Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics from nuclear weapons to politics. In 2002, he and a team of Post reporters won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.
OPINION Newly-installed Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said President Biden “will want to know what information we have that actually conflicts with his policy positions,” during her confirmation hearing last Tuesday before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Biden, when interviewing Haines about the job, “made it clear we will provide truth to power…he’s been adamant about this,” she said at one point.
Sen. Marco Rubio, the acting chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said Sunday that the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump is "stupid."
Rubio Rips McKinsey for Response to Arrest of Putin Critic
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) says serious questions are surfacing about “McKinsey’s core values and corporate culture” following the famous international management consulting firm’s order barring its Moscow office employees from joining the growing protests in Russia against the arrest of Alexei Navalny.
Navalny was arrested last week as he returned to Russia from Berlin, where he was recovering from his poisoning five months ago by a military-grade nerve agent known as Novichok. Navalny is one of Russia’s most prominent critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin. His Jan. 17 arrest sparked demonstrations on Jan. 23 that The Associated Press said led to the arrest of more than 3,000 people by Russian police.
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email How to Fight Domestic Extremism and Win Public Trust
After years of partisan politicization, national security leaders and workers need to be clear about how they ll keep us safe from each other.
In the coming months, national security leaders at all levels of government face three unprecedented challenges. The first is to rebuild the national security community’s reputation as an apolitical advisor for policy decisions. The second is to reverse the highly-politicized environment within government that was created by the Trump administration’s placement of political operatives over career professionals and their deliberate attacks on the national security workforce. The third is to prioritize the investigation of domestic terrorist threats like those that led to the assault on the Capitol of January.