The Illusion of Control
Control is what makes the world go around. We work our whole lives to obtain it. We are unsettled if we do not feel in possession of it. At times it allows us to go faster and at other times it slows us down to an excruciating crawl. “Get control of yourself!” “You’re out of control!” “You’re a control-freak!” Does it mean to rule or just to regulate? Is it a restraint or a standard to calibrate against? An interesting question is whether it makes your life better or worse to be in control. I will suggest that the big determinant of that is the extent of conscience or empathy one has. In the absence of conscience, control is a beautiful thing. People of conscience have a more balanced understanding of how control can cut both ways. Control equals accountability (or should) and people of conscience take accountability seriously. Those same people understand that one with control can find themselves in a place where accountability runs in multiple directions simultaneously, accountability that can be contradictory in a way that loyalties can be divided and satisfying all becomes impossible. This is the classic rock and a hard place situation that people of conscience know to anticipate when they take control.
Let’s look at Joseph Maguire, the current acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI). He is a retired Vice Admiral (Three-star) that retired in 2010 after a thirty-six-year career of leadership in the most high-powered area of the Navy and perhaps the overall military establishment. He ran SEAL Team Two and was Commander of the Naval Special Warfare Center. That military resume is a strong indicator that this is a man who has spent a life of service and a career of understanding and using control to the maximum benefit of his troops and the nation. This is a man who understands the burden of command. It reminds me of a great line at the end of the movie Eye in the Sky, a movie about this notion that control is a two-edged sword, when Alan Rickman (RIP) as the British Lt. General in a similar position to that held by Maguire, says to a parliamentary member who is wondering if he understands the consequences of the decision he has made, “Never tell a soldier, that he does not know the cost of war”.
Joseph Maguire was called back into public service by DNI Dan Coats, who brought him on as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, reporting to the DNI. Then, when Coats chose to call it quits a few months ago, Maguire was called on (I’m sure with the advice and suggestion of Dan Coats) to become the Acting Director of National Intelligence. It is said that he very unwillingly took the post out of a sense of obligation based on a career of service under eight presidents. It is easy to understand why such a man, when called to duty by any president, even the current president, would have a hard time not taking on the challenge, especially on an interim basis. A man so steeped in the ambiguity of control must have lost many nights sleep over his recent appointment, wondering how a career of such distinction could lead to this particular hot seat.
So, within his first month (might Coats have seen this train coming around the tracks…or maybe he himself is the train?), Maguire is faced with the ultimate control conundrum. He is presented with the mother of all whistle-blower complaints, an analytically-written report (obviously done by a senior intelligence official) that states unequivocally and with a great deal of prior research, that the President of the United States abused his power on this Ukrainian situation as well as an unnumbered list of prior instances. The chain of command on whistle-blower reporting within the U.S. intelligence agencies is to file it with the Inspector General. The Inspector General then has 14 days to determine the whistle-blower complaint’s credibility and urgency, whereupon he gives it to the DNI who “shall” send the report, along with the accompanying report on the report from the Inspector General to Congress for its review. The problem for Mr. Maguire, who is as straight and non-political an arrow as inhabits the halls of Washington, is that this particular whistle-blower complaint is against the President, which puts it into that increasingly overused category called unprecedented. Executive Privilege is a routine and big deal issue in the Executive Branch of government. Given the extreme tendency of this president to hide behind and declare Executive Privilege for almost any situation for which the President is accused, it is an even bigger deal in the Trump Administration. Mr. Maguire found himself caught in the rock and a hard place place of which I previously spoke.
Acting DNI Maguire thought that he was duty-bound to seek a legal opinion on what his responsibilities were in this particular set of circumstances. The law clearly said that if the Inspector General determined that the whistle-blower complaint was credible and urgent (which he had), the DNI “shall” submit it for review by Congress. But the law was contradicted by the concept of Executive Privilege. Which was the controlling notion? Which law “trumps” the other? One little problem was that Acting DNI Maguire felt he should logically take the issue to the Department of Justice,
headed, of course, by Attorney General William Barr, the same William Barr that was named as a co-conspirator in the first paragraph of the complaint by the whistle-blower. Hmmm. As one might suspect, the DOJ came down very clearly in favor of the President’s Executive Privilege, rendering Donald Trump yet again immune to the laws of the United States, regardless of the legislative intent to provide circuit breakers in the form of the Whistler-Blowers Act.
I would contend that while there are many lessons in this whistle-blower story, the story I choose to highlight here is that of the illusion of control. For Donald Trump, with his abject lack of a conscience, control is an oblivious if illusory and beautiful thing. Time of his life. The law can’t touch him. He himself says he can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and suffer no consequences. And then there is Acting DNI Maguire, a man of extreme sense of duty and nothing but conscience. Conscience for the people of his command. Conscience for the nation he has served faithfully for forty years. Conscience for the leader he has sworn to serve, that guy who feels he is above all the laws, but who is the duly elected and sworn 45th President of the United States of America. Poor Mr. Maguire, he knows that control is no bargain.