sign that the truth, while perhaps told, was not the truth that shaped the outcome.

It seems like only yesterday that Trump took Putin’s side over his own intelligence agencies at their last, infamous summit in Helsinki in 2018. Since returning to office this year, Putin has repeatedly rebuffed Trump’s appeals for “peace”—without consequence. On Wednesday, sounding like the wolf in The Three Little Pigs, Trump warned that Russia would face “very severe consequences” if he thinks Putin is blowing him off yet again.

(Farmer Brown Insurance)

One downside of that is that Trump will again do nothing, and Putin will continue pounding Ukraine into submission.  A potentially worse one is that Trump will overreact to his perceived humiliation and bumble the U.S. into a direct military confrontation with a nuclear-sabre rattling Russia.

We’re going to learn a lot from Friday’s high stakes summit. In the end, it may reveal not just the state of U.S.–Russia relations, but the state of trust between intelligence leaders and their own spies, not to mention an American president and his own intelligence agencies.