The Pentagon has raised Israel to its highest counterintelligence threat tier. The CIA has stopped sharing Iran intelligence with the President’s own Director of National Intelligence. And the men sitting across the table from Iran are being listened to — by an interested foreign power. This is not the workings of a functioning national security state. It is the portrait of a presidency that can no longer keep its own confidence.
The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency raised its counterintelligence threat assessment of the State of Israel to “critical” — the highest possible designation — in an internal message circulated to defense personnel in recent weeks. The reporting was broken on June 5 by NBC News and amplified the following day by The New York Times. The Times named three of the most consequential figures in Donald Trump’s Iran policy as the targets of intensified Israeli intelligence collection: special envoy Steve Witkoff, Pentagon policy chief Elbridge A. Colby, and Colby’s senior Middle East deputy Michael P. DiMino IV. The American intelligence community now believes a foreign service has been listening in on the President’s own negotiating positions — toward a war the President himself launched. The President shows no public sign of comprehending it, and the agencies charged with telling him are no longer speaking to each other.
This is not the ordinary, mutually tolerated friction of allied espionage. American intelligence veterans interviewed in the press were emphatic on that point. The Pentagon does not move a longtime ally above the assessed counterintelligence threat of any other partner — and above several adversarial states — for sport. It moves because a line has been crossed. And the line that was crossed is the one that separates intelligence collection from the active manipulation of American foreign policy.
1. The Pentagon’s “Critical” Verdict
According to NBC, the DIA assessment is a seven-page document, complete with charts rating Israel’s human and technical intelligence capabilities against the United States. The New York Times reported that the new designation places Israel above every current American ally, and even above several countries with which Washington has openly fraught relationships. Only South Korea, in certain narrow situations, was reported to approach the same designation.
The aggressiveness of Israeli intelligence collection on senior American officials during the second Trump administration, a senior US official told the Times, has been “unhinged.” That is the language a member of the American national security establishment used about a partner government to which the United States provides billions of dollars in annual military aid. It is not a phrase that surfaces lightly, and it is not the language of a normal allied relationship.
“The aggressiveness of Israeli intelligence collection on top U.S. officials during the second Trump administration has been unhinged.”
— Senior U.S. official, to The New York Times, June 6, 2026
The DIA assessment did not arrive in a vacuum. As reported by Al Jazeera and corroborated by multiple outlets, American defense personnel stationed in Israel discovered surveillance software covertly installed on their phones. The Times situated those incidents inside a longer pattern: in 2021, Israeli military intelligence operatives were allegedly caught attempting to plant a listening device at DIA headquarters; more recently, Shin Bet officers were reportedly caught attempting to bug a U.S. Secret Service vehicle. The DIA traced an uptick in Israeli activity to late 2024, accelerating through the start of Trump’s second term.
From “High” to “Critical”
The DIA’s internal counterintelligence matrix elevated Israel from “high” to “critical” — the topmost tier — exceeding the assessed threat of every other ally, per NBC News.
Witkoff, Colby, DiMino
The Times named the President’s special envoy and two senior Pentagon policy officials as figures of repeated Israeli interest, per corroborated reporting.
Phones, Bugs, and Vehicles
Communication-tap software was found on Pentagon personnel devices in Israel. Earlier reported incidents include attempts to bug DIA headquarters in 2021 and a Secret Service vehicle, per Ynet’s summary of the NYT report.
Private Planes, Personal Phones
U.S. officials told the Times that senior Trump-administration figures who travel on private aircraft, conduct national-security business on personal devices, and decline embassy support are especially exposed — a self-inflicted weakness noted across coverage.
2. The Negotiators in the Crosshairs
The names matter. Steve Witkoff, a Manhattan real-estate developer and Trump intimate whose diplomatic conduct has alarmed career officials inside his own White House, has served as Trump’s lead negotiator across three of the world’s most consequential files: the U.S.–Iran nuclear talks that preceded the February 28 strike; the Russia–Ukraine track; and the Israel–Hamas ceasefire framework. He carries the most sensitive negotiating positions in the U.S. government in his head, on personal phones, and into rooms attended by foreign counterparts who, in at least one well-documented case, sat down with both an Israeli minister and the chief of the Mossad just before a round of indirect talks with Iran in Rome.
Elbridge A. Colby is the Pentagon’s top policy official and one of the few senior figures in the Trump administration to argue for a more restrained American foreign policy — a position that places him in tension with the Israeli strategic preference for maximalist confrontation with Iran. Michael P. DiMino IV, his Middle East deputy, sits at the operational center of every U.S. policy decision in the region. If a foreign service wanted to know what Washington was about to do next — and how flexible Witkoff was about to be at the table — these are precisely the men one would target.
Israel has denied the reporting. The White House has denied the reporting. But the Pentagon has declined to comment, and the assessment is internal, classified, and disseminated to defense personnel — meaning the conclusion has already done its work inside the building, regardless of what the press shop says outside it.
3. The Agencies at War with Themselves
The Israeli espionage story is grave on its own. Set alongside what Reuters reported on June 2, it becomes catastrophic.
Reporters Erin Banco and Jonathan Landay, citing a U.S. official and three people with direct knowledge of the matter, documented that the Central Intelligence Agency under Director John Ratcliffe has stopped contributing to a range of intelligence assessments produced by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s office — including assessments related to the Iran war. The two agencies, the sources said, now function as separate analytical operations. The post–September 11 reform architecture that was built to prevent intelligence stovepiping has been quietly dismantled, mid-war, by the President’s own appointees.
The breakdown is not merely bureaucratic. Gabbard, according to Reuters, ousted two senior CIA officers running the National Intelligence Council and stripped the security clearances of 37 current and former intelligence officials — in the process publicly revealing the identity of an undercover CIA officer serving overseas. The CIA, for its part, was accused before the Senate Homeland Security Committee in May by one of its own officers, James Erdman III, of illegally surveilling White House officials, monitoring keystrokes on ODNI computers, and retaliating against analysts who cooperated with an investigation directed by the President himself.
One side of the American intelligence community is spying on the other. Neither side is sharing with the President. A foreign service is listening to the negotiators. This is what an intelligence collapse looks like, in real time, during a hot war.
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4. A Presidency Negotiating Against Itself
A timeline clarifies how rapidly the collapse has accelerated.
Each of these is a serious national security event. Compressed into ninety days, against the backdrop of an undeclared war, they describe an executive branch unable to perform the most basic function of a government: keeping its own counsel. The President is being eavesdropped on by an interested foreign service. His Director of National Intelligence is being frozen out by his own Central Intelligence Agency. His chief negotiator conducts business on personal phones and private planes. His Pentagon policy chief is being tracked. And the President himself — the only person empowered under the National Command Authority to launch nuclear weapons — is described by his own family, by 36 physicians, and by veterans of his first administration as increasingly erratic.
“Public trust in Donald Trump’s ability to meet the duties of his office has dropped to unprecedented lows. We are at a dangerous precipice, and it is now a matter of national security for Congress to fulfill its responsibilities under the 25th Amendment.”
— Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), House Judiciary Committee, April 14, 2026
This is not partisan invective. It is the convergence of formal intelligence reporting, sworn congressional testimony, on-record statements by named legislators, and a Congressional Record submission by serving United States senators. The factual record does the indicting.
The 25th Amendment Was Written for Moments When Reality Outruns Denial
The mechanism. Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment empowers the Vice President, together with a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments — or, in the alternative, “such other body as Congress may by law provide” — to transmit a declaration to Congress that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Upon transmission, the Vice President immediately assumes those powers as Acting President.
The named callers. On April 7, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) publicly called on Vice President J.D. Vance and the Cabinet to invoke Section 4 in light of what he described as a pattern of reckless escalation and erratic decision-making. One week later, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, introduced legislation to establish a 17-member Commission on Presidential Capacity — the “such other body” the Amendment contemplates. Over 70 House Democrats called for the President’s removal in the same week.
The legal argument. The Amendment’s framers did not confine “unable to discharge” to medical incapacitation. As the constitutional record reflects, the standard contemplates any condition — physical, cognitive, situational — that renders the President functionally incapable of exercising the duties of the office in a manner that protects the United States. A Commander-in-Chief whose negotiating circle has been penetrated by a foreign service, whose intelligence services will not share with one another, and whose own physicians’ peers have formally warned of cognitive deterioration is, by the most natural reading of the constitutional text, unable to discharge the safety-of-the-nation duties of the office.
The Practical Barriers — Honestly Stated
Vice President Vance is unlikely to initiate Section 4 against the President who placed him on the ticket. The Cabinet is composed of figures hand-selected for loyalty. Even if a declaration were transmitted, the Twenty-fifth Amendment requires a two-thirds vote of both chambers to sustain the removal over a presidential objection — a threshold that, in a Republican-majority Congress, is mathematically remote. The Raskin commission bill is unlikely to pass; Speaker Johnson is unlikely to bring it to the floor.
Why the Barriers Do Not Negate the Case
The Amendment was not written for easy cases. It was written for precisely the moment when the political path is hardest — when the people closest to the President have the strongest incentive to look away, and the structural duty to look directly. The fact that the existing Cabinet will not act is not an argument that the case is weak. It is an argument that the constitutional remedy was deliberately placed at a high threshold to prevent abuse — and that, when the threshold is met, the moral obligation falls on those serving in office to meet it anyway. The duty does not disappear because the political will is absent. It becomes more urgent.
5. What This Tells Us About His Priorities
A presidency is measured not by what it says about safety, but by what it does to secure it. By that measure, the picture is unflattering.
A president committed to American security would not staff the highest negotiating positions in the government with longtime personal acquaintances who conduct national security business on personal devices. A president committed to American security would not preside over a CIA–ODNI feud so corrosive that the Inspector General has opened a probe. A president committed to the safety of his own people would not respond to a Pentagon assessment that an ally is conducting “unhinged” intelligence operations against him by, as White House spokespeople did this weekend, denying the report and attacking the messenger.
The global standing of the United States rests on a single, unromantic premise: that an American commitment, given by an American negotiator, in an American-led negotiation, will hold. That premise is unsustainable when foreign services are reading the negotiator’s mail. Allies cannot rely on a Washington whose own intelligence agencies cannot rely on each other. Adversaries — Russia, China, Iran itself — are learning, in real time, that the United States is a country that can be played against itself.
This is the legacy of a presidency built on personal loyalty rather than institutional competence. The men around the President were chosen for their willingness to flatter him, not their capacity to protect him. The intelligence community has been politicized into open warfare. The negotiating apparatus has been informalized into a private club. And the foreign powers paying attention have noticed.
Editorial Conclusion
The Pentagon does not raise a longtime ally to “critical” for sport. The Central Intelligence Agency does not stop sharing Iran intelligence with the Director of National Intelligence on a whim. Both have happened — under this president, in this war, on his watch — and the safety of the American negotiator at the table has been compromised in front of him.
A presidency that cannot keep its own confidence cannot keep the country safe. The Twenty-fifth Amendment exists for the precise moment when the facts outrun the political will to act on them. We are in that moment. The duty under Section 4 falls on the Vice President and the Cabinet now serving. They will not, in all likelihood, meet it. But the historical record will note clearly that they were asked, that the case was made, and that they chose otherwise.
The Constitution does not depend on the courage of any single official. It depends on the willingness of the American people to remember which questions matter, and to demand that they be answered. This one matters. It is being asked. It must be answered.
Sources & References
- NBC News — Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say (Lubold, Kube & De Luce, June 5, 2026)
- Al Jazeera — Pentagon said to raise threat level on Israel spying to ‘critical’ (June 6, 2026)
- Al Jazeera Explainer — Why has the Pentagon assessed Israeli espionage as ‘critical’? (June 7, 2026)
- Asharq Al-Awsat (English) — Pentagon sees growing espionage threat from Israel
- Times of Israel — Pentagon raised threat assessment of Israeli spying to ‘critical’ — report
- Ynet News — The senior US officials Israel allegedly spied on
- Kyiv Post — Pentagon raises counterintelligence threat to ‘critical’ over suspected Israeli wiretapping
- Euronews — Pentagon raises counterintelligence alert regarding Israel
- Reuters / U.S. News & World Report — Exclusive: Top U.S. spy agencies feud over turf, mission (Banco & Landay, June 2, 2026)
- Reason — Whistleblower tells Congress the CIA illegally spied on White House officials
- House Judiciary Democrats — Raskin demands White House physician evaluate Trump’s cognitive fitness (April 10, 2026)
- The Hill — Rep. Jamie Raskin introduces bill to assess president’s fitness under 25th Amendment
- U.S. House of Representatives — Krishnamoorthi calls for President Trump’s removal under the 25th Amendment
- Deseret News — Democrats want a medical check on Trump’s fitness for office
- IPPNW — Medical experts declare President Trump too unstable to remain in office
- The Daily Beast — Donald Trump, 79, sparks fresh health concerns with interview outburst
- Just Security — Intelligence implications of the shifting Iran strike narrative
- Kyiv Independent / Yahoo News — Witkoff’s negotiation approach with Putin sparks concern in White House
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