Trump’s self-interested attack on the security services undermines morale

This is not the time to be challenging the FBI and CIA about phone-tapping, even if his plan is to deflect attention from Putin links

There will be questions raised about the effectiveness of our security surveillance. There always are. However unlikely and mathematically challenging the circumstances of any particular terror incident may be, there are inevitably questions to be asked. But they will be muted and even their formulation will grant the sense of futility: it would be physically and financially impossible to maintain non-stop monitoring of every misfit and hanger-on who has ever come to the attention of the security services. Omniscience is not an option. We all know that.

Even more important, we know that this is not the time to be undermining either public confidence in those agencies or their own professional morale. If there were identifiable mistakes, they will, of course, be addressed, but freewheeling public criticism would only contribute to division and anxiety, which is the very opposite of what every responsible national figure has called for.

The free world – an expression that began to sound outmoded 20 years ago, but which is now more useful than ever – needs to be clear about its priorities: united moral leadership and faith in the institutions that constitute an enlightened society. When politicians talk about Islamist terror attacks on “our values”, that is what they mean.

So it is peculiarly appalling that, at this precise moment, the President of the United States has explicitly refused to back down from his war of attrition with his own national security agencies and his absurd accusations against the agency of his country’s closest ally. Contrary to earlier statements from White House spokesmen, Donald Trump has reiterated in a startling interview with Time magazine that he does not withdraw his allegation that he was spied on with the help of GCHQ, at the behest of the Obama administration. He reaffirms his belief that the US intelligence agencies had malign intentions toward him and his associates, which resulted in those agencies listening in to their phone conversations before he took office. (He had originally used the term “wiretapping”, but later claimed this was meant vaguely to include all sorts of secret information-gathering.)

The basis for this reiteration of the charges against his own country’s agencies and those of the UK is information produced by the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes: that the names and communications of Mr Trump and some of his associates had been caught up in an “incidental collection” of data resulting from the routine monitoring of foreign sources. In other words, in the course of the surveillance of foreign agents and contacts, which is normal under US security procedure, there were communications with members of the Trump transition team. Both sides of those communications were collected. Hence, the appearance of Trump team members in the security records. This is what Mr Trump now claims to be “vindication” of his charge that Barack Obama had ordered the “wire-tapping” – whatever he has decided that means – of his headquarters.

It is worth quoting Mr Trump’s own words in order to get the full flavour of this: “So that means I’m right. Who knows what it is? You know, why, because somebody says “incidental”? [We] were under surveillance during the Obama administration… Wow.”

First of all, the information provided by Mr Nunes does not suggest that Mr Trump and his team were “under surveillance”: it means that some of the people they spoke to were. And the fact that this happened “during the Obama administration” is not remotely the same as the original Trump allegation that Mr Obama had “ordered” the security services to spy on his team. So, no, Mr Trump, that doesn’t mean you were right.

The President then went on to say that even though the suspicion cast on GCHQ was based on an unsupported assertion by a contributor to Fox News, retired Judge Andrew Napolitano (who has now been dropped by the network, which says it knows of no evidence to support his claim), Mr Trump stands by it.

Again, I offer you the verbatim Trump statement: “I quoted the judge the other day. I have a lot of respect for Judge Napolitano and he said that three sources told him things that would make me right. I don’t know where he has gone with it since then. But I’m quoting highly respected people from highly respected television networks. Why do you say that I have to apologise?”

Well, the highly respected television network has now sacked the highly respected person whom Mr Trump’s argument relies on. So where does that leave us?

But as you may have gathered, I did not quote those Trump remarks in detail simply to argue that they were incorrect. What I wanted you to note was the embarrassingly childlike tone (proving “That means I’m right” clearly being the only object of the exercise) and the apparently total absence of any wider sense of national and international responsibility at a very dangerous time.

What sort of national leader – let alone the leader of the free world – could fail to see that this is not the moment to attack the integrity and motives of the security services of countries that are engaged in a struggle against nihilistic violence?

Of course, that is not to say that security operations should be beyond criticism: that their methods or assumptions should not be susceptible to question. The whole point of a democratic system is that no governmental agency should be unaccountable to the people.

But Mr Trump is on another mission altogether. He seems determined to undermine faith in the basic principles of organisations such as the FBI and the CIA – to imply that they have unscrupulous, or even nefarious, political intentions, presumably designed to undermine his mission to “make America great again”.

Does he actually believe this? If so, what evidence does he have for that belief? (Silly question, I know: when has he ever felt obliged to produce evidence for any of his wild claims?) On the face of it, this looks too grotesquely absurd to be susceptible to any explanation other than pathological. But there’s another possibility.

One of the things that provokes the Trump team to rage so relentlessly against their own country’s intelligence establishment is that the FBI is known to have been engaged in an investigation of Team Trump’s ties with Putin’s Russia. Just last week, FBI director James Comey testified to Congress that such an investigation was indeed ongoing – a statement about which the White House was clearly incandescent.

The President’s people have attempted to shift attention from the substance of this investigation – that is, the possible existence of an unacknowledged and unacceptable relationship between Trump and the Putin regime – to the more technical question of whether communications with Russia have been improperly leaked by the secret services. The leaking of classified information certainly is a crime, but the question of whether Mr Trump or those close to him have ties to Putin is much, much more serious.

The matter at hand is whether Russia, with its professional hacking and disinformation programmes, attempted to influence the US election process in favour of Trump’s candidacy. (Whether such interference actually affected the result is unknowable.) If the answer is yes, the next question would have to be: why? Did they see Trump as a useful idiot who could be swayed by flattery? Do they have damaging information about him with which they could blackmail his administration? Is Trump’s attempted discrediting of the FBI designed to pre-empt any such discovery? As Mr Trump himself might say: who knows?