New in SpyFaces in the Crowd: Rick Crawford, from Bomb Tech to Intelligence Committee Chair

The Arkansas Tea Party Republican’s loyalty to Trump has paid off big time

Rick Crawford spent four years in the Army defusing bombs. It was kind of a family tradition, the five-term Republican told a local paper a few years ago. “I’m a second-generation bomb tech. My dad was a bomb tech, too,” he said. But life in the hurt locker wasn’t for him. Four years was enough—although rough stuff still had an appeal: To help pay for college he worked as a rodeo cowboy until an injury put an end to that. Even with a B.A. in Science from Arkansas State University, though, he returned to the rodeo as an announcer. Not only that, he became a “singing cowboy,” often crooning from a horse. Finally, he settled into a successful career hosting and operating a farm news network broadcast to radio stations across the South and Midwest.

Then, in 2011, came the call to run for Congress.

Capitol Hill is a place where talents at roping horses and defusing bombs could be useful, metaphorically speaking, especially today at the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which was supposed to be a haven of discreet bipartisanship when it was formed in 1977 to rein in abuses by the CIA, NSA and FBI. With the advent of the Trump era, however, it’s turned into another raucous political battleground and conspiracy theories boiler room. And Crawford, 59, stands with those who suspect the intelligence establishment has been out to get MAGA Republicans and their president—the so-called “Deep State.”