GOP pressure mounts to prosecute, fire intel officials who hid election issues from Trump
The materials, posted on the White House website following a prime-time address, include assessments indicating that intelligence officials were aware of risks such as outdated software and potential compromises by adversaries like China.
President Donald Trump on Thursday released a trove of declassified intelligence documents that his administration says expose long-suspected vulnerabilities in U.S. election infrastructure, in addition to alarming intelligence pointing to prior administrations' and officials' knowledge of such issues that were kept from the president, Congress and the American people.
"The intelligence community withheld information from his president's daily brief. That's a big deal. That's where the intelligence community gives him the absolute most classified data, what he needs to know for that day, and frankly, during his first term, they withheld it. That is a black mark on the intelligence community," Rep. Keith Self, R-Tex., told Just The News.
Self continued, "They should be charged because they hold positions of great responsibility, and they have violated our trust. They have violated the actual agreements that they sign when they get that level of classified data, so this is very, very easily charged and indicted."
The materials, posted on the White House website following a prime-time address, include assessments indicating that intelligence officials were aware of risks such as outdated software and potential compromises by adversaries like China — which the documents claim acquired data on millions of American voters — but did not fully disclose them to the president, Congress or the public.
At the conclusion of Trump's address, he directed Americans to the White House website, where the documents were both readable and downloadable. Minutes later, the site crashed due to high traffic volume.
Self is not alone in his conviction that these intelligence officials should be held accountable.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford, R-Ark., called on CIA Director John Ratcliffe to "take decisive action to hold all those involved ...accountable for these egregious betrayals of the American people’s trust.
"We all can agree that bureaucrats who manipulate or conceal intelligence from the people’s elected leaders to push their preferred policies or end states cannot keep their jobs in the American people’s Intelligence Community," he wrote on X. "Those involved, and any who knew and remained silent, must be immediately removed from their positions of trust.
Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article III Project and a former Senate lawyer, told Just The News he believes prosecutions are warranted.
Intelligence analysts "obstructed and they conspired to provide doctored evidence to the President of the United States about a foreign invasion of our elections, and they must be held accountable. They must be arrested. They must be charged. They must be held accountable," he said.
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