Posted on 03/17/2025 9:15:08 AM PDT by MtnClimber
A controversial Koch-backed appointment is retracted, ostensibly over Middle East issues. But the battle is really about China.
On Wednesday, a Donald Trump administration official waiting for his background check to be completed was removed from a top post in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence before he officially began. Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a foreign policy expert at the Charles Koch-backed Defense Priorities, was set to become the agency’s No. 3 official, deputy director for mission integration (DDMI). Among other duties, the DDMI is responsible for preparing the presidential daily briefing (PDB), the U.S. intelligence community’s most important and most sensitive document, produced specifically for America’s No. 1 customer for intelligence.
Even before Davis’ appointment was made public, it raised serious concerns among Trump insiders, including former intelligence officials who served during the president’s first term. The issue, as they explained to Tablet, was not just Davis’ lack of experience in intelligence matters but also his idiosyncratic foreign policy views, which are at odds with Trump’s on virtually every key issue—including China, Iran, Russia, Hamas and pro-Hamas campus protesters.
“The DDMI has to be aligned with the president he serves,” a former intelligence official in the first Trump administration told Tablet. “The job requires an experienced, knowledgeable official who can ensure analytical integrity protecting the president’s interests while engaging in the knife fight with the intelligence bureaucracy.”
Thus, the big worry is that an official in charge of the PDB opposed to Trump’s policies might try to curate intelligence so as to steer the customer-in-chief away from his preferences and toward his own.
Take Iran, for instance. Trump has said that he’d prefer negotiations, but the terror regime cannot be allowed to have a bomb and he’ll use military force if he has to. Davis thinks that’s “absurd.” In response to a question about Trump’s position on Iran, Davis wrote on X, “I don’t know who Trump has hired for his advisor, who’s giving him such absurd advice, but hitting the nuclear facilities of Iran is far more dangerous and difficult than what he believes.”
In December Davis attacked Sen. Ted Cruz after the Trump ally posted in support of the president’s campaign promises and wrote that “the antisemitic protests we’ve seen at universities will end next year. Universities that tolerate antisemitism will have their federal funding cut off.” Davis replied, “Where is ur moral outrage at the Israeli gov that continues to kill kids and other civilians without remorse or military necessity? ... you want to suppress any demonstrations directed against the policies of the Netanyahu gov, even peaceful ones, because you don’t like their message.”
In fact, Davis’ criticism of Trump foreign policy dates back to the start of the president’s first term. In an April 2017 column, Davis criticized Trump for ordering missile strikes against former Syrian regime chief Bashar Assad for using chemical weapons on civilians; bombing Afghanistan; and sending two aircraft carrier strike groups into waters near North Korea. What Trump called peace through strength, Davis argued, was likely to “result [in] the accelerating decline of our national security.”
He also criticized Trump’s first-term decision to withdraw from the Iran deal and implied he was a warmonger. “Diplomacy has long been available to incentivize Iran to agree to a path of restraint,” Davis posted on X in October. “But when we had a plan—the JCPOA—those wanting war chose to destroy the imperfect plan rather than work with what we had to build something better.”
Then this week, just as word of Davis’ appointment started to spread in D.C. circles, the Trump administration arrested 30-year-old Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, and announced plans to deport him for his leading role in the pro-Hamas demonstrations that roiled the Manhattan campus, where Jews were routinely harassed, threatened, and beaten by the pro-terror activists. With Trump promising more arrests and more deportations of campus thugs, Davis found himself at odds not only with the administration’s foreign policy but also its key domestic initiatives.
Making an official who has consistently publicized his opposition to the president’s own policies responsible for the president’s intake of intelligence is a mistake best caught early.
You have to wonder who recommended that Daniel Davis should be nominated.
And whether Trump will take the hint and bar that person from any access to Trump at all.
He is not a “Realist”. That’s a smear.
He’s a pacifist.
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