Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa forms committees to investigate the recent waves of violence between security forces and Alawite loyalists of ousted President Bashar al-Assad.

More than 1,000 people were killed after two days of clashes between Syrian security forces and loyalists of ousted President Bashar al-Assad erupt.

The violence overnight is the deadliest in Syria since Bashar al-Assad was ousted in a lightning offensive in December by Islamist-led rebels.

Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria since former President Bashar al-Assad was toppled in December.

Donald Trump has relentlessly insisted that the United States—or even he personally—should “take over” Gaza, remove its population of more than 2 million Palestinians, and turn the region into a “Riviera” on the Mediterranean for the “world’s people.” Just this week he posted an AI-generated video showing him and Elon Musk partying in “Trump Gaza,” a paradise dominated by a golden statue of the president.

As a practical and political matter, the idea is a nonstarter. But simply by proposing it, Trump may have paved the way for two more attainable goals that could reshape the Middle East—and lead to chaos for Palestinians, particularly those in the West Bank.

The first seems to be a nuclear agreement with Iran. Trump has been fairly open about his desire for a deal. After he announced new sanctions against the country early this month, Trump held a press conference in which he addressed Iran directly: “I would love to be able to make a great deal, a deal where you can get on with your lives and you’ll do wonderfully.” Trump must recognize, though, that the Israeli right—and its conservative allies in America—would be furious about such an agreement and demand some form of compensation.

[Yair Rosenberg: Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago]

Which leads to his second goal. In the same press conference, Trump hinted that he might allay Israel’s concerns by offering to expand its formal control in the West Bank. When asked whether he supported Israel’s “sovereignty” in the region, he said that his administration would “be making an announcement probably on that very specific topic over the next four weeks.” Palestinians are still holding their breath.

Annexing additional portions of the West Bank sounds tame compared with Gaz-a-Lago. And that could be precisely the point. By repeating his plan to clear out Gaza, Trump has shifted the Overton window in the Middle East and reinforced the idea that Palestinians’ claims are somehow void. The move follows a standard Trump tactic: say the same shocking thing over and over until it isn’t shocking anymore. Gaz-a-Lago sounds like madness, but apply a Trumpian lens, and a certain method appears—one that just might get him a nuclear deal with Iran.

There are several reasons to think he can make such an agreement, and probably one with favorable terms for the U.S. First, Iran’s bargaining position is exceptionally weak. Israel has dealt extensive damage to Tehran’s regional proxies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iraqi and Syrian militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas. Worse still for Iran was the downfall of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in December, the regime’s most powerful ally in the region. As a result, Iran is unable to project power in the Middle East or adequately defend itself from potential attacks from Israel or elsewhere. A deal would grant the regime not only an added measure of protection but also relief from sanctions, which would allow the country to begin to rebuild its economy and rethink its national-security strategy.

Iran’s little remaining leverage mostly comes from the progress it has made toward nuclear weaponization since 2018, when Trump withdrew from the deal that President Barack Obama had negotiated. That’s why another agreement is one of the few options Iran has to reclaim some power. One could imagine the country instead racing for a nuclear weapon. But the regime must know that Washington has a plan to destroy its nuclear capabilities within a matter of days through round-the-clock bombing.

Still, in response to Trump’s announcement this month that he was increasing sanctions, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seemed to dismiss the notion of a deal. But Tehran has otherwise been signaling for at least the past 18 months that it’s open to renewing talks with Washington.

As for Trump, a deal is the simplest way to keep Iran from sprinting toward a bomb and drawing the U.S. into conflict, which is the last thing he wants. It might also represent the best opportunity for him to establish himself as an international dealmaker. He would surely claim that his unique genius produced a deal that Obama couldn’t get (even though almost everything that will have made it possible happened under Joe Biden). He will probably demand a Nobel Peace Prize, and he might even get one.

The outline of such a deal is easy to imagine. Iran will likely have to halt further uranium enrichment, relinquish its current stock to be held in escrow outside the country, and place its nuclear facilities under the control—or at least observation—of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Perhaps it will have to destroy some centrifuges, too.

[Read: How Israel could be changing Iran’s nuclear calculus]

By most estimates, Iran is about a year away from developing a usable warhead; any agreement would substantially extend that interval. Obama got Iran to agree to pause any nuclear advances for 15 years. Given the regime’s weakened stance today, Trump might well get 20 or more. Trump could also insist that Iran verifiably limit the arms and funding it grants to regional proxies. Israel has effectively proved that these groups can’t defend Iran anyway, so the regime may be more willing to curtail its support.

The main obstacle to a deal might be Iran’s missile arsenal, which the country could refuse to decommission. But unilateral missile disarmament is virtually unheard-of in international relations. This shouldn’t deter the United States. Israel’s air strikes in October significantly degraded Iran’s arsenal as well as its ground-to-air defenses and its ability to produce fuel for sophisticated rockets. Iranian missiles don’t pose nearly the threat they once did.

Billboards outside an Israeli settlement in the West Bank (Lucien Lung / Riva Press / Redux)

If a deal gets done, that leaves the resulting anger of the Israeli right and its allies in America. The administration already has a blueprint for how it might assuage them: the “Peace to Prosperity” framework that Jared Kushner championed during Trump’s first term. Much of the proposal is impractical, even farcical, but it contains a plan for Israel to annex an additional 30 percent or more of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley. This would leave the remaining Palestinian territory surrounded by a new and U.S.-approved expanded Israel.

Right-wing Israelis regard the entire West Bank as their exclusive patrimony, so they might not be thrilled to get only 30 percent more of it. But the plan would significantly extend their area of sovereign control. In all likelihood, it would be sufficient to appease them after a nuclear deal is signed.

Palestinians will protest; they want a state, not a shrunken territory circumscribed and dominated by an enlarged Israel that may soon want to pursue total control from the river to the sea, as its governing coalition envisions. But Israel and the U.S. will likely be able to impose the scheme by force. Israel has already effectively controlled the territory since 1967; little stands in the way of the country claiming it outright.

“Peace to Prosperity” was widely ridiculed when it was released in 2020. Now, next to Trump’s Gaza plan, it will look to some on the right like a model of rationality and restraint. That could be enough to make it happen.

Gaz-a-Lago is a fantasy. But by reciting the proposal again and again, Trump might be setting in motion very real—and extremely ominous—consequences for the West Bank and the entire region.

The Iranian regime spent decades building the Axis of Resistance, a coalition of anti-Western militias that extended Tehran’s influence deep into the Arab world. But what takes years to build can collapse seemingly overnight. Iraq is the latest country in which many leaders are attempting to move out of Iran’s orbit.

Last year, the Axis rapidly slid from the seeming height of its power into terminal decline. Israel battered two key members, Hamas and Hezbollah, and the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad fell to its opponents. In Lebanon, the Parliament elected a new president and a new prime minister who are not on friendly terms with the Axis. Until recently, Tehran liked to boast that it controlled four Arab capitals: Damascus, Beirut, Sanaa, and Baghdad. The first two have slipped away. The third is still controlled by the Houthis, who remain loyal to Tehran. But what about the fourth?

Iran’s influence in Baghdad runs through the country’s Shiite militias and political parties. Iraq’s prime minister can hardly govern without the support of Shiite groups. And yet, the degree of Tehran’s control over Baghdad is always changing. Pro-Tehran parties can’t form a government on their own; they have to form coalitions with other parties, including those dominated by Kurds and Sunnis, who have little ideological affinity with the Axis. And even among Iraq’s Shia, the pro-Tehran position is heavily contested—all the more so, surely, now that the region’s balance of power has shifted away from Iran.

In 2021, pro-Tehran parties were roundly defeated in Iraq’s parliamentary elections. Muqtada al-Sadr, a charismatic Shia cleric and vociferous critic of Iran, looked set to form a government. But the pro-Iranian forces staged violent street clashes and, through clerical and parliamentary maneuvering, managed to stop this. Mohammed al-Sudani assumed the premiership in October 2022 in what was largely seen as an Iranian victory—not least because the prime minister he replaced, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, had been Iraq’s first non-Islamist ruler since the fall of Saddam. Kadhimi had restored Iraqi ties with Sunni powers such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, even while keeping excellent relations with Iran and encouraging the restoration of Iranian-Saudi diplomatic relations.

Yet Tehran’s hold over Baghdad is far from secure. Al-Sudani relies on the support of the pro-Tehran parties, but he has also continued to pursue much of Kadhimi’s regional agenda of cementing ties with Arab states. And two of his major coalition partners, the Sunni-dominated Progress Party and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), had previously formed a pact with Sadr. Even Sudani’s own small party, the Euphrates Movement (also known by its Arabic name, al-Furatayn), once explored a coalition with Sadr. Which is to say that Sadr has lost the intra-Shia battle for now, but his previous allies still hold a good deal of power in Iraq and share it with the pro-Tehran parties at their pleasure.

Many issues divide Iraqis, but one unites many of them: They don’t want Iraq to be a battleground for Iran’s conflicts with the United States and Israel. Nor, given the declining fortunes of Tehran’s Axis, do they wish to be on the losing team in the region. When Assad fell, Tehran went into a panic. Iraqis, meanwhile, attempted to normalize relations with the new Syrian administration. On December 26, Iraq’s intelligence chief visited Damascus and met with Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa. Iraqis have also taken part in Arab League engagements with Syria.

[Graeme Wood: The fall of Aleppo was oddly familiar]

Many in Iraq are now openly calling for disbanding the Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella of mostly Iran-backed militias formed in 2014 to fight the Islamic State. Explicitly modeled after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the PMF has been the main vehicle for Iranian meddling in Iraq. Members of the Iraqi government have begun arguing that with the Sunni terrorist group mostly defeated, the PMF is no longer necessary.

“I hope that we can convince the leaders of these groups to lay down their arms,” Fuad Hussein, Iraq’s foreign minister and a KDP stalwart, said in an interview last month. “Two or three years ago, it was impossible to discuss this topic in our society.”

Today Sadr, too, has called for only the state security forces, “and not militias or outlaw groups,” to bear arms. More surprisingly, some figures from inside the Coalition Framework, an umbrella of mostly pro-Tehran parties, have endorsed this position—among them, Mohsen al-Mandalawi, a Shia Kurdish billionaire and the deputy speaker of the Parliament. Disbanding armed militias or incorporating them into security forces loyal to the state would effectively take away Iran’s main source of leverage inside Iraq.

Such a move may also be calculated to head off trouble with Washington. The new Trump administration is reportedly considering fresh sanctions against Iraq unless the PMF is disarmed. During his first presidential term, President Donald Trump launched drone strikes into Baghdad that killed the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and the PMF’s deputy commander, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. As a result, the Iraqi judiciary has an outstanding warrant for Trump’s arrest. But now that the former president is back in power, the Iraqi government may be looking to smooth things over. Al-Sudani and Iraq’s ceremonial president, Abdul Latif Rashid, have sent congratulatory messages to the U.S. president, upon his election in November and his inauguration last month. Speaking to Reuters last month, Hussein said he hoped Iraq would “continue [its] good relationship with Washington” under Trump. And Ali Nima, an MP with the Coordination Framework, recently said that he expected Iraqi-American relations to improve and that the pro-Iranian group was “not concerned about Trump.”

Relations with Tehran, meanwhile, seem more contentious than ever. Last month, Sudani visited Tehran and got an earful from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The elderly Iranian cleric called for Iraq to preserve and strengthen the PMF and to expel all American forces. He also called the recent change of power in Syria the work of “alien governments.”

[Arash Azizi: RIP, the Axis of Resistance]

Is all of this enough to suggest that Iraq, too, is leaving Iran’s Axis? The Iraq experts I spoke with did not agree on the answer to this question.

“Iran continues to wield significant influence in Iraq,” Hamdi Malik, an associate fellow at the Washington Institute, told me. He pointed out that Sudani’s government initially sent the new Syrian regime “cautious yet positive signals,” but that “the tone in Iraq’s Shia circles shifted completely after Khamenei expressed a completely hostile view of developments there.” Moreover, the Sudani government relies heavily on the support of the Coordination Framework, many of whose parties derive their power and influence from Iran. “Therefore,” Malik told me, “any attempt by Sudani to curb Iran’s influence will be merely cosmetic.”

Farhang Faraydoon Namdar, a Kurdish Iraqi analyst at Missouri State University, agreed. The PMF still has some 200,000 members and an almost $3 billion budget. That force is most likely not going anywhere, he observed, the calls for disbanding it notwithstanding. And “almost all PMF groups are loyal to Iran,” Namdar told me. “The PMF has been able to entrench itself in Iraq’s economy and politics … they are the backbone of Sudani’s government.”

But Iraq’s position may be more complex than that of a simple vassal to a neighboring regime. Baghdad is uniquely situated to balance Iranian interests against those of the region’s Sunni Arab states, and it is working hard to build partnerships with its non-Iranian neighbors. Arran Robert Walshe, an Iraq expert based in Amman, told me he believes that Sudani is “cautiously disentangling Iraq from the Axis without fully severing ties to Tehran.” But Tehran and its Iraqi allies could spoil those efforts, Walshe cautions—for example, by attacking development projects in which Gulf states have invested.

Iraq will hold parliamentary elections in October. If enough Iraqis reject pro-Tehran parties at the polls, as most did in 2021, Sudani or a successor may have the opportunity to form a government that does more to assert Iraqi sovereignty. Parties currently in the Coordination Framework could even break away from Tehran and run on new platforms. By the unwritten sectarian power-sharing deal that has ruled the country since 2003, the Iraqi prime minister must always be an Arab Shiite. But he is not guaranteed to be pro-Axis.

During Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation hearing, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, both Democrats and Republicans, repeatedly asked the soon-to-be director of national intelligence whether Edward Snowden was a traitor for releasing thousands of classified documents that revealed clandestine U.S. sources and methods. And repeatedly Gabbard declined to condemn Snowden beyond the tepid acknowledgment that he’d broken the law. Even at that, she praised him for exposing a secret program.

All nine Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, and every Republican senator except Mitch McConnell, nonetheless voted to confirm her to lead America’s 18 intelligence agencies. Among her responsibilities, she will be delivering a daily brief to the president that curates analysis of the country’s most urgent problems.

Gabbard has hardly demonstrated the judgment necessary for the task. In 2013, overwhelming evidence, including expert U.S.-intelligence analysis, showed that the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons on his people. Gabbard was unwilling to believe it, perhaps because the conclusion did not accord with her preconceived ideas about the Syrian civil conflict. This is the stance of someone likely to either miss or reject warnings of emergent threats. And it’s not the only sign that the Trump administration is putting American security at risk.

Gabbard’s appointment is just one factor leading American allies, including but not limited to the “Five Eyes” states (the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in addition to the U.S.), to worry about whether they can securely share intelligence with the Trump administration. The Five Eyes extend the geographical reach of U.S. intelligence coverage and provide assessments that can increase or even usefully challenge U.S. findings. This input plays a part in calibrating the confidence that U.S. agencies have in their own conclusions. Australia’s intelligence services, for example, were the first to understand the risks that Huawei components posed for Western telecommunications networks. Their findings drove investigations in the U.S. and U.K. that led allied countries to strip Huawei hardware out of their 5G networks.  

[Shane Harris: Elon Musk is breaking the national-security system]

Without allied cooperation, Washington will soon be operating on a fraction of the insight it once had into foreign threats. And the U.S. will need that supplemental intelligence more than ever, because the Trump administration has hobbled its own premier intelligence-gathering agency by offering career-terminating buyouts to all CIA employees. Those who leave will take with them decades of experience running agents, understanding how foreign governments operate, building trust with international counterparts, and spotting meaningful anomalies.

Turning over the entire intelligence workforce will set the United States back incalculably in terms of its ability to both understand the world and act effectively against its adversaries. Consider Iran, an opaque, authoritarian foe whose powerful supreme leader is 85 years old. When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dies, events will unfold quickly on the ground: internal power struggles in Tehran, opportunistic maneuvers in the region. The U.S. government will not want to be on a learning curve at that moment—it will need experienced hands who can penetrate, analyze, and influence developments in real time. Instead the Trump administration is choosing to put the United States at a deficit.

The same is true in the global influence stakes. U.S. adversaries, including Russia and China, are engaged in information operations that actively seek to polarize and inflame American society. The new U.S. administration appears to be ceding that ground to them. The State Department office that combats foreign state-sponsored disinformation had already closed. Now the Department of Homeland Security has put staff members who work on foreign influence operations on administrative leave. The FBI has closed its foreign influence task force. The National Security Agency will likely be next: Gabbard has evinced both a flawed understanding of its governing legislation and a deep suspicion that the agency endangers civil liberties. But hostile governments will be the ones endangering America’s civil liberties, and manipulating its public discourse, if the U.S. allows them to participate unrestrainedly in its domestic political space.

America’s foes are surely observing the chaos in Washington and looking for espionage opportunities. They will find them. Four weeks into Donald Trump’s new administration, lax security practices have created all manner of risk. The CIA has provided employee data on unsecured systems. Staff members from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are downloading onto private servers information that foreign governments would pay dearly for (or use other espionage techniques to obtain). DOGE is apparently cavalier about exposing American citizens to danger—and about the government’s duty of care in protecting the identities of those who protect the country. The Bureau of Fiscal Services recommends that DOGE’s access to Treasury’s payments system be monitored as an insider threat.

[Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

This administration is still in its early days. The courts or Congress could reassert their constitutional prerogatives and slow or stop some of these actions. But the upheaval that has already occurred in the departments responsible for national security, together with the deficiencies of judgment displayed by some of the president’s Cabinet appointees, has already made America more vulnerable and less equipped to understand the threats it faces.

The Onion has headlined a satirical article “FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States.” Americans will be lucky if that’s all their adversaries do.

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The single greatest success of Donald Trump’s second term so far might be his Cabinet. Today, senators confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, one day after confirming Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. The nomination of Kash Patel to lead the FBI is headed to a floor vote, and Linda McMahon—chosen to lead and apparently dismantle the Department of Education—is testifying to senators today.

Many parts of Trump’s agenda are deceptively fragile, as the journalist Ezra Klein recently argued. Courts have stepped in to block some of his executive orders and impede Elon Musk’s demolition of broad swaths of the federal government as we know it. Republicans in Congress still don’t seem to have a plan for moving the president’s legislative agenda forward. But despite clear concern from a variety of Republican senators about Trump’s Cabinet picks, it now seems possible that Trump will get every one confirmed except for Matt Gaetz—an indication of how completely Senate Republicans have surrendered their role as an independent check on the president.

The initial rollout of nominees was inauspicious. Gaetz, whom Trump reportedly chose spontaneously during a two-hour flight, lasted just eight days before withdrawing his nomination, after it became evident that Republicans would not confirm him. The rest of the slate was weak enough that at least one more casualty was likely, though I warned in November that a uniformly bad group might perversely make it harder for Republicans to take down any individual. How could they say no to one and justify saying yes to any of the others?

Pete Hegseth had no clear qualifications to run the Defense Department, serial infidelities, and allegations of a sexual assault and alcohol abuse. (He has denied both allegations, and settled with the sexual-assault accuser out of court. Prosecutors have said that they did not have sufficient evidence to pursue charges.) Gabbard not only lacked any intelligence experience but also brought a history of views antithetical to many Republican senators, an affinity for deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and evidence of dishonesty. Patel was, in the view of many of his former colleagues in the first Trump administration, simply dangerous. Kennedy was, um, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Now all seem likely to take up their posts. Sure, it’s taken a while. Democrats have done what they can to slow down many of these nominations, and they voted unanimously against Hegseth, Kennedy, and Gabbard (a former Democratic House member!). Republicans objected when the administration tried to drive nominees through without FBI background checks, and damaging information about each of these nominees has continued to emerge; earlier this week, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin accused Patel of orchestrating a political purge at the FBI, despite promises not to do so. Yet none of that has mattered to the results.

Getting this done has required the White House to do some deft maneuvering. Trump allies publicly bullied Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who is a veteran and an outspoken advocate for victims of sexual assault, into backing Hegseth. According to The Wall Street Journal, they privately bullied the Republican Thom Tillis, a North Carolinian who has sometimes bucked Trump and faces a tough reelection campaign next year, after he indicated that he’d vote against Hegseth; he ultimately voted in favor. They horse-traded with Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana medical doctor who sounded very skeptical of Kennedy during hearings, giving him undisclosed reassurances in exchange for his support. As Politico reported, Trump dispatched J. D. Vance to absorb the grievances of Todd Young, an Indiana senator, about Gabbard; the vice president called off attacks from Trump allies and won Young’s vote.

One lone Republican voted against all three: Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the man responsible for keeping GOP senators lined up behind Trump during his first four years in office. The rest have various justifications for voting more or less in lockstep. They say they were reassured by what they heard in meetings—as though they’ve never seen a nominee fib, and as though that outweighed long histories. They say that presidents deserve to have the advisers they want. Behind closed doors, they might lay out a different calculation: Voting no on Cabinet members is a good way to tick Trump off while gaining little more than symbolism; better for them to keep their powder dry for real policy issues where they disagree with him.

These rationalizations might have made sense for a distasteful nominee here and there, but what Trump has put forward is likely the least qualified Cabinet in American history. In 2019, the Senate deep-sixed John Ratcliffe’s nomination as DNI (though it did confirm him a year later); this time around, when nominated for director of the CIA, he was seen as one of the more sober and qualified picks. Putting people like Trump’s nominees in charge of important parts of the federal government poses real dangers to the nation. Tom Nichols has explained how Hegseth exemplifies this: He seems more interested in bestowing trollish names on bases and giving contradictory messages about Ukraine than the tough work of running the Pentagon. That’s bad news in the immediate term and worse news when a crisis hits.

The idea of waiting to push back on Trump later might be more convincing if no one had ever seen him in action, as I discussed yesterday. Successfully ramming through this slate of nominees will only encourage the president. If Republican members wanted to, they could exert unusual leverage over the White House because of the narrow 53–47 margin in the chamber; Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin showed during the Biden presidency how a tiny fraction of the Democratic caucus could bend leadership to its will. But if Trump managed to get senators to vote for Gabbard and Kennedy, two fringe nominees with some far-left views, why should he expect them to restrain him on anything else?

The real reason for these votes is presumably fear. Republicans have seen Trump’s taste for retribution, and they fear his supporters in primaries. The irony is that in bowing to Trump, senators may actually be defying voters’ preferences. A CBS News poll published Monday found that six in 10 GOP voters would prefer to see congressional Republicans stand up to Trump when they disagree with him. By knocking down some of the worst nominees, senators might have made the Cabinet better and served the country well. But if that wasn’t enough to persuade them, perhaps the chance for political gain could.

Related:

Kash Patel will do anything for Trump. The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus (From November)

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The “Gulf of America” is an admission of defeat, David Frum writes. RFK Jr. won. Now what? Who’s running the Defense Department? Anne Applebaum: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing.

Today’s News

Trump signed a proclamation that outlines a plan to implement reciprocal tariffs for any country that imposes tariffs on the United States. A federal judge extended the pause on the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle USAID for at least another week. Roughly 77,000 federal employees accepted the Trump administration’s buyout offer by last night’s deadline after a federal judge lifted the freeze on the program yesterday.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Online life changed the way we talk and write—then changed it again, and again, and so on, forever, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Ian Woods*

The House Where 28,000 Records Burned

By Nancy Walecki

Before it burned, Charlie Springer’s house contained 18,000 vinyl LPs, 12,000 CDs, 10,000 45s, 4,000 cassettes, 600 78s, 150 8-tracks, hundreds of signed musical posters, and about 100 gold records. The albums alone occupied an entire wall of shelves in the family room, and another in the garage. On his desk were a set of drumsticks from Nirvana and an old RCA microphone that Prince had given to him at a recording session for Prince. A neon Beach Boys sign—as far as he knows, one of only eight remaining in the world—hung above the dining table.

Read the full article.

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“Having the best spies, the best collection systems, and the best analysts will not help an intelligence service if it leaks like a sieve,” the former CIA speechwriter Charles E. Lathrop remarked in The Literary Spy, a book of quotations about espionage that he compiled. Lathrop, who wrote under a pseudonym, was making a point about counterintelligence—the flushing out of enemy spies and leakers who might compromise a spy agency’s precious secrets. Counterintelligence, Lathrop observed, “is the kidneys of national security: necessary, but unheralded until something goes wrong.”

These days, something looks to have gone very wrong—with the kidneys and maybe with the brain, too.  

To protect secrets, people who will be handling classified information or assuming positions of trust within intelligence agencies are vetted, often by law-enforcement agents, who interview friends and co-workers, review travel histories, and analyze financial information to determine whether someone might make an attractive recruit for a foreign intelligence service. Perhaps he’s in debt and would be willing to sell sensitive information. Or maybe she harbors some allegiance to a hostile country or cause and might be willing to spy for it. Looking for these red flags is counterintelligence 101, an imperfect, laborious, and invasive process that American presidents of both major parties have nevertheless accepted as the cost of doing intelligence business.

[David Deming: DOGE is failing on its own terms]

But the legion of Elon Musk acolytes who have set up shop inside federal agencies in the past few weeks do not appear to have been subjected to anything approaching rigorous scrutiny. President Donald Trump has also nominated to key national-security positions people whose personal and financial histories contain at least caution flags. This deviation from past practice has created a new kind of counterintelligence predicament, officials and experts have told me. Rather than staying on high alert for hidden threats, the counterintelligence monitors have to worry about the people in charge.

The public knows very little about how, or if, staff at the new Department of Government Efficiency that Musk runs were vetted before they obtained access to the Treasury Department’s central payment system or the files of millions of government employees at the Office of Personnel Management. These two databases could help U.S. adversaries uncover the identities of intelligence officers and potentially their sources, people with knowledge about how the systems are set up told me.

Precisely what the DOGE teams are doing with this information, whom they’ve shared it with, and whether they have adequately protected it from falling into the wrong hands remains unknown. But the risks posed by this direct access to the government’s central nervous system are entirely foreseeable.

“The fact that people are getting access to classified and personally identifiable information who are not being vetted by our national-security system means it is more likely that there are going to be damaging leaks,” Tim Naftali, a counterintelligence expert and presidential historian at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, told me.

Why would President Trump, who is the ultimate arbiter of who gets to see classified information, take such risks? One answer is rooted in his historic distrust of the FBI, whose agents traditionally conduct background investigations of senior administration officials as they assume their posts. Trump views the bureau as a hotbed of disloyal conspirators. During the presidential transition, he reportedly resisted efforts to allow FBI background checks, and how thoroughly members of his administration were vetted, if at all, is still not clear.

Animus and mistrust likely guide the president’s decisions here. He has publicly seethed at the agents who searched his Florida home, as part of an investigation that led to felony charges for mishandling national-security information after he left office. The agents who worked on that case are assigned to a counterintelligence squad at the FBI’s Washington field office, and the White House is trying to fire them. These agents routinely investigate threats to U.S. national security, and removing them would at least temporarily stall their efforts.

“In his dark passion for retribution, Trump is making his own government, which is our government, more vulnerable to adversarial penetration,” Naftali said.

Security risks now pervade the federal government, thanks largely to a cadre of youngsters, some barely out of high school, whom Musk has deployed inside federal agencies, ostensibly to identify wasteful government spending. In addition to the Treasury Department and the Office of Personnel Management, DOGE agents have reportedly accessed information networks at the State Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Commerce Department, the Education Department, and the Energy Department, among others. Musk has further plans to send teams to other major organizations, including the Pentagon.

[Read: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

As his teams fan out, the kidneys of counterintelligence are backing up.

At Treasury, a security team warned that DOGE employees’ access to a central government payment network presents an “unprecedented insider threat risk,” The Washington Post reported last week. The government defines an insider threat as “someone with regular or continuous access” to a computer system who could exploit the information for criminal purposes, leak it to unauthorized parties, or sell it to a foreign government. Edward Snowden, the government contractor who disclosed classified information about NSA surveillance to journalists and who now lives in Russia, is the classic modern example.  

Two intelligence officials told me that the Treasury system, which processes more than $5 trillion in payments each year, contains sensitive national-security information. It could be used to uncover the identities of U.S. intelligence officers—who are after all paid from the Treasury—as well as people or organizations who are paid to spy on behalf of the United States.

These names are not explicitly identified as intelligence assets in the Treasury network, but an adversary with the time and know-how could use the Treasury data, possibly in concert with other information, to discover classified identities, the officials indicated. According to the Post, a senior career official at the department raised such concerns in a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The official recommended some unknown mitigating steps that Bessent reportedly approved.

At the Office of Personnel Management, DOGE employees gained access to information, including addresses and salary history, about Treasury and State Department employees working in “sensitive security positions,” the Post also reported. Personnel data are another puzzle piece that could allow an adversary to identify who works for the intelligence community, and potentially in what country they’re stationed.

“Little pieces of information matter a lot when they’re put together with other little pieces of information,” Joel Brenner, who was in charge of U.S. counterintelligence policy under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told me. This is standard intelligence tradecraft. “That’s how we do it. That’s how every intelligence service does it,” Brenner said.

The Office of Personnel Management is not known for its counterintelligence prowess. A decade ago, Chinese hackers breached the agency’s computer networks and stole the records of millions of U.S. government employees, in one of the great espionage coups of recent history. As I reported at the time, officials had earlier resisted a plan to merge a system known as Scattered Castles, which contained the records of intelligence-agency personnel and others who held security clearances, with OPM’s system, fearing exposure in just this scenario.

Their concerns proved prescient, and today, Scattered Castles remains segregated from OPM’s systems—fortunately, given recent reports that Musk’s team has connected its own server to OPM’s systems, which could open a gateway for foreign hackers to again burrow in.

Yet intelligence-personnel records may still be at risk. Last week the CIA sent OPM a list of names of new CIA officers via an unclassified email, people familiar with the matter told me. The CIA sent only the officers’ first names and the first initial of their last names. But even those fragments of information could be useful to foreign spies.

Over the weekend, a former senior CIA official showed me the steps by which a foreign adversary who knew only his first name and last initial could have managed to identify him from the single line of the congressional record where his full name was published more than 20 years ago, when he became a member of the Foreign Service. The former official was undercover at the time as a State Department employee. If a foreign government had known even part of his name from a list of confirmed CIA officers, his cover would have been blown. The cover of a generation of young intelligence officers now appears to depend on whether Musk’s DOGE kids are, with no obvious experience in such matters, properly handling and protecting the information that the CIA sent them.  

How trustworthy are Musk’s employees? Early reports suggest that if they had been subject to traditional background checks, which they apparently were not, some of them would have had trouble passing. One standout in this regard, Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old DOGE member who has used the online handle “Big Balls,” was fired from an internship after he was accused of sharing proprietary information with a competitor, Bloomberg reported. After he was dismissed, the former intern bragged on an online chat platform that he “had access to every machine” and could have deleted crucial data from the company’s servers. “I never exploited it because it’s just not me,” Coristine reportedly wrote. This is the textbook definition—indeed, the U.S. government’s definition—of an insider threat.

The cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs has written that Coristine was affiliated with a community of chat channels “that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network.” Coristine, who was first identified not in a government announcement but by investigative reporters at Wired, founded a company that “controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” the publication reported. Coristine has recently been named a senior adviser at the State Department, according to the Post.

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

Government computer-security experts are worried that DOGE members could corrupt vital technology systems. “Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors,” my colleagues wrote in The Atlantic last week. An insider need not even behave maliciously to cause havoc. DOGE agents, who are overwhelmingly young with little professional experience or familiarity with older government systems, “may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo.”

The counterintelligence risks don’t extend only to unchecked young people with the keys to the government’s kingdoms of data. Some of Trump’s Cabinet nominees—including those for two national-security positions—raise classic red flags.

According to his financial disclosure forms, Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to run the FBI, was paid $25,000 last year by a film company owned by a dual U.S.-Russian citizen that has made programs promoting “deep state” conspiracy theories pushed by the Kremlin, the Post reported. Receiving money from a foreign government is a basic risk factor because it raises questions about whether a government employee’s favor or influence can be bought.

The resulting six-part documentary appeared on Tucker Carlson’s online network, itself a reliable conduit for Kremlin propaganda. In the film, Patel made his now infamous pledge to shut down the FBI’s headquarters in Washington and “open it up as a museum to the ‘deep state.’” The FBI is one of the Russian intelligence services’ main targets for espionage.

On his disclosure forms, which were made public only after he testified in his Senate confirmation hearing, Patel describes the payment as an “honorarium.” That term traditionally implies a nominal or even negligible sum of money, which this was not. He also listed consulting work for clients that include the Qatari embassy and said that he would keep his stock in the Cayman Islands–based parent company of the clothing brand Shein, which was founded in China.

According to his financial disclosure forms, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to run the Health and Human Services Department, is saddled with up to $1.2 million in credit-card debt. Owing money is another risk factor because it might induce people to accept funds in exchange for sensitive information. Investigators examine bank records, credit-card statements, and other financial documents to determine how much debt a security-clearance applicant carries and its proportion to his level of income.

Allegiance or even sympathy to a hostile power is yet another warning sign. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, has drawn widespread criticism for her statements supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as her 2017 meeting with Syria’s then-president, Bashar al-Assad. More alarming, the Post found evidence that Gabbard tried to obfuscate details about the nature of her encounters with the Syrian dictator from congressional investigators and may have lied to her staff. Having a history of shady meetings with any foreign national, much less the head of a country, is a great way not to be approved for a security clearance. (Just ask Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose own opaque interactions with foreign officials temporarily stopped him from obtaining a clearance in the first Trump administration.)

During her confirmation hearing, Gabbard resisted entreaties from her fellow Republicans and Democrats—with whom she used to caucus when she was a member of Congress—to condemn Edward Snowden’s leaks and label him a “traitor.” Gabbard, who has long praised Snowden as a courageous whistleblower and called on Trump to pardon him, would say only that he “broke the law,” an obstinate position that left the distinct impression she approves of what Snowden did. Nevertheless, today the Senate voted largely along party lines to confirm Gabbard’s nomination as the nation’s top intelligence official.

Traditionally, counterintelligence officials have judged people whose ideology mirrors that of an adversarial state, or who have financial conflicts of interest, to be at higher risk of becoming spies or leaking secrets. “At the moment, that’s the population from which President Trump is selecting his most powerful and influential members of his administration,” Naftali told me.

[Read: It’s time to worry about DOGE’s AI plans]

Trump’s assault on the country’s national-security agencies stems from a distrust that millions of Americans share, Jeffrey Rogg, an intelligence historian at the University of South Florida, told me. Trump has repeatedly said—accurately—that the intelligence community often falls short of its basic obligation of keeping the United States from being taken by surprise by the country’s adversaries. And the agencies have failed several times to root out their own insider threats. Those counterintelligence debacles shake public confidence and bolster Trump’s critique that the intelligence agencies are dysfunctional and even corrupt.

At the same time, many career intelligence officers don’t trust the president or the people he has chosen to lead. They believe that Trump has misled the public about what the intelligence agencies are really there to do. And these, too, are accurate complaints, shared by many Americans.

Intelligence agencies depend on trust, both in their own employees and from the public. That confidence is disintegrating. As Rogg told me, “This is where we’re going to be our own worst enemies.”

Questions grow over future of 2,000 SDF fighters in Syria after Bashar al-Assad toppling, President Trump taking office.