Intelligence Committee member Jim Himes expresses confidence in Biden national security team
In this episode of Intelligence Matters, Michael Morell speaks with Congressman Jim Himes, a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and chair of the Strategic Technologies and Advanced Research Subcommittee of HPSCI. Himes discusses the coronavirus as a national security threat, re-building trust in the intelligence community, and his confidence in Biden's national security team.
Highlights:
- Covid-19 as national security threat: "We were just shy of three thousand fatalities on 9/11. We've now spent many trillions of dollars to address a threat that at the end of the day killed three thousand Americans. Next weekend there will be three hundred thousand dead Americans as a result of the coronavirus. If I said to you, two years ago, 'I can't tell you what it's going to be, but I can tell you that in December of 2020, we will be talking about something that just killed three hundred thousand Americans.' You would sit up and you would have said, 'are we spending, pick your number, fifty billion dollars to avoid that happening."
- Rebuilding trust in intelligence community: "There is no deep state in this country, but there is something that would look like the deep state to somebody who is a believer that the president should be all powerful and the president should be able to, in a unitary way, do whatever he wants to do. . . It's not the deep state. It is an attribute of a society in which there is the rule of law. The president doesn't get to override the rule of law."
- Reaction to Biden's national security team: "Avril Haines, Tony Blinken, these are some of the most understated and unflamboyant, deeply steeped in the culture of the agencies that they're being asked to run. I feel very good about all of them. They are people who grew up inside or spent years in the agencies they are being asked to run. I know them to be studiously apolitical. I know that Tony Blinken was with Biden for a very long time. But nonetheless, I know them to be inherently apolitical. I feel very good about the team that's been assembled so far."
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"Intelligence Matters": Rep. Jim Himes transcript
Producer: Paulina Smolinski
MICHAEL MORELL: Congressman, welcome to Intelligence Matters. It is a real honor to have you on the show. I just want to let my listeners know that we're going to take a one week hiatus here in our National Security Issues series, quite frankly, because we had the opportunity to have you on the show, Congressman. We'll continue with that series next week. I'd love start with a little bit of your background. Why politics as a career choice?
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: Great question. I came to politics pretty late in life. When I got elected in 2008, I had never held elected office. I had been in business for 12 years. I'd worked in the nonprofit sector for five. The succinct answer to your question is that as interesting as business was, I've always been fascinated by the power of government to do good things when it does good things. But also, how severe the consequences can be when it gets things wrong. I thought, 'wow, I'd like to like to be a part of that for a while.'
MICHAEL MORELL: Government has a potentially bigger impact than individual nonprofits or NGOs. That always drew me to government as well.
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: Absolutely. At some level, the private sector can transform the world through the development of technology or changes to consumer technology. Academia is amazing, too. Ideas, at the end of the day, are driving our history. When it comes to the nineteen sixties, taking big strides to improving civil rights in this country, it takes the power and the pervasiveness of the federal government to make stuff like that happen.
MICHAEL MORELL: Then why an interest in national security?
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: Number one, of all the places where government getting things right or wrong can matter on a day to day basis, foreign policy and national security is one of them.
We're speaking very shortly after the anniversary yesterday of December 7th, 1941. There's an example of what happens when intelligence gets it wrong. There's plenty of other, more contemporary example. At the end of the day, our country is an idea, and it's an idea that we don't just want to keep to ourselves. It's an idea that we want other people around the world, hopefully in a graceful way, to be open to and to accept enlightened ideas of accountable government and freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The way we propagate those things is largely through our example, but also through thoughtful foreign policy and thoughtful national security.
MICHAEL MORELL: Then why intelligence? Did you ask to be on the committee?
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: I asked for a number of years before I was appointed to the committee. Speaker Pelosi is very thoughtful and very careful about who she puts on that committee, as she should be.
I sit on the Financial Services Committee. Everything else we do around here is subject to public scrutiny. When we're talking on the Financial Services Committee about derivatives, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, any number of academics, are scrutinizing what's happening in the world of derivatives. When we're talking about things like surveillance or counterterrorism policy or what our intelligence sources are in places like Russia and China. Nobody gets to look at that except for a very small number of people in the executive branch who are doing it. And a very, very small number of people in the Congress who are charged with making sure that those activities are consistent with our law and, just as importantly, with our values. That feels like a real job. One of the things that can be challenging about being in the Congress is that you spend a lot of time doing things, wondering if you're actually accomplishing stuff when you're performing oversight over a lethal program or when you're trying to balance our surveillance needs against the protections that every American has. That feels like really important work.
MICHAEL MORELL: This oversight role- I don't think people give enough credit to. These are, at the end of the day, secret intelligence organizations operating in a democracy. At the end of the day, the American people need to have confidence that they're operating effectively. That they're using taxpayer's money wisely and they're operating within the Constitution and the statutes of the United States. This is really important stuff at the end of the day.
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: It's important for reasons big and small. The big reason it's important is that in an open democracy, secrets are hard. Covert activity, stuff that the American electorate can't know about, that's hard. In some ways it runs against the grain of the very concept of democracy, where the citizens who pay for those activities should know what they're paying for. They should have some confidence that it's both effective, but also consistent with their values. It's important for reasons that may be smaller than that overarching reason.
I joined the committee two weeks before the Snowden disclosures, and we could spend hours on that. One thing that was true, and I'm not a fan of Snowden. I think there's lots of ways to raise your hand in a safe and comfortable way, saying, 'I don't like what I'm seeing here.' He did not choose those ways. But to some extent, it was a failure of oversight, too. Because when people saw what Snowden revealed, there were a lot of folks that were pretty uncomfortable about what they saw. A lot of folks were undereducated about what they saw. That's a little bit of a failure of the Congress because it's our job to go back to the American people and say, 'look we may not be able to tell you everything, but you should know the broad parameters of what we're doing and we think that it's either good or bad based on what we know.'
MICHAEL MORELL: Do you think the folks that you deal with in the intelligence community understand the importance of oversight? I sat in a lot of meetings in front of both your committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee with intelligence officers who I saw being more careful with what they said to you all than what they said to a foreign intelligence service.
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: That's interesting and a little discouraging. I can understand there's lots of reasons why a senior intelligence officer would approach a congressional hearing very, very carefully. Obviously, we control the purse strings. We can raise hell in ways that are really uncomfortable for the intelligence community.
We're also notoriously talkative. Wes don't grow up in environments where we're told to keep quiet. Much the contrary, we live in an environment where we're told to talk about what we know. I get all of that.
To answer your question, number one, I've never met anybody in testimony who I didn't feel was committed to giving me the information that I sought. I get in the face of critics of the intelligence community. There's a lot of stereotypes out there. 'These are cowboys. These are folks who want to operate on the edge of the law.' No, no, no. There may be a few of those out there, but by and large, these are people who are deeply patriotic, deeply steeped in the Constitution, in the law.
What is challenging is oversight is really hard for a whole bunch of reasons. One, it's what I call the little boy effect. For starters, it's not lost on me that the intelligence community will often come into a hearing, and they'll spend the first thirty minutes showing us really cool videos. But they're right. I hate to be gendered about this, but there's a little boy in all of us who it is like, 'oh, that's really cool. Well, OK, that's fun.' That's not oversight. Then you have a challenge again, when you get to know intelligence professionals. You get to know that they're incredibly committed and patriotic people. They are very thoughtful about the law, and they put their lives at risk. You can't help but be consumed with your pride in what they do. That makes oversight hard because our job is not to be cheerleaders for the intelligence community. It's to every once in a while say, 'hey, this isn't going to work.' I've always believed 'show us the videos because they're pretty amazing' but start every hearing by telling us what's going wrong and what you're worried about. We don't do enough of that.
MICHAEL MORELL: How do you prioritize the biggest threats to our national security?
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: It's a key oversight question. It starts with the fact that humans aren't good at thinking about risk. The classic example is that everybody is terrified of flying, and statistically speaking you will not die on an airplane. Nobody is terrified of the double bacon cheeseburger that most assuredly will kill you. Right. As humans, we're not very good at thinking smart about risk. For example, I was in lower Manhattan on September 11th, 2001, and so there are few people who feel that event as much as I do. We reordered the United States government, our system of laws, and our military. We fought two wars to avert that from happening again.
I'll remind you that there we were just shy of three thousand fatalities on 9/11. We've now spent many trillions of dollars to address a threat that at the end of the day killed three thousand Americans. Next weekend there will be three hundred thousand dead Americans as a result of the coronavirus. If I said to you, two years ago, 'I can't tell you what it's going to be, but I can tell you that in December of 2020, we will be talking about something that just killed three hundred thousand Americans.' You would sit up and you would have said, 'are we spending, pick your number, fifty billion dollars to avoid that happening.'
My point is that we're sometimes not very smart about thinking and sending resources to the areas that are truly a risk to the safety and soundness of our country.
MICHAEL MORELL: When you think about the risk, is the rise of China what worries you the most? Is it the technology battles we're in the midst of? Or is it Russia? Iran? Climate change? What do you think we need to focus most on?
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: Let me start by answering that question tactically. As you might sense from my previous answer, I do think we've got work to do to shift resources and attention away from counterterrorism towards the hard target threats. China in particular. Even as we are very, very careful not to think over simplistically and say that China is a threat in the way terrorism or the Soviets or the Nazis were a threat. China is a unique challenge.
They hold a lot of our debt. We are huge trading partners. They are a unique challenge in which intelligence plays a really important role.
I think we have under invested in the intelligence around China in particular. I mean, what are the truly catastrophic events? What's the analogy to nuclear weaponry? Nuclear weaponry in 1945 changed the United States government because President Roosevelt, on the advice of Albert Einstein, realized that if the Nazis beat us to a bomb, history would be radically different than we would want it to be. I don't know that we're in that world today. You asked about technology. We need to make sure that we are at the forefront of biotechnology, where some really nasty stuff could come out of things like quantum computing. That gets pretty technical and esoteric. The point is we better be at the forefront. While I think it's a mistake to use a race as an analogy to thinking about those things, let me just say 'if we're not winning that race, we better be up in the pack.'
MICHAEL MORELL: What's the new leadership of the IC going to find when it gets into place? What will they find that's working well and what will they find that needs some adjustment?
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: The answer is very clear. The intelligence community is about finding truth. Truth is sort of the wrong word, because never in the history of intelligence has somebody said, 'here's the truth.' What they say is 'here's what we believe with a high probability.' Their chief customer, the president of the United States, for reasons that we see very literally every hour of every day on Twitter, is not interested in the truth. I know that sounds like a deeply partisan statement, but objectively speaking, this is not a president who highly values the truth.
There's a natural tension between between the intelligence community's ingrained, and sometimes difficult to maintain commitment to the truth, and a president who says essentially, 'don't tell me the truth, tell me what reinforces what I believe.' First of all, having new leadership is going to be a very big step in the right direction. In the professional ranks, there is going to be very big sighs of relief.
There's also going to need to be a cultural reconstruction. I don't spend enough time inside the agencies to know how cultures suddenly shifted in favor of managing the president or in favor of managing this or that DNI. But culture is really important. The new team is going to need to go in and from the most senior professional right down to the new recruit, they are going to need to fumigate the place and create a culture. A culture that says 'we are professionals and regardless of what the president wants or thinks he or she wants, we need to convey the truth. We need to be true to that process.' That's going to be a challenge.
MICHAEL MORELL: My sense is that if President Biden says and does the right things, if the new leadership says and does the right things, accomplishing what you just said I think is doable. One of the things that I'm really worried about is because of President Trump's words and actions, there's a significant chunk of the population that sees the intelligence community as part of the deep state. They see the intelligence community not as as defending the country, but as being partisan, actually trying to undermine democracy.
How do we change that mindset? Because that mindset doesn't go away when President Biden gets inaugurated on January 20th.
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: I'm not sure I know the prescription and how we fix that, but I do know the diagnosis. The problem in this country, from the standpoint of those who believe in the deep state- let's set aside bureaucratic inertia. There is no deep state in this country, but there is something that would look like the deep state to somebody who is a believer that the president should be all powerful and the president should be able to, in a unitary way, do whatever he wants to do.
So if you want to ban Muslims from coming into the country. This is Donald Trump's words, not mine, or if you want to say 'No Congress, I am going to take money and build a wall.' Two things which are blatantly illegal, and the law stops you from doing that. The law as executed by the Department of Homeland Security or the military or the CIA stops you from doing what you want to do. You might say, 'that's the deep state.' Baloney. It's not the deep state. It is an attribute of a society in which there is the rule of law. The president doesn't get to override the rule of law, as this president has regularly wanted to do.
I understand where the idea that there is a deep state comes from, but it's not a deep state. I've mucked around in federal bureaucracies for 12 years now, and I've never met anybody who says 'my job now is to stop the will of the president of the United States.' What they say is, 'I will abide by the law.' And if you're Donald Trump or any of his minions, that feels like a deep state rebuke.
Now to your question, how do we change that? I take some solace in history. When Joseph McCarthy was running rampant in this building, and ruining people's careers, because when they were 19 they were a member of the Communist Party of the United States, he had a lot of support. He created fear throughout academia, through show biz, you name it. Today, nobody stands up and says, 'yeah, I was a big supporter of Joseph McCarthy. I really wish he'd prevailed.' I think time and the natural pragmatism of the American citizenry will erode this idea that there is this deep state that was out to thwart Donald Trump's will.
MICHAEL MORELL: How do we get the ICC to the cutting edge of technology, and how do we keep it there?
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: My subcommittee wrote a report that I would commend to anybody who's interested in this. I think we're doing pretty well. The innovation that happens inside places like MIT, Lincoln Labs, inside DARPA and IARPA funded projects, inside research centers and in American academia is really pretty good. It's keeping us near the front of the pack on some things. What's different is that we used to be the only people in the pack 30 years ago. Today that's no longer true. Even 30 years ago, the Soviets were pretty good on technology.
We're still in really good shape, but we're no longer alone in the front of the pack. The Chinese, the Russians and the Iranians and some of our antagonists are there. By the way, so are our allies.
The Israelis, with respect to things like communication hardware, are as good as they come. From a government standpoint, it's a really interesting question. Because the success model has always been that government does the basic research. The government didn't invent the iPhone. But the semiconductor that runs the iPhone, the GPS system that provides location services, Siri, a lot of the basic research was actually undertaken by a federal commitment to that kind of research. We need to recommit to that.
There's a less intuitive point, which is how does technological innovation happen? It happens in environments that are nonhierarchical, that are iconoclastic, in which people take huge risks. If you think about those three things, nonhierarchical, iconoclastic, and a place where people take huge risks. I'm talking about everything that is not the government. None of those are values of the government. We need to think about having our intelligence community in particular, much more open to entrepreneurs in Palo Alto and Route 128. To be more open to going to London to meet this guy at an artificial intelligence organization, to sending our intelligence officers out into the private sector. Sending them into academia to absorb some of these things, non-hierarchical thinking, iconoclasm, risk taking, that otherwise don't grow naturally inside the federal government.
MICHAEL MORELL: How do we make sure that we protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans as the ICC does more with technology, particularly open source information? At the end of the day, we're trying to protect the constitution here, not undermine it.
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: By the way, that's a subset of a much larger conversation. Every once in a while, as a member of the committee, somebody comes up to me and metaphorically throws up all over me about the fact that the NSA is tapping their phones. I usually say, 'the NSA is not tapping your phones. Let me explain to you who might be tapping your phone and under what conditions, etc.' That's not always a successful conversation. It's part of a larger issue because, 'you think the government knows a lot about you. Let me introduce you to Facebook and Google and let's take a look at what they know about you.'
Misunderstanding and misinformation thrives in an environment where there aren't lots of relationships and communication. One of the things that I do as an overseer is I spend a lot of time explaining under what conditions an intelligence agency might look at somebodies' browser history. That somebody is almost certainly a non-U.S. citizen, not subject to constitutional protections. But under what conditions can the FBI look at your browser history. Having that conversation is a real step in the right direction.
It's not just the general public. I have senators. I kid you not. I have senators who will say that the NSA is tapping people's phones. People who should really know better. I think having those conversations and establishing those relationships, particularly in the world of people who are technologically savvy, is something we could do a lot better on.
MICHAEL MORELL: Switching gears to relations between Republicans and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, which as you know as well as anybody, has not been perfect. What does that look like going forward?
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: Not been perfect, that's the understatement of the year. Some day when we have more time, you'll need to tell me what it's like for somebody testifying in front of a committee that has become so horribly polarized.
MICHAEL MORELL: I could do that actually.
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: Here's the good news. We know why that happened, right? It was Donald Trump. Whichever side you take on this, one side of that committee became an investigative operation against Donald Trump and the other side became the defense of Donald Trump. That's about as impartially as I can say what happened. That is not what that committee should be.
I do believe that the Ukraine situation that got this president impeached is not likely to be immediately repeated. So maybe we don't have to stumble over that problem again. It was remarkable the extent to which facts had nothing to do with that. This gets to the larger question. We were talking earlier about a deep state. If you explain to somebody what the facts are, that is very rarely persuasive.
A couple of things are going to happen. We're going to have Democratic President Joe Biden. I am 100 percent confident in my prediction that my Republican friends are very soon going to rediscover the absolutely critical nature of oversight of the executive branch. Which they weren't terribly committed to for the last four years.
I don't mean to be snide about that. The Democrats do that, too. My Republican friends are going to all of a sudden be super interested in oversight. That's going to help.
I have a lot of confidence in people like Avril Haines taking the helm to be nonpartisan, to be apolitical, to be crisp and clear in their answers. That's going to help in a big way.
MICHAEL MORELL: Do you think it's possible for the committee to get to where it needs to be with Congressman Schiff and Congressman Nunes leading their respective sides, given all the politics that have gone through the last four years?
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: It's an awkward question for a bunch of reasons. There's no denying that there was a very substantial breakdown in that relationship. Quite frankly, not just in that relationship-- I am being as neutral as I can. I have very strong feelings that I'm not going to get overly partisan about in this conversation.
It wasn't just the ranking member and the chairman. By and large, most members of the committee are pretty reasonable, pragmatic people. We don't have a lot of the aggressive bomb throwers on the committee. But we just went through a really difficult time.
It's going to be really hard to reestablish the committee that we need. It's really critical. We're not playing around here. This is really serious stuff.
I'd like to believe that if Adam and Devon remain at the helm on the committee, that they take a deep breath and recommit themselves to the mission of the committee. But it's going to be very challenging.
MICHAEL MORELL: What's your reaction so far to the Biden national security team.
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: Avril Haines, Tony Blinken, these are some of the most understated and unflamboyant, deeply steeped in the culture of the agencies that they're being asked to run. I feel very good about all of them.
They are people who grew up inside or spent years in the agencies they are being asked to run. I know them to be studiously apolitical. I know that Tony Blinken was with Biden for a very long time. But nonetheless, I know them to be inherently apolitical. I feel very good about the team that's been assembled so far.
MICHAEL MORELL: They're also all whip smart. They don't come much smarter than the three of them.
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: Which is 99 percent of the time a good thing. I've reflected a lot on the Iraq war and some of the other strategic mistakes we've made. When we talk about people like Robert McNamara and Secretary Wolfowitz, sometimes being really smart can be a liability. Nonetheless, what you say is absolutely right. I think whip smart, combined with a little bit of intellectual humility, is the ticket.
MICHAEL MORELL: All three of them who I know very well. All three of them are humble and have deep integrity. I think perfect choices for the moment that we live in.
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: It's going to be a challenge to me. I'm going to have to make a mental switch because we are humans. I'm going to commit to my Republican friends to be as skeptical and as tough on these people who are associated with my party and who are my friends, as I would be of Rick Grenell or John Ratcliffe or whoever the folks that were temperamentally or at least psychologically more easy to be tough oversteer toward.
Our role is not to support or attack, but to be constructively skeptical and critical of what we've been charged to oversee.
MICHAEL MORELL: I know it's not official yet. What's your reaction to General Austin as secretary of defense?
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: I don't have a ton to say about that. I'm not steeped in the lure of a civilian secretary of defense. I do believe that I voted for the waiver for General Mattis.
There are folks who are expressing very serious concern about a general officer so soon assuming the civilian leadership. But I'm going to defer on that until I'm a little smarter.
MICHAEL MORELL: Question about what you expect from the IC leadership as it comes before the committee. What do you want to hear from them?
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: There's no question in my mind that the testimony was probably colored by the what was occurring between the majority and the minority in the last four years.
Donald Trump will be gone. Different people will be in place. I will want them to move beyond the Donald Trump wars that we've all experienced.
Number two, if I were running the show, I alluded to this before, I would demand that every hearing start- not with that cool video, which, yes, I want to see. But I need you to start with what's going wrong, what are the threats, what are the risks? Then we'll see the cool video about how good you are.
Again, oversight is hard. It really is hard. It's hard for reasons well beyond what we've discussed. This is a very technical area. It's a legally esoteric area. I need you, Madam DNI, to tell me what you worry about and what risks there are out there so that we can be, first of all, not ambushed when something goes wrong. Secondly, so we can be thoughtful in helping you to address those risks. That's a deeply unnatural thing. Nobody ever gets rewarded for making a mistake and coming in front of Congress and saying, 'we screwed this up.' We need to change that culture. If I were running the show, I would say start every hearing with what makes you nervous, where the risks are and what keeps you up at night.
MICHAEL MORELL: Congressman, I don't know if you were on the committee when Leon Panetta was the director, but I thought Leon was the ultimate role model for dealing with Congress. His approach was 'tell Congress what you think, tell them everything you know. Be honest about what you've got right. Be honest about what you've got wrong and you're going to find a friend.' That was my experience being his deputy. We had terrific relations with both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee because he took that approach.
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: I wasn't on the committee when he was director, I came here in 2009, so I did not experience that, but I'm not one bit surprised. Leon Panetta was a member of Congress for many years. So he knew how these creatures behave.
What you describe rings true. I see this every single day in hearings. Immense precision in answers. You can tell that immense precision is driven by the absolute horror that you might say something that isn't perfectly accurate. That's not actually a useful conversation. You're a person. I'm a person. We make mistakes. If you don't know precisely give me an estimate.
MICHAEL MORELL: What do you want the American people to know about the women and the men who work in the intelligence community?
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: I want the American public to know that there's a reason why we have not suffered another foreign attack of the magnitude of 9/11. And you don't know what those reasons are or how it worked or why it continues to work. But the answer is the women and men of the intelligence community and the women and men of the military. That doesn't mean they always get it right. In fact, sometimes they get it spectacularly wrong. But in ways that you will never know, these people put their lives at risk in places you don't ever want to be in for your safety. They do get it wrong from time to time, catastrophically wrong from time to time. Often when they get it wrong, it's not because they're doing it wrong. It's because they're political.
I'm thinking of the famous slam dunk case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They need to know that those people are all those things. While they do make mistakes, they think really hard, not just about the law, but about the values that underlie that law. It doesn't mean they don't make mistakes, but they need to understand that's the culture inside the intelligence.
MICHAEL MORELL: Congressman, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for your service on the committee. It's not a committee where there's a lot of political benefits to being on it, but certainly it benefits the national security of the United States. Thank you for joining us.
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: Thank you, Michael. As always, a pleasure talking with you.
