House Intel. Chair: Need Better Communication Among Intel. Agencies and With State, Local, Private Sector

On Wednesday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Rick Crawford (R-AR) stated that while there has been improved communication among intelligence agencies since 9/11, there is still room for improvement and “We need to reach out to state, local, tribal agencies as well. We need to reach out to the private sector as well, and recognize that they’re all vulnerable.”

Crawford said, “[W]hat we did right was to sort of break down the walls that were preventing our agencies from communicating. So, there are some things we need to do further with that. We need to foster a joint service environment, a culture in the I.C., the intelligence community, that understands, much like the military…same thing needs to happen in the intelligence community. Not one single agency can do it all alone, and we need to expand our bandwidth and recognize that everybody’s in this fight, as it applies to protecting the homeland from counterintelligence threats.”

Host Elizabeth Vargas then asked, “But isn’t that the job of the DNI, which was created after 9/11, to make sure all of these intelligence –?”

Crawford then cut in to answer, “That’s exactly right.” But “we don’t have it already in the context of making sure that we are breaking down those barriers to full communication…what we want to make sure we don’t do is say that we did such a good job with 9/11 Commission recommendations that everything’s fixed and we can now sleep safely at night, because the threats have evolved over that 25-year period. And we want to make sure that the culture evolves with it. So, yes, we did a better job of implementing more communication among the agencies. But here’s what we need to do differently: We need to reach out to state, local, tribal agencies as well. We need to reach out to the private sector as well, and recognize that they’re all vulnerable. Look at critical infrastructure attacks, cyberattacks.”

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