The CIA Bends The Knee To Trump

The agency’s new take on COVID-19's origin won't be the last time it alters its product to please him. PLUS: Warrantless 'backdoor’ searches under Section 702 ruled unconstitutional!

Edited by Sam Thielman

I'M WRITING IRON MAN FOR MARVEL COMICS! IF YOU PUT IT ON YOUR PULL LIST AT A COMIC STORE (AN ONGOING SUBSCRIPTION WHERE THE STORE RESERVES EACH ISSUE FOR YOU), I'LL SEND YOU FREE STUFF! EMAIL SOME KIND OF RECEIPT TO FOREVERWARS.BULLPEN@GMAIL.COM AND THE SWAG WILL BE YOURS! 

THE CIA, that bastion of honor, made a big show in January 2017 of its contempt for Donald Trump. Barely two weeks after the CIA assessed that Trump was the beneficiary of a Russian influence operation, Trump showed up at Langley following his inauguration speech to tell the CIA that "there is nobody I respect more." Trump, recognizing what he could accomplish with the CIA, declared himself eager to remove "restrain[ts]" on the agency. Then CIA officials wailed to journalists that Trump disrespected dead agency veterans by making political speeches in front of the wall at headquarters memorializing them. The CIA refusal of Trump's olive branch was a crucial moment for #resistance liberalism to convince itself that the Security State was really, truly, finally aligned with it. 

It sure isn't like that in 2025. 

Last week, as new CIA Director John Ratcliffe was in the terminal phase of his confirmation, the agency officially revised its assessment of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. It just so happens to be the lab-leak origin favored in 2020 by Trump and Ratcliffe, then Trump's director of national intelligence, as a cudgel against China. What a fortuitous coincidence! 

As you'll see in Julian Barnes' Times story at the link, "there is no new intelligence behind the agency's shift." Nor is the CIA willing to say what it's saying with its chest. Instead, it professes "low confidence" in its judgment. 

Now: As you may remember, the CIA hasn't been saying anything about COVID-19 with its chest. "The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting," stated an Office of the Director of National Intelligence update on the intelligence assessment on COVID from June 2023. 

I would be lying to you, reader, if I told you I know how COVID-19 really started. I seem to have that in common with the CIA. Accordingly, the agency has taken an assessment that it considers a coin flip and spun it so it comes up the side that the new boss on the 7th floor and his retribution-minded boss in the White House want. In doing so, it is setting a tone for what it wants its relationship with Trump to be. This absolutely will not be the last time the CIA adopts the version of events Trump prefers. 

"It represents to me two things, at least," texts Glenn Carle, a retired CIA official. Number 1, Carle says, "The new [D/CIA Ratcliffe] has or will accept and lean to assessments and data…selection…more hostile to China and, more particularly, more in line with a MAGA and neocon view of the world. 2) A change in the inclinations of how the leadership at my former level adjudicates issues/thinks." 

Carle's second point is what I'm getting at. We already knew Ratcliffe, who made his bones with Trump duringTrump’s first impeachment by making counter-accusations against the Biden Crime Family and Ukraine, would be Ratcliffe. We didn't yet know how the CIA was going to respond. Twenty years ago, after the White House left it holding the bag for both 9/11 and Iraq, the agency absolutely savaged a director whom the White House sent to make the agency adhere to its prerogatives. This time, it's showing people who play dominance politics that it wants zero smoke. 

"I think the power dynamics have shifted with Ratcliffe's arrival, and the [senior analysts of the National Intelligence Council]-level people aligned with him have more influence immediately," Carle adds. "So a shift, at least, but while the institutional dynamics and power alignment have shifted, the views of the players have not." 

Carle was put in mind of the Vietnam-era White House suppressing the CIA's recognition that body counts did not indicate progress in a futile war. "Same effing issue—exactly the same—in the huge war in which I was involved in the IC [intelligence community] between the sociological-focused terrorism assessments arguing 'cool down! No single threat, no military solution' (my side) and the GWOT [Global War on Terror] all-jihadists-are-part-of-a-single-organization which is an existential threat." 

The Times piece quoted Sen. Tom Cotton—who as a young officer in Iraq intimated that the paper revealing part of the NSA's warrantless surveillance dragnet could get soldiers in his company killed—about the meaning of the intelligence shift: "Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on our world." That's the unsubtle motivation behind this effort, and we should expect the CIA to accommodate it. 

AS LONG AS WE'RE TALKING ABOUT CHINA AND THE NEW COLD WAR, the Chinese artificial-intelligence company DeepSeek has recently released an AI that has matched or outperformed the AIs created by Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI and other American tech companies. 

It's done so at an order of magnitude smaller cost—$5.6 million compared to billions—and, crucially, in spite of the Biden administration's momentous initiative to cut off China's access to semiconductor chips. That means DeepSeek has defeated a measure purpose-built to keep China a generation behind the United States on artificial intelligence, a cornerstone of the Trump-Biden-Trump China Cold War. DeepSeek has made its model open-source—which means developers will flock to it, because it's vastly cheaper than what Silicon Valley has constructed at tremendous and subsidized cost.

[As a matter of interest, Meta’s AI models are open source. A lot of really good—which is to say, efficient—software is by nature. That’s probably a factor in the rapid and extremely comparatively cheap development of the Chinese models, and a good demonstration of how stupid it is to pretend proprietary software development is analogous to the nuclear arms race. But another factor is that Silicon Valley oligarchs need LLMs to be expensive to justify absurd overinvestment and lucrative government contracts. Nobody has to build and staff missile silos or mine plutonium to run computer software.—Sam]

Check out this WIRED article and this 40-minute CNBC piece for more. Then pre-order a book I'm very excited about and have just started to crack: FOREVER WARS pals Van Jackson and Michael Brenes' The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy. We cannot afford an AI Cold War ("Cold") while the planet burns. 

702 BACKDOOR-SEARCH UNCONSTITUTIONAL: No sooner does Director of National Intelligence-to-be Tulsi Gabbard suddenly discover the constitutional merits of mass warrantless surveillance of Americans' international communications data under Section 702 than it comes to light that last month, U.S. district judge LaShann DeArcy Hall found that the "backdoor search" provision—by which the FBI or NSA searches through its ill-gotten 702 data for information on U.S. persons—is unconstitutional. (Hall issued this ruling on December 2, but it only became public last week.) 

Hall's ruling derives from a long-running case over the use of 702-derived information (secretly) in someone's terrorism prosecution. A higher court assigned her to analyze the "separate Fourth Amendment [-implicated] event" of the warrantless search through the 702 data—that is, the backdoor search.* She devastates each argument for the warrantless searches, which are usually based on exigency, if they address the searches' merits at all (typically, NSA types simply assert that non-surveillance judges lack the proper authority or expertise to review them). "A search that relies on an initial warrant or exception to the warrant requirement is limited by its original justification, and to intrude further on lawfully acquired items requires new and independent approval," Hall writes. She continues: 

In other words, simply acquiring Defendant's communications under Section 702, albeit lawfully, did not, in and of itself, permit the government to later query the retained information. …To hold otherwise would effectively allow law enforcement to amass a repository of communications under Section 702 – including those of U.S. persons – that can later be searched on demand without limitation. But this approach undermines the purpose of the warrant requirement, which is to interpose a 'neutral and detached magistrate' between the citizen and the 'officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime'...

Indeed it does! Hall appropriately analogizes the backdoor search to the British Crown's colonial-era general warrants, which prompted the Fourth Amendment in the first place. There's also an extensive redaction of the factual circumstances of the search that appears to hide a vastly overbroad claim of warrant exemption that Hall calls, in an unredacted moment, "just untrue." If I have any criticism of her ruling, it's where she attempts to use 702 against the backdoor search, writing, "Indeed, Section 702 is specifically designed to avoid the collection of communications by U.S. persons." Your honor, Section 702 is specifically designed to bless the collection of communications by U.S. persons by making it appear to be foreign collection that just so happens to constantly ("incidentally") produce the collection of communications of U.S. persons! 

Will this stop the backdoor searches? I'm sure it won't! You may have noticed that flagrant unconstitutionality tends to prompt not the end of mass surveillance, but more creative lawyering to obscure that flagrant unconstitutionality. 

If you'll indulge me, I feel a certain vindication about the backdoor search provision, so named by Sen. Ron Wyden, because me and my buddy James Ball found and exposed the NSA's claimed basis for it within the Snowden documents. That was 2013. It's 2025. Or, I guess 2024, since that was when Hall ruled. How many millions of people had their liberty—since privacy is a liberty issue—violated in secret by the NSA and FBI during the intervening eleven years? Never back down, never give in. 

I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to hearing how Gabbard discusses all this in her confirmation hearing on Thursday. 

*The NSA and FBI have previously maintained the search is not a separate event at all, but covered under the grant of authority Congress provided by passing and renewing 702. Meanwhile, out of the other side of their mouths, the NSA and FBI have maintained since Snowden that collection of the data isn't surveillance at all; surveillance only occurs at the search phase. Anyway! 

YEMEN. Also on Wednesday, Trump re-designated Ansarallah, commonly known as the Houthi Movement in Yemen—which governs a substantial part of Yemen—as a terrorist organization. This will do absolutely nothing to remove the Houthis from power. It will instead bar USAID from doing business with relief organizations seeking to get food, medicine and fuel into Yemen. The order explicitly bars funding for any organization that has "criticized international efforts to counter Ansar Allah while failing to document Ansar Allah's abuses sufficiently." 

I would also expect often-sheepdipped counterterrorism assets to return/intensify in Yemen. 

HEY, SPEAKING OF MICROSOFT AND OPENAI, they're deeply embedded in the Israeli military. 

The documents additionally indicate that the “Rolling Stone” system, which the army uses to manage the population registry and movement of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, is maintained by Microsoft Azure.

I wonder what they'll use that data for! 

SOMETHING I SHOULD HAVE PUT IN LAST WEEK'S overview of the executive orders on mass deportation is the grant of authority for ICE to operate within schools, hospitals and places of worship. I saw Greg Stoker place the prospect of immigration raids in hospitals within the context of the imperial boomerang—that is, the normalization of U.S. client Israel raiding and bombing hospitals in Gaza has eroded opposition to a lesser but no less real form of state violence in hospitals inside the United States. 

Additionally, on Wednesday, during his brief tenure as acting secretary of defense, Robert Salasses underscored a point I made in that post, about U.S. Northern Command manifesting the promise of its post-9/11 origins. NORTHCOM, as the operational lead for the military contribution to Mass Deportation, will "provide military airlift to support DHS deportation flights of more than five thousand" people from San Diego and El Paso. Already we have reports of deported migrants flown to Brazil—though on a civilian plane, not a C-17, per AFP—restrained in handcuffs and denied water and the bathroom. Such treatment prompted Colombian President Gustavo Petro's brief Sunday posting clash with Trump. 

But Petro seems to have backed down and, per Trump, accepted military deportation flights to Colombia, so I have to wonder if we are in for Guantanamo-style rendition restraints in the bellies of C-17s, particularly now that Pete Hegseth, a former Guantanamo perimeter guard, is installed as Pentagon chief. 

"This is just the beginning," Salasses said in a statement to reporters on Wednesday night, and I believe him. 

WHOEVER VANDALIZED MIRIAM, an Israeli restaurant in Park Slope was not resisting genocide, they were attributing blame for the genocide not to the Israeli government committing genocide but to a restaurant that serves shakshuka. That is an antisemitic attribution of collective guilt and deserves condemnation. Everyone's focus must be on preventing Israel from annexing the West Bank—where on Saturday the IDF shot and killed a 2-year old girl—and returning to its slaughter in Gaza after the first phase of the ceasefire ends in something like 30 days. 

FINALLY, I had a great time on Thursday answering more than 100 questions about my IRON MAN run. These go to some wild places. Someone asked me if I thought love is blind. If somehow that isn't enough, sometime today my friend Elana Levin will release an episode of their podcast Graphic Policy Radio interviewing me about IRON MAN.

DO YOU WANT SIGNED COPIES of my IRON MAN issues? The place to get those signed copies—of each issue, any issue, and all issues—is Bulletproof Comics on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn! You can order each of them from Flatbush's Finest right here! They also still have a few signed WALLER VS. WILDSTORMs left! And if you'd want some nonfiction books of mine without pictures, check out the critically-acclaimed REIGN OF TERROR—and, soon to be available for pre-order, THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN!