Michael Ellis, deputy director of the CIA, suddenly downgraded a career lawyer who was the agency’s acting lawyer since January and settled in this role, according to people familiar with the issue.
Mr. Ellis, who played a role in a series of controversies during the first term of President Trump, also retained his post of manager No. 2 at CIA John Ratcliffe, the agency director, had to authorize or have replaced this decision.
It was not clear what was behind Mr. Ellis who took personal control to make legal judgments for the agency while continuing to direct it, but this decision made the alarm among certain current and former intelligence officials.
Stephen Gillers, professor of legal ethics at New York University, described the “rather bizarre” arrangement. Punciating rules of professional conduct for lawyers who prohibit conflicts of interest, he said that Mr. Ellis could serve as CIA general councilor for questions in which he had no interest, but could not give himself legal advice on the issues that concern him – including if the political actions he wanted to take would be legal.
“If the deputy director wants to do something and needs a legal opinion to find out if he can do so, he cannot advise himself,” said Professor Gillers. “This is the strange thing about it. He must get the advice of someone who is independent.”
The CIA did not specifically answer questions about what was behind this decision and if it raised conflict of interest problems. But in a press release, a spokesperson for the CIA, Liz Lyons, noted that Mr. Trump had appointed a lawyer for the State Department, Joshua Simmons, for the role. The Senate Intelligence Committee provided for a confirmation hearing for him on Wednesday.
“The deputy director is a highly respected national security lawyer and an intelligence professional,” said Ms. Lyons. “This temporary arrangement was approved by the lawyer’s lawyers while the Senate considers President Trump’s candidate Josh Simmons, for the CIA Advocate General. We are impatiently awaiting the rapid confirmation of Mr. Simmons.”
The post of CIA Advocate General is normally a presidential appointment which requires confirmation of the Senate. But it has been vacant since January 20, when the Biden administration ended and Kate Heinzelman, who had been the best lawyer for the agency, resigned.
Since his departure, a career lawyer who had been the main assistant lawyer was the best acting lawyer in the CIA, his name has not been published publicly.
This lawyer has now been relegated to the role of a regular – not licensed deputy – and Mr. Ellis gave himself the role of principal assistant, which automatically makes him the general interim councilor as long as the position remains vacant. The lawyer who was demoted has been short vacation, according to people familiar with the issue.
Mr. Ellis was 40 years old when Mr. Trump appointed him to the CIA earlier this year – making him his youngest deputy director. A graduate of the Yale Law School in 2011 which has a reputation of both an intelligent lawyer and a loyalist of Trump, he played a role in a series of events in the first mandate of Mr. Trump who repeatedly attracted the attention of the public.
He had been a member of the republican staff of the House Intelligence Committee – working under its president at the time, the representative Devin Nunes de California, and alongside Kash Patel, now director of the FBI – when Mr. Trump became president in 2017 and made Mr. Ellis lawyer to the National Security Council.
In March 2017, after Mr. Trump caused a fire storm by wrongly saying that President Barack Obama had passed Trump Tower during the campaign, Nunes helped play for Trump on surveillance issues. He gave a high -level press conference in which he announced that he had just learned that surveillance of the Obama era targeting foreigners abroad has accidentally carried out Trump Associates – and said that he would talk to the White House on this subject.
But it later appeared that Mr. Nunes had learned the case of two managers of the White House, including Mr. Ellis. The performance also triggered what Trump’s allies have dealt with as a scandal on the “unmasking” of Trump identities in reports based on foreign intelligence surveillance, but an American lawyer appointed by Trump later revealed that there had been no abuse or irregularities.
Trump then congratulated Mr. Ellis during this episode when he announced his appointment as assistant director of the CIA.
The name of Mr. Ellis has surfaced again in other controversies. The Congress asked for his testimony during his first investigation into dismissal on Mr. Trump after being informed that Mr. Ellis and his boss had a conversation on what had to be done with a transcription of a telephone call in which Mr. Trump asked the president of Ukraine to open a criminal investigation into Joseph R. Biden Jr., his opinion of the elections, probably in 2020, while Mr. Trump supported the military aid of this country.
Mr. Ellis was also a figure in the legal struggle of the White House in 2020 with John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser to Mr. Trump, on a memory written that Mr. Bolton was strongly critical of the president. When the Ministry of Justice continued Mr. Bolton in order to block his publication, Ellis submitted a declaration saying that he had examined the manuscript and found classified information.
A lawyer for Mr. Bolton at the time said that an official who manages the pre-publication of documents written by the staff of the National Security Council had already worked with Mr. Bolton for four months and had asked for many changes to withdraw any classified material from the final manuscript, then indicated that there was nothing else. He described Mr. Ellis’s second gaze, “a transparent attempt to use national security as a pretext to censor Mr. Bolton”, and a judge refused to block the publication of the book.
(In August, the FBI searched Mr. Bolton’s house and office on the basis of separate suspicions that he could have poorly managed classified information. This investigation is supposed to find the Biden era, but has grown after the CIA director of Trump, Mr. Ratcliffe, informed Mr. Patel on this subject.)
In January 2021, a few days before the Trump administration left his duties, the outgoing actor’s defense secretary, Christopher C. Miller, installed Ellis as a general council of the National Security Agency on the objections of the Director of NSA, General Paul M. Nakasone. At the time, Mr. Patel was chief of staff to Mr. Miller.
The NSA lawyer remains in office when a new president takes over, unlike a policy. But the day Mr. Biden swore as president, General Nakasone put Mr. Ellis on administrative leave, partly citing an allegation that he could have poorly managed a classified document.
Ellis was still on leave when he left the government in April 2021, and the classified document investigation was abandoned. Later in 2021, an inspector general report of the Pentagon revealed that there had been no undue pressure from the Trump’s White House on the Ministry of Defense to hire Mr. Ellis for the role, but recommended to reopen the classified document survey. It is not clear if it has ever happened.
Trump also mentioned this episode by announcing the appointment of Mr. Ellis’s CIA in February. Mr. Ellis, he wrote, “was selected to be a general lawyer for the National Security Agency before being purged by the Biden administration.”
