A Conversation With Representative Jim Himes

Representative Jim Himes discusses threats to America’s national security and the role of the intelligence community in safeguarding American interests.

GORDON: So good evening. I’m Michael Gordon. I’m the national security correspondent from The Wall Street Journal.

And I think we’re going to have a very interesting and relevant evening tonight with Congressman Jim Himes, who’s the ranking member of the House, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which means he’s got a window into just about everything this organization is interested in. And he also has some thoughts and insights into the intelligence community per se and how it could do its job better.

This is a meeting that’s going to be on the record. And the structure that we’re going to follow, that you’re familiar with, is I’m going to ask some questions for about thirty minutes and then open it up to the members here and also online so you can ask your own questions and take advantage of this opportunity.

I think one thing that’s on everybody’s mind is what’s happening now in the Caribbean, and what’s happening in Venezuela, and where is the Trump administration going? And I think the question I would like to ask is, you—in the briefings that you’ve been part of, how has the Trump administration explained what its objectives are with Venezuela and in the Caribbean? Is it regime change? Is it something less than that? When they talk to you about what they’re up to, what do they say their foreign policy goals are at this time?

HIMES: Well, Michael, thanks for subbing in. This was supposed to be interviewed by David Ignatius, so we got a big upgrade. Thank you for that. Sorry, David. (Laughter.) And I know how challenging that is.

So your question is, what do they—what do they articulate when they’re talking to us about their activities in Venezuela? They’re not talking to us about their activities in Venezuela or in the Caribbean. It was fifty-nine days or fifty-eight days into the sixty-day period in which the president is required to either cease military operations, or to inform the Congress, or to ask for authorization for military activity that we actually got our first meaningful briefing. There was a briefing last week with the House Armed Services Committee. It was classified briefing, in which the chairs and rankers of the Foreign Affairs and the Intelligence Committee were invited. And subsequently there was the very first meeting for a very small group on the Office of Legal Counsel opinion, which says that this—that these military attacks on drug boats are legal.

So they’re not talking to us about it in any meaningful way. We don’t do a lot much more serious than killing people, especially when two-and-a-half centuries of tradition of our military not killing civilians is flipped to actually target civilians. For obvious reasons, I can’t get into detail around the OLC, Office of Legal Counsel, opinion on this. We can talk a little bit about it if you like. But I have not changed—even though I had an hour to look at a forty-eight, forty-nine-page document, I’ve not changed my opinion that the legal rationale for this strike is profoundly questionable, at best.

GORDON: So what can you tell us about the legal rationale? Some of this has been in the public domain. It seems strange to classify your legal analysis for the use of force. Is it based on Article II of the Constitution? Is it based on the argument that the cartels are foreign terrorist organizations? Is it based on some other set of criteria? What is their basic argument for why this use of force is legitimate? And what is your objection to it?

HIMES: Yeah. So their basic argument can be gleaned from their public pronouncements on this. If you look at the secretary of defense, I guess secretary of war, whatever you want to call him—if you look at Secretary Hegseth’s, you know, testosterone-laden social media about these strikes, every other word is “terrorist,” right? So it’s terribly important to the public explanation here—and, by the way, yes, you should be concerned that an unprecedented action by the United States is not being briefed to Congress in any meaningful way, much less shared with the American people who pay for this and who send their sons and daughters to engage in military activity. But there’s a clue in that every other word in the social media is “terrorist.”

Now, call me old fashioned, I actually think it’s valuable to maintain a distinction between terrorists, terrorist entities who are interested in creating caliphate, overthrowing the West, et cetera, and a cartel, which, like any number of other gangster-like organizations, is interested in making money, primarily. I think that’s a distinction worth maintaining. But you can tell that—and they’ve announced this publicly as well—that they have this concept of a non-international armed conflict, a NIAC. And a NIAC actually has a distinct legal meaning in Article III of the Geneva Conventions of 1949. It’s a fairly clear legal category that has a two-part test.

Number one, it needs to rise to a level of violence, kinetic activity, et cetera, that can’t be, presumably, dealt with in a law enforcement context, as we always have with the cartels. And number two, it needs to be that the entities engaged need to be parties to this conflict. And what that means is that they have a military-like hierarchy, with military-like plans, with military-like objectives. And of course, it’s on that second point that they fail dramatically.

Fundamentally, and I can’t get into the details of the opinion, but it’s really important to the Trump administration that these be terrorists, that violence be the end in and of itself. In contrast to the factual—the facts that we know, which is that, as horrendous as it is—and I don’t object to anybody making Fallujah-like comparisons with the violence that is being undertaken by the cartels—the violence is incidental to the objective of making money.

And in fact, if you could get ten cartel leaders up here and interview them, just as if you interviewed the mafia, they would tell you that we would rather not have the violence. The violence attracts attention. It attracts pushback. And so there’s a fundamentally different category between cartels, or counterfeiters, or whatever traditionally criminal entities are out, there and terrorists that I think causes the administration’s legal—by the way, non-lawyer here. I should say—should have said that right up front. But it causes the administration’s legal basis for this to just collapse.

GORDON: So when they carry out these drug boat strikes—and I forget the number that we’re up to, but it’s mounting—do they know specifically who they’re killing? And do they know the link between the individuals on the boats and the cartels, who are on their classified list?

HIMES: Here, I have to get a little hedge-y, because it does get pretty—it gets very quickly to sources and methods. It will come as no surprise to anybody in this room that our intelligence community is incredibly capable. Very, very good at what they do. So the probability that the military in one of these strikes is going to target a fishing boat or a boat carrying, you know, refugees or a leisure boat, it’s pretty low. It’s pretty low. But it’s not zero. And, and again here I want to be careful about getting into details, but as this room will know in the long, generations-long counterterrorism efforts we have made DOD stuff easier to talk about than covert activities, we have built an immense architecture around do we know the precise identities of individuals when we take a strike?

Do we know the identities of the person that’s sitting next to them in the car? How do we feel about that? What if they’re at a wedding? And so we’ve built this immense architecture in the counterterrorism context that, as far as I can tell—and by the way, those words should terrify you, I’m ranking member the Intelligence Committee—as far as I can tell, doesn’t exist for these strikes. So are we taking out fishing boats? No, I don’t think so. But have we—have we done anything like the very detailed work, love it or hate it, that we do in the counterterrorism context? I don’t think so.

GORDON: Are you satisfied that when these boats are struck the narcotics or the contraband on these boats is destined for the United States and not for some other international market?

HIMES: Well, the answer to that question is that we have no way of really knowing whether a stop in Trinidad or a stop in El Salvador, whether the product is destined for European or U.S. markets. It is probably destined to one of those two markets, if that’s the route that they’re taking. But I would argue that there’s a more important question, which is—we’ve talked a lot about the sort of legal justification for this. What about the just practical question of, does this make a difference, right? Eighty (thousand) or 90,000 fatalities in this country from drug overdoses a year. Catastrophe, absolute catastrophe. Most of that is fentanyl. No fentanyl is coming out of Venezuela. Cocaine comes out of Colombia. You can’t produce it anywhere other than in that Andean region. But cocaine is not really the problem.

And, oh, by the way, if you succeed in what I think they’re—I think that, my opinion, their aims are twofold. One, to be—to just run movies on social media, to be performative, because this looks like we’re doing something about a very serious problem. And, number two, to close off a particular route for the transmission of, in this case, cocaine, which is not, of course, causing the fatalities. Now, cocaine gets laced with fentanyl, so it’s a little more complicated than I’m suggesting it is. But so what happens? There is a very lucrative market here. So if you shut off the boat routes, there are terrestrial routes and there are airborne routes. So what are you really accomplishing here? The answer is, you’re just moving pipelines around.

GORDON: So we’ve been talking about drug boats in the Caribbean. In the meetings in which you’ve been, the briefings, and closed session, and the discussions you’ve had about the legal aspects of this, are they laying the predicate for offensive action against Venezuela?

HIMES: I had strong feelings about this. And I have to remind myself that this administration is unpredictable. And let me just completely damage my own credibility here. When the new administration was sworn in on January 20 I said, well, look, at least, you know, we’ve got adults in the room on the economic issues. The economy is going to be pretty, pretty calm, Bessent, et cetera. And then, of course, we got liberation day. You know, and incredibly random and chaotic economic policymaking internationally. And I also said, and, you know, Donald Trump, I don’t much like the guy, but he is, you know, extraordinarily careful about international kinetic engagement. And now we’re, you know, sending bunker busters down ventilation pipes in Iran. So let me just completely damage my own credibility before I give you the answer.

Which is I don’t—I think that the press is far more convinced that the United States is going to attack Venezuela in some way than the administration actually is. And I say that because Marco Rubio, love him or hate him, he does understand the long generations of outcomes when the United States military acts in Latin America. Generally speaking, not a good idea for the partnerships that are so important to us down there. And I also, inasmuch as I’m a little bit of a student of MAGA, you know, I don’t know how you go to Steve Bannon and say, hey, we were just kidding about this America first stuff. And, you know, I know you hate the Iraq War and Afghanistan, but now we’re militarily engaged in Venezuela. So I continue to be pretty bearish on the notion that we’re going to get militarily involved in Latin America.

GORDON: Are they making the argument that Maduro is somehow linked to the cartels, or has influence over the cartels in such a way that he could be deemed to be responsible for their activities and potentially made a target?

HIMES: Well, we know the answer to that question, right, because we know what the administration said. The administration told a story of Maduro being a cartel kingpin, directing Tren de Aragua in particular. And that turns out not to be true. And when the intelligence community, of course, the National Intelligence Council, produced a report saying what we all suspected was true, which is that, no. You know, is there corruption in Caracas? Of course there is. You know, but is the Venezuelan state, you know, systematically involved in drug trafficking? No, they are not. And of course, when the National Intelligence Council wrote that report, the two individuals who were in charge of writing that report were promptly fired.

So, again, it’s really important to this administration because the whole legal construct—there’s lawyers in the room—inasmuch as the legal construct has any credibility at all, it really depends on the administration convincing people that the cartels are ISIS. Remember, ISIS used to extract and trade oil in Raqqah. Why? Because they wanted the money to create mayhem around the world. It’s really important that we all buy into that framing, because then if you have an ISIS-like entity, well, we’re all used to going after ISIS. Of course, that’s not what’s happening here, right? These people, these leaders, as horrendous as they are, they would rather there not be violence than that that would be the—you know, the end of what they’re trying to do.

GORDON: So I’d like to shift to a different region, another volatile region in the Middle East, which is Syria. And on Monday we’re going to have a rather extraordinary event in Washington, which is the new Syrian President al-Sharaa, previously an al-Qaida leader and a militant in Iraq and now a statesman, is going to be meeting with President Trump at the White House. And the research I’ve done, and maybe someone can prove me wrong, but I think it’s the first time a Syrian president will be in the White House, let alone someone with this kind of pedigree. The Congress right now has been wrestling with repealing the Caesar Act, which imposes rather severe sanctions on the Syrian economy. The Senate has—will revoke the act, with the reporting requirement. The House hasn’t taken a stance. What’s your sense of how this is going to come out in the NDAA that’s being wrestled with this week? And what do you think the U.S. should do on this, in terms of the Caesar sanctions?

HIMES: Yeah. I’m probably better equipped to answer the second part of your question than the first. I, candidly, don’t know exactly how the policy apparatus is going to deal with this over time. Inside the Congress—which I can predict a little bit better than I can predict inside the Oval Office—inside the Congress, there are two schools of thought. One is my school of thought, or at least the one that I agree with, which is, hey, look, you know, this may not have been our choice to lead Syria, and God knows his resume has some pretty ugly stuff on it, but, you know, seems to be saying the right things, maybe doing the right things. And let’s give this guy a chance, because a stable non-Assad Syria is a pretty darn good outcome for everybody. There’s another school of thought which is, this guy’s al-Qaida. He always will be, et cetera. And that’s creating some pushback.

I have no idea how the president is going to think about this guy. You know, you sort of grasp for ideas. You know, well he seems to respect very powerful dictators, like Xi and Putin. And he seems to not respect less powerful dictator—you know, authoritarians, let’s say. So I don’t know. But, you know, having been pretty hard in the last fifteen minutes on this administration, I’m hoping that this is an area where maybe the blob, that’s us, is wrong with respect to Donald Trump. You know, I’ll give you—I’ll give you an analogous example. You know—(laughs)—I give this administration a hell of a lot of credit for engineering the Israel-Gaza ceasefire.

Now, I’m not particularly bullish on where it goes, but it was something that Joe Biden failed to accomplish. Quite frankly, that I think any other president who wasn’t prepared to stick a phone in Bibi Netanyahu’s face and say, call the Qataris and apologize, wouldn’t have pulled off. And so I because of that sort of random, weird element of the foreign policy of this administration, who knows. Maybe al-Sharaa is going to charm him and we will open the door to something really, really good. It’s possible. I have—I don’t know.

GORDON: Well, the Trump administration is on record now with this impending visit as saying the Caesar Act should be repealed unconditionally, and instead of just a temporary waiver of sanctions. So they’re sort of all-in on that. But when what you see from your perch on the intel community, what are your concerns about Syria? Do you think that the current leadership has a chance to navigate a path in which there would be respect for human rights and minorities, and to forge a constructive relationship with Israel? Do you think that this is the only—as our ambassador in Turkey says—there’s no plan B, this is our best and only shot? What’s your—what are you hearing about the situation within the country?

HIMES: Like any other multiethnic Middle Eastern state, this is a really hard problem. And there aren’t a lot of examples of success. So one question is, what do you consider a success? It’s perfectly legitimate to say, I consider a success a Syria that is ruled better and more consistent with international norms than the rule of the Assads, right? Pretty easy to tick that box, presumably. Another objective might be to say, let’s just keep a lid on it. And, you know, it’ll be like Iraq, with its Shia-Sunni split and all the political attentions attendant. It’s probably not going to be Jordan. And, again, I’m not sure—as much as we have a profound friendship and partnership with Jordan—I’m not sure that on the, you know, sort of human rights front or whatever we would necessarily put them at the very top of the bucket.

But it does feel to me, with respect to the repeal of the act, that we ought to—we ought to give this a chance. And is the outcome going to be terrific and make us all happy? Probably not. But is it going to be, hopefully, significantly better than what was the status quo for two generations? If we put our credibility and power and support behind it, not only do we increase the probability that that happens, but we acquire some leverage.

GORDON: So I’d like to turn from world affairs to the intelligence community itself. And what is your assessment of the current stewardship of the intelligence community, the degree to which it may or may not be being politicized, and whether—and when you talk to intelligence officials from allied countries, do they have concerns at this juncture about fully cooperating with the United States?

HIMES: Again, second part of that question is easier to answer it. It will probably surprise no one that when Five Eyes partners turn up in Washington, they don’t, you know, pull into my office and say, we’re not sharing this with you guys. That doesn’t happen. But, you know, they are who they are. And my guess is that there’s probably a great deal more care around protecting sources and methods now than there was with the last administration. But, again, you know, they just don’t turn up and tell me that, for very obvious reasons.

Let’s see—

GORDON: What do you think you’re getting when you hear from the intelligence community? You think you’re getting the unvarnished analysis from experts in there? Or do you think there’s some censorship or a spin being putting on it? What’s the change since the new administration has come in?

HIMES: So in terms of the caliber of the analysis, I don’t have any reason to believe, and I haven’t seen any evidence, that intelligence reporting is being slanted to adhere to the prejudices of the president, or whatever. And now, not that I necessarily would instantly be able to identify such a thing, but I don’t see that. It’s a little hard question to answer. Some of you in the room will be familiar, the former chairman Mike Turner. There’s a whole story there as well. Mike made being chair and ranking member of the Intelligence Committee three full-time jobs. He would have a hearing every single day, sometimes two a day, trips every week. You just, I mean, this was what Mike Turner did.

And we have not had an intelligence—a formal intelligence briefing in six or seven weeks. And the pace prior to the government shutdown and the dissolution of the House of Representatives—(laughs)—over Jeffrey Epstein, God help me—the pace was sort of once a week. So that tells you something in and of itself. Here’s what I hear. What I hear—and remember, there’s probably IC people in the room, it is ingrained in the genetics, and there’s a great deal of momentum around the idea that if you’re in this entity, you speak truth to power.

Problem is that all things erode. And humans are subject to persuasion and incentives. And it’s a little hard for me to get at with some of the other elements of the IC, but I can tell you, because I’ve heard this from people at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that there is already a great deal of hesitancy on the part of rank and file FBI agents to take assignments that they feel could put them at odds with the White House. So election protection, identifying foreign meddling through social media and stuff. What I hear is that there are a lot of agents who are saying, hey, I value my career. It’s not like I’m going to do something that lacks integrity, but, nuh-uh, I’m not taking that assignment, thank you very much. And that’s a real problem.

And lastly, I would say, and I don’t want to get too detailed here because I have, you know, ongoing transactions with these people. You read the newspapers and watch the press. There’s a fairly dramatic difference between the chiefs of certain elements of the IC relative to others. I mean the obvious example, and I’m just telling you something that you read about a number of weeks ago, when the director of national intelligence—my own view of that role is that that person is not known to most. They’re very quiet, in the background. They are 100 percent dedicated to being, you know, pure as the driven snow on being apolitical. And you don’t know who they are and they don’t speak much.

And our DNI decided six weeks ago to tell the American people that the former president the United States, Barack Obama, the former, former president of the United States, was a traitor and that she was making a referral to the Department of Justice on grounds of treason. Those are pretty radically different views of the job. And I’ll just leave that—I’ll leave that there. (Laughs.)

GORDON: So one striking aspect of their decision making is they decapitated a couple intelligence community agencies. Why was the head of NSA discharged? What about DIA? Why were these actions taken and what explanation were you given?

HIMES: Second part easier to answer than the first. We were given no explanation, for both the firing of the director of the National Security Agency and for the firing of the director of the DIA. Both, by the way, long serving, immensely patriotic military officers, unblemished records. Unblemished records. Not a single example of politicization. Summarily fired. And I know no more than you do. Apparently, Laura Loomer may have had something to do with this, but I don’t know. That’s just what I hear.

And the problem with that—you know, yes, I would actually like to know the answer to the question that you asked. But the problem with that, of course, is that there’s a great deal of concern and anxiety and fear inside the IC right now. It’s bad enough to be told, we care that you produce conclusions that are consistent with what the president puts on Truth Social. That’s really bad. There’s something worse than that, which is that you could get fired for a reason that no one understands. I mean, that takes you from anxiety to terror.

And my concern right now, because I’m not a big believer that the president is a consumer of intelligence, my concern right now is that we are losing capabilities that are unique and exquisite. And people are finally saying, to hell with this. You know, I can triple my salary at Palantir. Why, in God’s name, am I going to try to play this mental Parcheesi and stay in this job where I’m being paid a third of my market value? The brain drain is a very, very substantial problem for the IC going forward.

GORDON: What are your own ideas about how to strengthen the IC and intelligence through technology and other initiatives? If you were in charge, what would you do?

HIMES: Two areas that we talked about a little bit that I focused on for a long time. The IC needs to be a lot more nimble in adopting cutting-edge technology. There’s a whole fascinating conversation that would occupy three hours, not our remaining five minutes, about in a panopticon world, in a world where signals intelligence and other forms of digital dust, et cetera, can tell you everything if you can get at it, what’s the role of HUMINT? Super interesting conversation. What is not super interesting, what is obvious, is that you better be at the cutting-edge of gathering that digital dust, of intercepting SIGINT, of breaking cryptography.

And I would say that the IC is not as reticent as the Pentagon about adopting new technologies, but it’s a pretty fast follower in its reticence to do so. And we can’t afford to fall behind our geopolitical foes on the adoption of that. We have the lead right now—narrow, but we have that lead. And we can’t give that up. I get the question—I’ve been doing this for ten years—I get the question all the time, what’s the biggest threat to the United States? And, you know, yeah, OK. Coronavirus, and al-Qaida, and ISIS, and the Russians, and North Koreans—I mean, the usual ones that you read about.

But I would always say that the real existential threat to the United States, from a national security standpoint not just the intelligence community, is that we lose our innovative edge. And I would say, but that’s not going to happen. We’ve got MIT. And we’ve got Harvard. And we bring in the most, you know, capable international immigrants on the planet. And we bring in, you know, scientists and everything. Well, now we’ve started to dismantle all of the foundational elements of our innovative edge. We’re attacking Harvard and MIT. We’re telling immigrants that they ought to go to work at the Cavendish Labs at Cambridge instead of at MIT’s Media Lab. We are dismantling all of the elements of our innovative edge. And that really scares the hell out of me.

GORDON: What is the quality of congressional oversight over the intelligence community during the current administration?

HIMES: So Mark Warner and Tom Cotton and Rick Crawford and I spend a lot of time and energy making sure that we don’t go off the rails. Everyone who follows this stuff will remember how broken the Intelligence Committee became when then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi asked the intelligence committee to investigate the famous Ukraine, you know, I’ll send you weapons if you do me a big favor thing. As a practical matter, however you come out on that argument that meant that we did no effective oversight in the House of Representatives for about a year and a half over this really important $90 billion-a-year entity. And it also meant that Warner didn’t want to hear from me—or, didn’t want to hear from Schiff. Schiff was the ranking member of the chair at the time.

So we’ve repaired that. And we’ve arrived at a détente. You’d have to ask Mark and Tom how they do this. But I think the détente that I’ve got with Rick is similar to what’s over in the Senate, which is we’re both committed to keeping comity on the committee and doing our oversight. Rick knows that I’m not going to ask him to join me on pointed letters to the director of national intelligence. And I will respect him in that regard because I don’t want to put him in that position. And he’s not going to light me up for doing oversight. So that’s a form of détente that is far from ideal, but it’s better than nothing. And it’s certainly better than that committee, of all committees, becoming a partisan battleground, which is what it was for a while.

GORDON: OK. Well, speaking of comity, at this time I would like to invite the CFR members here in this room to come forward with their questions. There are also going to be questions from viewers online—members online. And I need to remind you it’s on the record. And also, when you ask a question, please identify yourself. So let’s have comity, but maybe not too much, so get some tough questions here. Over there.

Q: Hi. My name is Will McGee. Thank you so much for being here.

What opportunities outside of technology do you see for IC modernization or reform in this Congress?

HIMES: Yeah, great question. Great question. I didn’t get to this because I’ve been droning on too long. But the other area that comes to mind is OSINT, open source. I’m going to try to answer this in a minute, which means I’m going to be a little bit cartoon-like in my descriptions. Including the fact that an entity, as many of you will be aware, the Central Intelligence Agency, is the manager for OSINT. That’s a problem. You know, the culture of the CIA is, at its core, you know, a bunch of people who do really cool stuffs in the alleys of Kandahar, you know, meeting people in cafés. Everything about that entity is about secret stuff. And OSINT is the opposite of that. And there is both a cultural skepticism, if I may put it diplomatically, about OSINT. There are also, because we’re a good country with a constitution and preserve the rights of our citizens, a desire to get it right.

I once said to a clearance person, you know, we’re still giving clearances by sending some dude in a raincoat to your, you know, college roommate to ask whether you played with paper dolls in college. Really? Is that what we’re doing in the twenty-first century? Why do we not just say to the people who want to be in the Directorate of Operations, give us all of your passwords and we’ll just look at your—now, and there’s a lot of good reasons why we don’t do that. But anyway, my point is, obviously, that we have both a cultural resistance to OSINT and civil liberties concerns that make that hard. But that’s huge, right? Because I really do believe that 95 percent of the stuff—I’m making that up, I don’t know if it’s 90 or 99 percent—but a substantial majority of the stuff that we want to know is out there in the public realm, if we’re just willing to go out there and get it.

GORDON: OK, in the middle, right there.

Q: Hi. David Sanger from the New York Times. Good to see you.

HIMES: You brought in a ringer.

Q: He did. (Laughter.)

GORDON: We used to—the record will show, we used to—

Q: We would pass these back and forth. (Laughs.)

GORDON: We won’t get into that right now.

Q: Yeah. (Laughter.) Long and awful stories.

So the president the other day called for a resumption of nuclear testing. And then on 60 Minutes he said, well, that’s because China and Russia and other countries are doing this as well. And seemed to not only confound us, but members of his own administration. Including his energy secretary, who said, basically, we’re going to go ahead with non-explosive testing. Do you have any—have you been able to dig into, and has the committee maybe prior to his statements, looked at what he was referring to? We assume it was pretty small tests, hard to detect, that may have gone critical. But what was he referring to? And what’s your thinking about what the reaction would be if, in fact, we did resume testing?

HIMES: David, I’m feeling some sympathy because, you know, I’ve been watching the press chase the imminent invasion of Venezuela, and the imminent invasion of Nigeria. And, you know, the fact that—you know the possibility that we’ll be blowing up the Bikini Atoll again. You know, the president just says stuff. I mean, he just says stuff, right? Somebody puts something in his ear and he goes out and he goes back to the back of the plane and he says stuff. I articulated earlier my skepticism that we’re going to get involved militarily in Venezuela. I really don’t believe that we’re dropping the 82^nd Airborne into Nigeria to protect Christians. And I suspect that on this nuclear thing, which is maybe a little bit less amusing, somebody just put a thing in his ear about how Russia and China—certainly Russia, maybe China—are violating treaties. And, you know, you’re a fool. You’re a fool, Mr. President. They wouldn’t have said it that way, but that’s the way he would have perceived it. And so therefore, you know, he just says something.

And the reason I say that maybe that’s a little bit more serious is that we could go that route. In my own opinion—and, again, let me de-credentialize myself here, I’m not a strategic nuclear guy. But in my own opinion, that would be, over time, staggeringly expensive. It would take away the focus from things that the Pentagon should be doing yesterday, which is figuring out whether drones can take out our strategic nuclear assets, because you can do that to the Russians, in favor of something that achieves, what? You know, we have a triad, right? (Laughs.) Like, you know, we’ve got three ways to deliver strategic nuclear weapons. And if you start testing again—and, again, you’ve seen the White House walk this back—if you start testing again, and if you start getting back into a Cold War mindset where it really matters whether you’ve got seven times the number of warheads that can obliterate the planet or nine times the number of warheads, all you really achieve is an unstrategic focus and a shocking amount of money.

So I’m hoping that this is in the category of things that the president just said. And, you know, I hope we get back—it’ll be a more interesting fight in Congress, because there are plenty of advocates, including Tom Cotton and others, who would love to go back to that Cold War thing, where it’s really important that we not just have nine times the warheads that we actually really need, we need twenty times the warheads. And, look, at some point, though the United States Congress and the U.S. government has believed since the late ’90s that we—there are no consequences to spending, at some point there is. And so I do think that this is an area where we ought to be really strategic about where we spend our time, energy, and money.

GORDON: I think on this issue, David, we do have a little bit of information about where I think President Trump is headed. Which is that today Director Ratcliffe at the CIA tweeted an article and referred back to reports in 2019 and 2020 about intelligence community suspicions that the Russians and Chinese, the Russians in particular, were doing what are called—so-called supercritical tests, which are experiments that produce a nuclear yield but are extremely low yield. And the reason I’m sensitive to this is one of the articles he retweeted was mine, and from some years ago. So I think what they appear to be focusing on is not non-nuclear, but also not large—not large underground blasts, as in the past. But whenever I’ve asked the White House, which was yesterday, to clarify things further, I haven’t gotten any better explanation at this point.

Another question, and then—OK. Right there.

HIMES: (Laughs.) I’m just chuckling. David, imagining—as I listen to Michael—I’m imagining the poor deputy something-something that needs to go into the office and say, Mr. President, I need fifteen minutes to explain the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to you, right? That’s a career ender, right? (Laughs.)

Q: Shouldn’t be a long—(off mic). (Laughter.)

Q: Hi. Jon Alterman, CSIS.

I want to pick up on the oversight question, because what you described was a system where oversight has just broken down. That the administration isn’t talking to the oversight committees, and seems to be getting away with it. That the oversight committees really aren’t able to control the intelligence operations of the government. Is that something that you think the committees can do something about? Is there any common agreement that there are boundaries to the administration blowing by the intelligence oversight committees? Or is it simply Congress once again saying, well, we’ll see?

HIMES: Yeah. Yeah. Great question. I think there’s always one big barrier to good oversight, and now there’s three. The one big barrier to oversight, and I’ve been doing this for ten years, and some of you are guilty of this, is that, you know, when CIA comes in to brief a program, you know, that is dangerous and butts right up against limits of civil liberties, the first thing they do—and it’s a whole bunch of boys, not exclusively, but a whole bunch of boys on the committee—the first thing they do is run a couple of really cool videos. So we’re like, oh my god, that is so cool. That is really amazing. Can’t believe you can do that. Now, all of a sudden, the energy in the room is just—you know, it’s not exactly skeptical, right? So, and—you know, the elements, I love them, the intelligence—the elements of the intelligence community are pretty good at distracting us and distracting the boys.

Number two, in this instance that is made more difficult by the fact that, with very limited exceptions, the majority is not terribly committed to getting in the way of this administration. For them, it is a political, and potentially existentially political—existential political issue to cross the administration. Now I’m choosing my words here because you saw three votes in the Senate last week opposing the president’s use of tariffs. So it’s not—it’s not absolute. But that’s a huge leap for a Republican in Congress to say, uh-huh, you know, something the president said is just plain wrong. That’s a huge political leap.

And then there’s the third problem, which is—choosing my words carefully here—this administration is willing to be lawless in many respects, especially with respect to congressional prerogatives. I expressed to you how I felt about the validity of the OLC opinion on the Caribbean strikes. There is no congressional power more clearly articulated in the Constitution than the purse strings. At the end of the day, it’s kind of all we got. And, you know, you all read the same newspapers that I do. Purse strings are optional now. And back to problem number two, very few Republican appropriators are willing to say, no. You know, we actually appropriated money for USAID. That’s just not something that gets said in the majority.

I don’t want to leave this as dark as I’ve made it sound, because I will tell you—I don’t think I’m violating confidence here—at the end of the classified HASC meeting, where an admiral and a senior civilian from the Pentagon briefed the operational aspects of the Caribbean strikes, the Chair Mike Rogers and the ranking member both—I was a little taken aback by this, because it wouldn’t have happened in HPSCI—the chair and the ranking member both chewed out the Pentagon people and said it is inexcusable that this much time has passed without any meaningful congressional brief. There had been staff briefings and stuff. But I was—I was sort of—I sat up and thought, wow. You know, Mike Rogers and Adam Smith were chewing out senior Pentagon people about the failure to brief the Congress. And I took some happiness in that.

Q: Hi. Daniella Cheslow, Wall Street Journal. And I also worked with Michael Gordon. (Laughs.)

I’ve been hearing among some Republican members that the Obama drone strikes provided a sort of precedent for what we’re seeing now in Venezuela. And I wondered if you have any thoughts on that. And a second question, I hear a lot of positive words about Qatar and their role in mediating. I also hear a lot of criticism from people like Laura Loomer and other critics. I’d love you to tell us your thoughts on Qatar.

HIMES: Yeah. So the examples that will be or have been trotted out by the administration to justify these actions, yes. Obama, Syria, 2011. Clinton, Balkans, late 1990s, right? Obama—sorry, Clinton. Clinton in the Balkans undertakes a NATO military action, blows through the sixty-day War Powers Act cessation period. Congress gets its knickers in a twist, but he’s out by day ninety. OK, so not good, but he’s out by day ninety. The Obama example, again, from my congressional standpoint, inadequate congressional authorization. The president at that time realizes that he’s not going to get congressional approval for what he called “pinprick surgical strikes” against Syria. And he goes ahead and does it anyway. And, by the way, the House of Commons had just voted it down in the U.K. And so, yeah. That was a, in my view, overstep of congressional authority. I expressed that view in June of 2011 when I joined the resolution saying, you’re out of Syria. I voted in favor of that resolution.

So, yes, there are examples. And, by the way, you know this. There are—this goes back to the War Powers Resolution being passed in 1973. The president has never acknowledged that it’s entirely constitutional. On the margins we’re always playing around with sixty days or ninety days. Fine. Fine. Here’s a distinction—not a lawyer—but here’s a distinction that feels to me like it matters. In every single one of those cases, whether it was Radovan Karadžić in the—whatever his name was—in the Balkans, or the Syrian regime, or, you know, we could go on here, they were all military or quasi-military targets. They were not civilians engaged in a commercial enterprise. And so I think you can acknowledge the push and pull between the Congress and the executive that probably goes back 250, years, and say, but this is something radically new and unprecedented—attacking civilians who are engaged in a disgusting, but nonetheless commercial, enterprise. That’s new.

Qatar. I’m sorry, say again what the question about Qatar is.

Q: Just for your thoughts on Qatar. Good, bad?

HIMES: You know, I mean, you know, my friend Guy (ph) up here—I used to be a Latin Americanist, right? And they have a saying in Mexico, you know, so far from God and so close to the United States. You know, Qatar, you know, it’s like, right there. You know, Iran is ninety miles away. And, you know, they’ve got a U.S. air base on their property. So, look, my view is that they get a little bit of—a little bit of a bum rap. It is fun to beat up on Qatar because they provide some sanctuary to Hamas and because, I guess, some Qatari dollars found their way into Hamas’ coffers. I think it is also true that the Israeli prime minister probably turned a blind eye, at best, may have even encouraged, that money to flow in order to keep the Palestinian—the Palestinians divided.

And it is, of course, enormously convenient for us to have a place like Qatar where Hamas officials are there for U.S. officials to meet and negotiate. Which is why the Israeli strike on Qatar was such a transformative moment. You’ve all read the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and stuff. You know. It was in that moment, I think, that the White House realized, holy smokes, this is—there’s a paradox here that doesn’t—that doesn’t really work anymore. So, do I endorse the way the Qataris run, you know, their human rights, the way they treat women? No, no, no, no, no. But they are a very useful player in a very sensitive region.

GORDON: Congressman, if you think the administration’s legal case for carrying out these boat strikes is illegitimate, and I take that to your view. You don’t accept their legal argument. Does that not mean that the U.S. military commanders are carrying out unlawful orders? And doesn’t that have some broader significance than just a legal fight between the Congress and the White House?

HIMES: Yeah. I’ve thought a lot about this. Initially I kind of—I wondered how the chain of command was as comfortable as they are doing something unquestionably unprecedented. Again, not a lawyer. I assume, you know, if you met the young man who wrote this opinion, the assistant attorney general, it would be interesting to hear lawyers argue this. But it’s certainly unprecedented. Deliberate attacks on civilians. And what I have come to learn, pulling this apart, is that for a military officer, for military personnel, the work of determining whether an order is illegal is excruciating. It is potentially career-ending.

And for reasons that we may all understand and may not satisfy the idealists in all of us, if an OLC opinion exists saying that this is a legitimate option for the president, and anyone engaged in this option will be protected from prosecution, and if the assistant attorney general says what he says, which is that this was subject to an intra-agency legal conference at which the decision was unanimous—now, don’t know who was there, especially since an awful lot of those folks have been fired, the JAGs and others—to me, that feels sufficient to tick the box for military officers. I don’t know what else you could ask them to do, because, of course, a military officer who believes an order may be illegal has a chain of command—a legal chain of command to pursue, which bumps pretty quickly into those who have issued the OLC opinion.

GORDON: We have some questions online now, don’t we? OK, here we go.

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question—we’ll take the next question from Peter Galbraith.

Q: Peter Galbraith of Townsend, Vermont. Thank you for these very thoughtful comments you’ve made.

I’d like to go back to Syria and discussion of repeal the Caesar Act, and whether there’s any kind of conditionality that might relate to protecting minorities in Syria. We’ve had the massacres on the coast, the attacks on the Druze, and, of course, the Kurds are our allies and it’s a fairly tense situation between them and al-Sharaa. Or are we simply—is Congress simply going to embrace Sharaa, ignore his past, and move on regardless of the consequences?

HIMES: I think this administration—I can’t remember who articulated it—but I think this administration—it may have been the secretary of state, national security advisor, archivist, whatever other titles of nobility Marco carries—(laughter)—I think it was Marco who articulated the notion that it’s a sort of trust but verify thing, right? Let’s take at face value what he’s saying, but let’s make sure that we’ve got ways to verify that al-Sharaa is doing what he said he would do. And I come back to something—I won’t repeat it at any length—but I come back to what I said before, which is it does feel to me like there’s enough, at worst, ambiguity, such that we ought to do those things to develop leverage with the new regime in Syria. Let’s carefully open up relations. Let’s support the regime such that we actually have some leverage. And then we’ll be in a position to say, you know, no, this steps over the line.

If we go the other route, any number of bad things happen, right? Collapse of the regime, very possible. Though I think it would take some real hard swallows on the part of the Syrians, the Russians—the Russians, who still have a presence there, you know, build their influence. And so, again, nobody’s promised an outcome here, but it does seem to me like we’ve got an option that we ought to play. And not be naive, but see if we can develop leverage in a way that maybe, maybe, maybe gets us to a good outcome in the region, or in the country.

GORDON: Peter, I had to report this out just a few hours ago. And the way I understand the compromise that—certainly the way it came out on the Senate side is the Caesar Act is being—would be repealed, if the Senate gets its way. There’s a reporting requirement for four years where the president has to certify that the Syrian leadership’s adhering to human rights, trying to build ties with Israel, fighting terrorism, joins the D-ISIS coalition. But if Syria fails these reporting requirements, so to speak, there’s no immediate snapback of sanctions. Tom Barrack, our ambassador to Turkey, argued that private investment, NGOs, need more than a six months at a time. So they’d have to be in the business of legislating a whole new set of sanctions. The only exception is that the Treasury and State Department ability to sanction specific entities would remain. That’s on the Senate side. And the House doesn’t have a clear position.

Another question. No more questions online. Over here.

Q: Hi. Ben—wow, this is loud. Hi. Ben, from Reporters Without Borders.

I work with a lot of spyware victims. And I appreciate your work on countering commercial spyware. We’ve seen the Trump administration work to procure commercial spyware with ICE buying Paragon, with the Adam Sandler producer trying to buy NSO group Pegasus. What do you think that the intelligence—or the Intelligence Committee should be doing to regulate, oversee, prevent the use of spyware against Americans, both for civil rights reasons but also just for the concerns around the increased proliferation that has? Thanks.

HIMES: Yeah. During the Biden administration I did invest a lot of time and energy, and to some result, actually, in making it hard for at least our allies to purchase spyware. Politically challenging thing since, of course, NSO is an Israeli company, et cetera, et cetera. And I really do worry that there will be less attention paid to this in the Trump administration than there was in the Biden administration. So that will have an impact on NATO allies, like Turkey. Remember, the Pegasus stuff, as you’ll recall, there were a number of NATO allies that had purchased this stuff and used it in ways that we would not be comfortable with. So I do worry about that.

When it comes to the use inside the U.S., I tend—and maybe I will regret this—but I tend to think about really monitoring the legal authorities and not being too obsessed with the particular technology that may or may not comply with those legal authorities. And so, you know—(laughs)—if you tell me that there’s a federal entity, it would probably be somebody somewhere in DHS, that is using Pegasus to capture emails from an American, I go to the legal question of, well, what was the Fourth Amendment process that allowed for that to happen? So I tend domestically to fall back on kind of the legal protections that exist there. Which doesn’t necessarily give me comfort, but nonetheless it is a thing.

And then I also worry about the more novel elements of stuff. In Connecticut we’re scratching our heads over license plate readers, right? Every local—you know, no town is too small but that the one patrol car has a license plate reader. Well, who’s capturing that information? How long is it stored? Who stores it? And how can you access it? At the end of the day these are legal and authorities questions, which is where I tend to focus. That’s not to say that it gives me necessarily comfort, you know, particularly in an administration that is quite happy to have uninsigniaed, masked individuals yanking folks out of cars. But I do tend to focus on the legal authority side here domestically on equipment like that.

GORDON: Any other questions in this room? Over here.

Q: Thank you very much, Congressman. Glenn Gerstell.

You were very involved in the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act a couple of years ago, which is coming up for renewal in—I guess, this April. Any sense of where Congress is headed on that important question, and the Trump administration itself?

HIMES: Yeah. Thank you. Great question. This is probably violating CFR protocol, but Glenn Gerstell, when he was general counsel at NSA, was really critical in helping us improve the record of the use of 702 authorities, and ultimately advocating for its reauthorization.

So I checked today—that was a hell of a battle. And, by the way, for good reasons—for good reasons. 702, particularly the question—maybe I’ll just do twenty seconds on this—702 is—the FISA 702 authorities are what we use to compel U.S. persons, usually means platforms or email providers, et cetera, to give us information that—national security information. So suspected Pakistani terrorist, turns out some of those emails will be routed through the United States and available. Because the U.S. platform is a U.S. person, legally speaking, there needs to be a special regime to get those—to get those—to get that collection. Where it gets really, really problematic is that very rarely does an email not have a recipient. And sometimes that recipient, of course, is a U.S. person. And so how you store U.S. person emails, who gets to query it under one condition, is a fantastic and interesting conversation in the context of civil liberties. And my own view is that it started out in a bad place, and it certainly culturally, particularly inside FBI—they would acknowledge this; I’m not talking out of school—there were very sloppy administrative procedures around things like U.S. person queries.

Anyway, here’s the good news. By law, these entities must report to us on how they’re doing on inappropriate queries generally, but also of U.S. persons. And the—and the really good answer is that they’ve really cleaned up their act in a very big way. There are still people—by the way, there would be people from the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and the ACLU who would disagree with the notion that this whole construct is legal. And they would say, look, if you’re going to query a U.S. person you need a Fourth Amendment warrant. I don’t agree with that, and the courts don’t agree with that, but that is a legitimate intellectual position.

Where are we today? The good news is that we’re really seeing a dramatic improvement in the administrative protections around the use of these authorities. The bad news, quite bluntly, is that FISA was reauthorized with a very strong vote on the floor that was—the majority was the minority. In other words, Democrats produced more votes than the Republicans did. And were it to be reauthorized, which it must be reauthorized, you would need somewhere in the neighborhood of ninety, 100, 110 Democrats. And it won’t surprise you to know that the Democratic Caucus of the House is in a very different place with respect to questionable authorities or arguable authorities than they were two years ago. Like it or not, that’s a fact.

And so I think it would be—even though the record of the IC and the FBI’s use of this authority is much, much better than it was—I think it would be a much heavier lift. And this matters. Why? I’ve spent too much time on an esoteric topic here. But, Glenn, you’ll correct me, but 60-ish, 60 percent of the president’s daily brief is 702 collection. And so this really, really matters. And it would be a much heavier lift. I’m just going to say this because it was such a day for me, but there was a—there was an actual amendment on the floor to require a Fourth Amendment warrant for every U.S. person query. You would have had to go before a judge with all the process implicit in that, affidavits filed, et cetera, and request a warrant, just as if we were going to break down your door or whatever.

That amendment failed in the House, 212 to 212. (Laughs.) Didn’t receive a majority vote. If you buy me a drink afterwards I will tell you about how Jamie Raskin switched his vote in the end on that vote. But nonetheless, that’s how close that fairly important thing was in the House at the time. And needless to say, it’s a very different environment for the party that produced most of the votes to reauthorize that today than it was a year-plus ago.

GORDON: Well, that was an interesting and provocative way to end this discussion. We’ve reached the 7:00 hour.

HIMES: I’m here all week.

GORDON: We’re all going to buy you that drink because we want to hear that story. (Laughter.) But I don’t think we’re going to hear it right here, right now. So thank you for joining today’s meeting. And thank you, Representative Himes, for a very wide-ranging, frank, and tour de raison of global issues and the IC. I think it was an extremely interesting, forthright presentation.

HIMES: Thank you. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.