New York Times Magazine: “Under Trump, intelligence officials have been placed in the unusual position of being pressured to justify the importance of their work, protect their colleagues from political retribution and demonstrate fealty to a president. Though intelligence officials have been loath to admit it publicly, the cumulative result has been devastating. Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, compared the O.D.N.I.’s decline under Trump to that of the Justice Department, where ‘they have, step by step, set out to destroy one of the crown jewels of the American government,’ he told me. ‘And they’re using the same playbook with the intelligence community.'”

“The O.D.N.I.’s erosion has in turn shaped the information that flows out of the intelligence community to the White House — or doesn’t. The softening of Key Judgment 2 signified a sobering new development of the Trump era: the intelligence community’s willingness to change what it would otherwise say straightforwardly so as not to upset the president. ‘To its credit, the intelligence community resisted during the earlier part of the president’s term,’ Representative Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told me. ‘But by casting out Dan Coats and then Maguire, and replacing them with loyalists, I think over time it’s had the effect of wearing the intelligence community down, making them less willing to speak truth to power.'”