Once again it was time for retribution. Just as he had cleared the FBI of Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, and other Crossfire Hurricane officials, Trump now purged people connected to impeachment, including Sondland and Vindman, who was humiliatingly escorted out of the White House on his way to losing his army career. A long-sought target of this latest purge was the intelligence agencies. The housecleaning went far beyond what Bush did in placing Goss atop a distrusted CIA in 2004. Atkinson, the inspector general who reported the Ukraine whistleblower account to Congress, was out. So, too, was his boss, Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, along with deputy Andrew Hallman, after an intelligence official gave an election briefing asserting continued Russian election interference for Trump’s benefit. Trump learned about the briefing from Nunes. He exploded at Maguire at an Oval Office meeting for what he saw as disloyalty. Brennan called the “virtual decapitation” of the intelligence leadership a “full-blown national security crisis.”
Trump replaced Maguire with a former Bolton aide and Twitter troll, the pugilistic ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell. Grenell used his appointment—an interim one that the Senate was never going to confirm—to leak information suggesting the Obama administration had inappropriately exposed Mike Flynn’s identity after intercepting Kislyak’s calls with him, a charge that a prosecutor would later invalidate. Grenell’s obvious cronyism was also a lever for Trump to get Senate Republicans to vote to replace him with an even bigger loyalist with less intelligence experience: John Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe acted quickly to declassify documents seeming to exonerate Trump, like an annex from the 2017 intelligence assessment saying the intelligence agencies had “limited corroboration” for a salacious dossier prepared by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, which was peripheral to the assessment. The impulse to please Trump with intelligence spread beyond ODNI. At the Department of Homeland Security, a whistleblower in the intelligence directorate said Trump appointees deemphasized threat assessments about violent white supremacists in favor of making false equivalences to left-wing groups. “The bottom line from the White House,” explained Miles Taylor, DHS chief of staff under Nielsen, “was they didn’t want us to talk about domestic terrorism because they worried that if we talked about right-wing extremism, we would alienate many of the president’s supporters.”
Ever since Bush first clashed with the CIA over the Iraq war, elements within the right had seen the intelligence agencies as a hindrance to their ambitions. It was a position that required ignoring their stewardship of the surveillance, rendition, torture, and assassination missions of the War on Terror. That tension eased when the right aimed its hostility not at intelligence operatives but at analysts and senior leadership, who tended to act, as a matter of professional pride, without the personal loyalty Trump demanded. With MAGA seeing the stakes of political conflict to be as existential as the Flight 93 Election thesis implied, the intelligence chiefs’ pretense at independence seemed to them like hostile Deep State intransigence. Trump had accommodated institutions fearful of him by installing the graybeard GOP senator Dan Coats as director of national intelligence. That had resulted in #Russiagate and impeachment. Installing Grenell and Ratcliffe as directors of national intelligence was more than an attack on the independence of the intelligence agencies. It was an attack on the idea that intelligence ought to be independent. Trump’s career-long achievement had been to manipulate reality to his benefit. He wanted from intelligence the sort of thing that Giuliani was doing with his Ukraine drug deal, or from the “investigators” he claimed to send to Hawaii for Obama’s birth certificate: material to invent the crimes of his rivals and explain away his own. Trump, to the acclaim of much of the Republican Party, was not fighting a Deep State. He was building one.
As the man House Democrats had impeached attempted to suborn the intelligence agencies, they again raced to preserve his surveillance power. Impeachment prevented congressional Republicans from easily renewing the main surveillance provisions of the PATRIOT Act. Even though those provisions had nothing to do with Crossfire Hurricane, it was politically untenable to give MAGA’s FBI enemies what they wanted. Longtime GOP surveillance reformers took the opportunity to kill not only the Call Detail Records program—uncontroversial after NSA’s suspension—but also PATRIOT Section 215’s warrantless business records collection, which had been how NSA and the Justice Department laundered bulk domestic phone records collection. For the first time since 2001, a key PATRIOT authority expired for an extended period.
Schiff, backed by Pelosi, worked unsuccessfully to revive it. In exchange he allowed his Republican colleague Jim Jordan to add a provision permitting the attorney general to disapprove surveillance on an elected official. Then, over the howls of civil libertarians in both parties and more strident ones outside, Schiff weakened protections against the FBI’s warrantlessly collecting Americans’ browser and search histories on a scale just short of bulk. “He dishonestly mischaracterized both the Daines-Wyden and Lofgren-Davidson [reform] Amendments and successfully stalled FISA reform,” said one of those civil libertarians, Ohio Republican Warren Davidson.
Democrats, aligned with the besieged intelligence agencies, mumbled through their acceptance of a Justice Department inspector general report that MAGA trumpeted. Although the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, found that there was none of the deliberate bias in Crossfire Hurricane that MAGA claimed, he established that the FBI had provided the FISA Court with misleading justifications to continue the surveillance on Carter Page. But neither MAGA nor the #Resistance paid commensurate attention to a follow-up report from Horowitz that attempted to explain the failings of Crossfire Hurricane. After taking a sample of twenty-nine FBI submissions to the secret court, he found an average of twenty errors in each of them. “[I]t appears that the FBI is not consistently re-verifying the original statements of fact within renewal applications,” Horowitz said, describing a process error that risked guaranteeing an investigative perpetual-motion machine.
In the twenty years since 9/11, FBI submissions to the FISA Court had exploded—the eight field offices from which Horowitz gathered his sample had submitted seven hundred such surveillance applications over five years—and the FBI was, at a minimum and with frequency, stretching the evidence necessary to put Americans under national security surveillance. And this was for the most legally rigorous of the FBI’s menu of options for such surveillance. Horowitz’s report indicated that the problems with Crossfire Hurricane emerged from a process that the bureau had routinized and used against anonymous Americans, most of them Muslim, for an entire generation. His findings impacted American politics not at all.
* * *
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A DIFFERENT PATRIOT ACT PROVISION than the ones Schiff tried to save turned Adham Hassoun into a Forever War pioneer yet again.
In January 2019 a judge ruled that the predicament Hassoun’s statelessness presented during his ICE detention was perverse enough to permit him to be temporarily released into his sister’s custody back in Florida. But the Justice Department cited a post-9/11 immigration regulation to keep him at Batavia as a potential security risk. He was now a man in his fifties, in poor health, who had committed no act of violence. The administration had to find a jailhouse snitch in order to portray Hassoun as dangerous.
The untested regulation sparked the interest of the ACLU in defeating it. Backstopping local attorneys, it filed a habeas corpus case to free Hassoun. Rather than back down, the administration escalated its efforts. In November, as filings in the case moved toward an evidentiary hearing before a federal judge to determine the danger he posed, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security fired a Chekhov’s gun of the War on Terror.
Buried deep within the PATRIOT Act was a lost artifact: Section 412. The subject of great civil-libertarian fear shortly after passage but never exercised, it explicitly provided for the indefinite detention, renewable every six months,
of undeportable noncitizens deemed terrorism risks. The PATRIOT Act had criminalized Hassoun. Now, after he had served his time, after he was taken into a completely different cage, the PATRIOT Act could keep Hassoun in such cages forever.
“This is the USA. It’s not like a Third World country,” he marveled. “You can’t do this to people—this country, they say they cherish freedom.” Soon, in an adjoining building of the ICE prison where he lived, came a virus that threatened to speed his release in a different sense.
CHAPTER NINE
THE INVISIBLE ENEMY
2020-2021
On the last day of 2019, an inflamed procession of Iraqis passed unchallenged into the Green Zone and set fire to a way station outside the U.S. embassy. During the tensest days of the occupation, attacks on the embassy had been a matter of rockets and mortars fired from a distance. Now, long after most Americans had forgotten that U.S. troops even remained in Iraq, Baghdadis fought at close range, using metal poles as battering rams to bash the bulletproof glass from security-guard stations. No one was hurt—this was no Benghazi—as the point of the violence was to remind the United States that it was not the dominant power in Iraq. Its adversary, Iran, was.
The war against ISIS on Iraqi soil had been a war of an unspoken coalition. Oversimplified, the United States provided air cover for Iraqi Shiite militias—sixty thousand fighters incorporated into the defense apparatus in a face-saving gesture as “Popular Mobilization Forces”—many of which were under the ultimate command of Qassem Soleimani. As he boasted to David Petraeus during the surge, Soleimani was the architect of an expansionist Iranian strategy that exploited every mistake the United States had made in the Middle East since 9/11. He was pragmatic enough to cooperate with Washington when it suited Iranian interests, as destroying the Caliphate did, and was prepared to clash with Washington when it suited Iranian interests, as with Soleimani’s backstopping of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad or, earlier, with IED modifications that killed hundreds of U.S. troops and maimed more. Soleimani’s impunity infuriated the Security State and the right. His success stung.
Following the July 2017 defeat of ISIS in Mosul, Trump’s withdrawal from Obama’s Iran nuclear deal the following year and his adoption of a “maximum pressure” policy of economic strangulation restored the familiar U.S.–Iranian posture of antagonism. Although there were fewer U.S. soldiers on patrol, Iranian roadside bombs reappeared on Iraqi highways, as did militia assaults on Iraqi military bases that collectively hosted more than five thousand U.S. troops. Throughout 2019 the United States quietly escalated Mideast force levels by fourteen thousand to counter Iran, even as Trump promised withdrawal. The escalations led to the Iraqi militia Kata’ib Hezbollah rocketing a base in Kirkuk on December 27, 2019, killing Nawres Hamid, a thirty-three-year-old contract linguist and naturalized American citizen who had fled Iraq in 2011. Trump ordered strikes on five Kata’ib Hezbollah positions in Iraq and Syria that killed at least twenty-five people. Those strikes prompted the riot at the Baghdad embassy.
It was a humiliation that capped, in the eyes of many on the right, a generation of humiliations at the hands of Iran. Some senior military officers considered themselves straitjacketed by the traditional reluctance to risk open war with Iran—a war that, compounding their frustrations, they recognized would eclipse the horrors of Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump decided instead to fulfill the eighteen-year-old right-wing desire to bring the War on Terror to Iran. He boasted to guests at his Mar-a-Lago resort that they should expect “big” action.
On January 2, as Soleimani drove from the Baghdad airport after collecting the Iraqi official in charge of the militias, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a drone strike killed them both. The military had presented Trump with the strike option insincerely, through its typical Forever War practice of presenting presidents with an array of otherwise absurd options to convince them to choose its preferred approach. Trump instead sealed Soleimani’s fate. Gina Haspel, who the Security State mandarins insisted would restrain Trump, reportedly emphasized the dangers of not killing Soleimani. The War on Terror’s ever-expanding target list now included the leader of a foreign country’s external security.
Fury and fear swept the region. Even the Saudis, sworn enemies of Iran, urged de-escalation. Iraq’s prime minister, installed largely by the Americans, said Soleimani had been in Baghdad on a mission to reduce tensions when he was killed. Tired of having their country being used as a proxy battlefield, an Iraqi parliament created by the United States voted to evict the American forces it had invited back to fight ISIS. In Iran, crowds estimated in the hundreds of thousands turned out to mourn Soleimani and demand revenge. It came, days later, in the form of a ballistic missile strike on the Ain al-Asad base, resulting in no deaths but over a hundred cases of mild traumatic brain injury for U.S. troops there. The lack of carnage was considered Iranian restraint.
When it became clear Iran was not going to let the assassination go unanswered, Trump and his administration reached for the 9/11 template. First they described their escalation as de-escalation, a move to “stop a war, not start one,” much as Bush had framed the invasion of Iraq as the prevention of a worse conflict. Then, despite the fact that the intelligence revealed continuity with the past months’ pattern of low-level Iranian proxy violence, Trump and Pompeo, an enthusiastic advocate of killing Soleimani, insisted they had foiled an “imminent” attack. Trump invented a plot against four U.S. embassies that his latest defense secretary, Mark Esper, could not substantiate. Sometimes “dozens” of Americans were at risk in the phantom plot, while at other times the administration insisted it was “hundreds.” Pompeo, pressed by reporters, dissembled that the question of imminence didn’t ultimately matter. Seeing the narrative escaping, Pence recycled a long-debunked insistence that Iran had been in on the 9/11 attacks, even managing to mistake the number of hijackers in the process. While insisting that he had restored “deterrence” against Iran, Trump simultaneously tweeted that he stood ready to bomb its cultural treasures, an unambiguous war crime and signal that killing Soleimani was truly about civilizational retribution. Above all, Trump portrayed Soleimani not as an official of a sovereign country, but as a mere terrorist whose life was forfeit.
There was no strategy behind Trump’s response. He had called Iraq a stupid war and told his MAGA followers that the end of endless wars was nigh. But his American exceptionalism meant he would never tolerate Iraqis forcing U.S. troops out. In response he threatened to sanction Iraq, whose brittle economy had prompted massive protests months before, which caused the Iraqis to back down. When outgoing prime minister Adil Abdul Mahdi urged the United States to negotiate a withdrawal, the State Department replied that “any delegation sent to Iraq would be dedicated to discussing how to best recommit to our strategic partnership—not to discuss troop withdrawal, but our right, appropriate force posture in the Middle East.” Trump had no interest in leaving Iraq if it meant America had to respect Iraqi sovereignty, so more than five thousand U.S. troops would remain there despite the poisoned relationship. Two of them would die at Camp Taji when, two months after the administration had insisted its deterrent was restored, Iranian-aligned militias again rocketed the base. Rocket attacks continued, against Taji and the Green Zone, through June. At the end of his presidency, Trump left twenty-five hundred troops in Iraq.
If 2013 began the decadent phase of the War on Terror, and 2016 showed an eruption of right-wing frustration with it, then 2020 began with the culture of the war—its offended pride, its civilizational contempt—consuming America. The nation’s post-9/11 moral exhaustion, on display through Trump’s presidency, meant that he would be the latest leader to achieve neither peace nor victory, only prolonged violence. He was in no position to triumph against the literally invisible enemy that was about to overwhelm the country. But he was perfectly poised to aim the War on Terror at his domestic opponents when they marched in their millions against the system that produced him.
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EIGHTY THOUSAND PEOPLE HAD DIED in two months. Consigned to a year of sustained anxiety, Americans—tens of millions of whom simultaneously experienced an agonizing slide into poverty—wondered if their neighbors, staring out at them from behind a mask at a distance, would infect them. In New York City sirens punctuated a deathlike public silence no New Yorker alive had ever known. The sirens were a reminder of the closeness of death, just as the awful, lingering smell from the burning World Trade Center had been. The novel coronavirus pandemic revealed that America’s entrenched socioeconomic reality made life an agonizing choice between health and economic survival. Beyond a twelve-hundred-dollar stimulus check and six-hundred-dollar weekly unemployment checks that ceased in July, Congress was not interested in paying people to stay home. There could be no Bush-like call for fearful citizens to go shopping. “Essential” workers, the working class that kept the deliveries coming to the middle and upper classes, alongside health-care workers who were also treated as marginal, were neither paid commensurately nor properly equipped with safety gear. Like the firefighters breathing in the toxic fumes of the World Trade Center before them, they were instead dubbed “heroes.”
The White House responded with waves of denial that right-wing politicians and media amplified. White people brandishing guns and signs reading i want a haircut protested what they perceived to be the tyranny of quarantine. Meeting no resistance from local police, a demonstration of white anger at a public-health lockdown swelled until the Michigan legislature, fearful of men with AR-15s roaming its hallways, canceled its session. The protesters were a small minority—polls showed that by margins of almost 80 percent, people in all communities favored the quarantines—but they were politically expedient to Donald Trump.
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