Trump picks billionaire military contractor to lead intelligence board
Source: The Hill
BY KATIE BO WILLIAMS - 05/11/18 06:19 PM EDT
President Trump on Friday announced that Stephen Feinberg, a New York billionaire who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, will chair a White House executive board that reviews the effectiveness and legality of foreign intelligence.
Feinberg in the early months of Trump's presidency was rumored to be under consideration to lead some kind of broad-based review of the intelligence community, which Trump was then blaming for the departure of his first national security advisor, Michael Flynn. But that role never materialized. Now, he will head the so-called President's Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) — a committee made up of non-government employees that gets access to a wide swath of intelligence information and acts as an independent monitor on the 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community.
The panel has no legal authority and its influence has risen and fallen depending on the president in question. President Jimmy Carter once disbanded it entirely.
Feinberg, who has no previous experience working in government intelligence, is the first person that Trump has appointed to the board. Previous reports had suggested that Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who backed Trump in the 2016 campaign,. was also in the running for the post.
Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/387361-trump-picks-billionaire-military-contractor-to-lead-intelligence
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