For Trump, Personnel Decisions Will Be Crucial

In his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, former president Trump said that the biggest mistake of his first term was choosing “bad” and “disloyal” people to be part of his administration.

Some of those he lumps into that category were neither bad nor disloyal. Former senator and then attorney general Jeff Sessions and former director of national intelligence — and retired SEAL vice admiral — Joe McGuire come to mind. I knew them both and they deserved better fates than they suffered under Trump.

And then there’s former FBI director James Comey and former CIA director Gina Haspell. Comey should have been fired as soon as Trump took office. Haspell — who Trump had been warned against — should never have been chosen as CIA director.

A reader who remembered my columns from years ago asked me to review what I wrote then and give my take on the new information that is coming out thanks to whistleblower revelations. Here goes.

I’m sure I’d written about Haspell and Comey before, but the only columns I could find were the following. One explained how Haspell ran a big part of the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump and his campaign while she was CIA station chief in London. Another was about the Comey-Brennan conspiracy to violate Trump’s civil rights to interfere in his 2016 campaign.

Gina Haspell is not a disloyal person. To the contrary, she is entirely loyal but to the wrong people. As I wrote in 2019, she was a protégé of John Brennan, a past CIA director and a hyper-partisan anti-Trumper. As CIA station chief in London Haspell had no problem with Comey’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign and Trump himself. She ran the overseas part of it.

We have to remember that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was based entirely on the fraudulent “Steele Dossier,” which no part of the intelligence community (IC) ever verified. It was the means by which the IC declared war on Trump. Both Trump and the IC have been at odds ever since.

Oblivious to all this — and despite warnings he received from intelligence community veterans — Trump nominated Haspell to be CIA Director.

That was clearly Trump’s worst personnel decision. Not only was she loyal to the wrong people, Haspell ensured that the intelligence community continued to oppose Trump during her tenure.

There is no excuse for the IC to be politicized, though it very much is.

The IC still holds a big grudge against Trump. If, as we hope, he is reelected tomorrow, he’ll have to deal with that quickly because it is a real crisis within the government. If any president cannot rely on the IC for accurate information, foreign policy is mere guesswork. We’ve had enough of that under Biden/Harris. It must not be allowed to continue.

Former FBI director James Comey was an anti-Trump partisan from the start. If you need any proof of that you need only remember that in July 2016 he gave Hillary Clinton a pass for obvious, serious crimes while he served in the top FBI job. (READ MORE from Jed Babbin: What Great Allies We Are)

Clinton had, for the four years she was Obama’s secretary of state, used her unsecured email system — “Clintonmail.com” — to discuss with her staff and others (including Obama) secret and top secret information.

Included among the top secret information was an unknown amount of “SITK” — “Special Intelligence Talent Keyhole” satellite intelligence — which is some of the most closely-held intelligence data, equal in sensitivity to information received from spies in enemy governments. The only other classified information that is as closely held is the information about Presidential Directives, which was another subject of conversation on “Clintonmail.”

Presidential Directives are top secret documents which give presidential authorizations of covert operations, some of which leave blood on the walls.

Anyone could — and some foreign governments must have — tapped into those “Clintonmail” conversations.

Hillary and her staff communicated regularly — hundreds or thousands of times — about those subjects over the “Clintonmail” system. Every time they did this it was a serious felony, and they did it — hundreds? thousands? — of times.

Nevertheless, in his big press conference that July day, Comey said that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges against Clinton for the classified information on her unsecured emails. It was an enormous dereliction of his duty. Comey’s decision was entirely political, meant to help Clinton’s campaign.

Trump fired Comey in May 2017. And now we have evidence that Comey ran a “honeypot” operation to spy on Trump’s 2016 campaign.

According to a Washington Times report, Comey ran that operation personally. According to the whistleblower, two female FBI agents were planted in Trump’s campaign to act as “honeypots.” During the Cold War we referred to Russian female spies who were willing to have sex with a target “honey traps,” and “honeypots” are no different: the method and the objective are the same.

How many female FBI agents were willing to prostitute themselves to help James Comey spy on the Trump campaign? The whistleblower said there were two. If the whistleblower’s allegations are true, and however many there were, they will have thoroughly ruined the FBI’s already shot-to-hell reputation.

So what can Trump do if he’s elected tomorrow?

First, he needs to have a conservative experienced in personnel matters at the helm of presidential nominations and appointments and a staff to match. As president he can appoint over 8,000 members of the government from cabinet members on down.

As I learned from more than one friend who went through the Trump process the first time around, Trump had the worst presidential appointments staff ever. As the First Law of Governance says, personnel is policy. Someone who has that as his or her guiding principle — and their like-minded staff — will be essential this time around.

Second, Trump needs to clean up the IC. That’s an enormous task but there can be a few steps taken immediately.

Trump needs to appoint someone in each federal agency — every one, including the Defense Department, State Department, the IC agencies, and White House operations such as the National Security Council — who has the clout to remove people who are loyal Democrat operatives. (READ MORE: The Real Forever War)

As for DoD, that will also require firing all the generals and admirals who have bought into Biden’s “woke” policy that is destroying our military.

Most senior IC members and cabinet members such as Hillary keep their security clearances for years after they leave office. Trump could — and damned well should — cancel all of those clearances immediately for Clinton, Obama, Biden, Harris, and everyone who worked for them. He may not be able to cancel the clearances of former presidents or vice presidents but he can cancel all the rest.

Those steps are just the beginning. If Trump can come to understand that personnel is policy, his second term — if there is one — will be a lot more successful than his first.

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