Adam Howard (Credit: public domain)
Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail to make war against the deep state. Now it seems the first battle may take place on home ground: the White House.
Congressional and intelligence sources tell Tablet that the candidate slotted in for the top intelligence spot on the National Security Council is ill suited to serve the president’s agenda. Adam Howard, reportedly the front-runner for the NSC’s senior director for intelligence, is currently staff director for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), chaired by Republican Congressman Mike Turner. According to several current congressional sources, multiple House members have raised concern over an alleged boast made by Turner on Capitol Hill that he’s “taking over Trump’s IC [Intelligence Community].” Presumably, Howard is meant to be his instrument.
Maher Bitar (center right), the outgoing National Security Council Director for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs, and his wife, Astrid Dorelien, during a family photo in the Oval Office of the White House September 21, 2015 in Washington, DC. (Credit: ObamaDiary)
On Sunday, Joshua Steinman, an NSC official from the first Trump administration, posted a long thread on X reporting that the current NSC is being staffed with holdovers from the Joe Biden administration and others unlikely to serve Trump’s agenda, including Howard, whose intelligence experience is limited to the two years he’s served as HPSCI staff director. Biden’s senior director for intelligence is Maher Bitar, an anti-Israel activist once affiliated with the Students for Justice in Palestine. Bitar also came from HPSCI, where he worked under then-Congressman now-Sen. Adam Schiff, one of Trump’s most vocal opponents on Capitol Hill.
“Without an operational intelligence background, you can’t clean up the mess made by the current [Biden] team,” wrote Steinman.
I spent 4yrs on President Trump’s National Security Council – first day to last – and I fear there are mistakes being made NOW re: NSC that will lead to four years of ineffective governance at best, betrayal at worst.
Out of loyalty to him, I am going public.
Here we go:
1/
— joshua steinman (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) (@JoshuaSteinman) January 5, 2025
“[Is Howard] willing to expose IC dirty tricks targeting the President?” Steinman asked in his X thread. He was not outlining a hypothetical but rather referring to the NSC’s work in the first Trump White House uncovering the surveillance of the president and his aides. After the 2016 election, NSC staffers found that Obama officials had unmasked the names of transition team officials in transcripts of foreign intelligence intercepts, most notably Gen. Michael Flynn. Trump’s onetime national security adviser was unmasked by at least 40 Obama officials—including now President Joe Biden.
The unlawful leak to the media of Flynn’s phone conversation with Russia’s U.S. ambassador led first to the combat veteran’s departure from the White House and subsequently the special counsel investigation that hobbled the first half of Trump’s first term in office. NSC holdovers from the Obama administration bogged down the Trump team and one holdover, CIA official Eric Ciaramella, teed up the first impeachment of Trump.
Turner in fact was excellent during the impeachment process, using the televised hearings to defend the president and break down Schiff’s anti-Trump witnesses. After Turner took over the committee, he was reportedly keen to reset relations with Schiff and the Democrats and move toward bipartisanship. The problem is that it’s hard to have comity with a faction led by an ambitious activist like Schiff who saw the committee as a political weapon to target opponents.
There’s a lot riding on the current NSC starting off on the strongest possible footing and with an eye to defending a commander in chief certain to be in the deep state’s crosshairs. Steinman concluded his thread with the observation that if the new intel director “isn’t 100% on board with the Trump Agenda, we are in for trouble.” (Read more: Tablet, 1/09/2025) (Archive)