How the spies lost the trust of the President

Eli Lake:
...
... it's a mistake to analyze this as a choice between believing Putin versus believing our intelligence community, as Senator John McCain recently tweeted. It's no mystery why Trump doesn't trust U.S. intelligence agencies. As the old saying goes: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Trump understandably believes the intelligence agencies are out to get him.

Let's start with the 2016 election. It's true that Trump during the campaign displayed a disturbing sycophancy when it came to Putin. Russia's president seemed to be the only world leader the candidate wouldn't criticize. And that was unprecedented. But it was equally unprecedented for so many former intelligence mandarins -- who served presidents from both parties -- to openly campaign against him.

Remember this Nov. 3, 2016 op-ed from the former CIA director Michael Hayden: "Trump Is Russia's Useful Fool." Then came a scolding from former deputy CIA director Michael Morell and former undersecretary of defense for intelligence Mike Vickers. They bluntly said Trump couldn't be commander-in-chief if he kept saying all these sweet things about Putin. Both men served as advisers to Hillary Clinton's campaign.

So it's a "the chicken or the egg" problem. Since early in the campaign, Trump violated political norms by openly praising an American adversary. This prompted former intelligence leaders to violate norms by openly engaging in electoral politics.

Then there is the period right after the election. That's when an opposition research dossier, generated by a firm that took money from Russian-connected interests to campaign against human-rights sanctions on Russia, was circulating around Washington. It turns out that the opposition research was paid for in secret by the Democrats. It was a hodgepodge of rumor, innuendo, reporting and probably some accurate information. Former FBI director James Comey felt compelled to disclose the existence of this dossier in briefings for both Trump and the outgoing president, Barack Obama.

We all know what happened next. Armed with that tidbit, CNN published a story about the dossier being briefed to the current and incoming president. A few hours later, Buzzfeed got hold of the mysterious document and published the whole thing. It birthed a story line that has dogged Trump since his inauguration.
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So it shouldn't be a surprise that Trump doesn't trust the intelligence community. A better question is why so many Democrats and journalists do. It was only three years ago that many Democrats called for CIA director John Brennan's head after the Senate Intelligence Committee learned his agency had been spying on Democratic staffers conducting oversight of the CIA's "black site" program during the George W. Bush administration. It was an ugly episode.
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There is more.

When the FBI used the dirty dossier to get a FISA order to spy on the Trump campaign that is something that is not likely to increase trust.  Then there were the intel reports that kept popping up in the media because of Obama administration unmaskings.  The bigger question is why should he trust these people?

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