Trump's Truth Social CEO Nunes Takes Over the Intelligence Advisory Council
The Trump administration has appointed Devin Nunes, CEO of his own Truth Social platform, as chairman of the White House's Intelligence Advisory Council, strengthening its information politics with social media.
The Trump administration has established an information politics system in which the CEO of his own business, Truth Social, oversees the US intelligence community.
On the 14th, President-elect Trump wrote on Truth Social, "Nune, who has become the chairman of the US intelligence oversight committee, will continue to lead the 'Trump Media & Technology Group'," adding, "While continuing to lead the Trump Media & Technology Group, Devin will provide an independent assessment of the effectiveness and validity of US intelligence activities based on his experience as the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and his key role in exposing the Russian hoax."
Trump is the company’s largest shareholder, and Nunes, a former California congressman who served as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee from 2015 to 2019, was one of Trump’s closest allies in Congress during his first term and led TruthSocial from 2019 until he resigned from the congressional seat on Jan. 1, 2022.
The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB), along with the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), is an independent body within the Executive Office of the President’s Office of the President’s Office that has been repeatedly strengthened under Republican rule, but its direct jurisdiction has been strengthened under Trump with the appointment of a close associate of the president.
The 'advisory committee' that started as an 'evaluation' of intelligence agencies by external experts in 1959 was changed to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) in 1961 by President Kennedy, and the Democratic Carter administration abolished this committee in 1977 and changed the structure to 'provide services to all presidents except President Carter', and the hard-line conservative President Reagan reestablished the PFIAB in 1981, and in 2008, the Republican President Bush renamed this organization the 'President's Intelligence Advisory Board' as an Domestic And International intelligence management system that 'does not begin or end at the border' for national intelligence agencies.
The White House said, "For more than 50 years, the PIAB has been a nonpartisan organization that provides the president with objective and expert advice on the actions of the U.S. intelligence community," and "It exists solely to assist the president by providing the president with an independent source of advice on the vitality and insight necessary for intelligence agencies to plan for the future. The Board of Directors has access to all information necessary to perform its functions and direct access to the Chairman,” the website states.
The Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), a separate White House intelligence oversight body from the PIAB, is primarily responsible for “overseeing whether the intelligence community complies with the Constitution and all applicable laws, executive orders, and presidential directives,” effectively “supplementing” the oversight of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department and Agency Inspectors General and General Counsels, and the Congressional Oversight Committees, which oversee the 12 intelligence agencies.
The Trump administration appears to have overseen Nunes’s Intelligence Advisory Committee through Truth Social, which the president himself controls and operates, and through this, the intelligence community’s “all-information gathering and monitoring” has secured “all-information access.”