THE CIA'S SECOND-IN-COMMAND JUST FIRED THE AGENCY'S LAWYER AND HIRED HIMSELF
Michael Ellis. Deputy Director of the CIA. This week he walked into the general counsel's office, removed the person whose entire job is to tell the CIA when it's breaking the law, and installed himself in the seat
Read that again. The man running covert operations is now also the man who approves whether those covert operations are legal. No separation. No independent check. Just Ellis, grading his own homework, in the most secretive agency in the federal government
There is no oversight body watching this happen in real time. No confirmation hearing. No public vote. One trusted Trump loyalist just erased the one internal brake that existed inside the CIA's legal chain
This is the same Michael Ellis who Trump tried to install as NSA general counsel back in 2020 and got blocked for being too political to trust with classified legal judgment
Didn't matter. Trump brought him back anyway. Promoted him anyway. And now he's unsupervised, sitting on both sides of the legal review process for one of the most powerful intelligence agencies on planet earth
Compare that to a career CIA analyst who needs three signatures and a security review just to expense a cab ride
Ellis needed zero signatures to seize legal authority over his own conduct
This isn't a personnel shuffle. This is Donald Trump's pattern, repeating inside the one agency where nobody is supposed to see it happen
Schedule F for the civil service. Loyalty tests for prosecutors. Acting officials who answer only to Trump. And now the CIA's own watchdog function, swallowed whole by the guy it was supposed to watch
When the people checking the power and the people holding the power are the same person, that's not an intelligence agency anymore
That's a black box with Donald Trump's name on the door
And nobody elected Michael Ellis to anything