A personal plea from the acting director of the National Security Agency was not enough to halt the firing of a top scientist who landed on the president’s bad side, a report has alleged.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard rebuffed a request for mercy from the NSA’s temporary leader, Lt. Gen. William J. Hartman, and proceeded with firing the agency’s chief data scientist, officials told The New York Times in a report published Wednesday.
The axed scientist, Vinh Nguyen, was one of 37 officials at the NSA who lost their security clearance on Tuesday—an act described as being an intelligence community “purge” of anyone perceived as disloyal to President Donald Trump.
Nguyen had been under attack by right-wing media for his ties to what Trump calls “Russiagate”—the investigation that sought to determine if his 2016 campaign had ties to Moscow.
The loss of Nguyen threatens to weaken the U.S. on key security matters. The scientist was a leading expert on artificial intelligence, cryptology, and advanced mathematics, the Times reported.
Specifically, the paper added that Nguyen has been in charge of “developing artificial intelligence systems to improve the gathering of foreign communications” and was “involved in the intelligence community’s work on quantum computing, which has the potential to break current encryption systems and revolutionize espionage.”
Nguyen sounded the alarm on a podcast last year that the U.S. needed to improve its investment in artificial intelligence to keep up with China.
“We do not want to live in a society where our AI are built and run by the People’s Republic of China—because they are not built on our democratic values,” he said.
Nguyen was first recruited to work for the NSA when he was a 17-year-old whiz kid who excelled at math. He is the son of a South Vietnamese general who fought next to American troops in the Vietnam War.
The Times noted that there was “no evidence” that Nguyen’s firing was tied to his performance at the agency, noting that he had not “mishandled classified data, made poor analytic judgments, or politicized his work.”
“However, his role in the analysis of Russian election meddling in 2016 has been a focus of conservative news media,” the paper wrote, “which under Ms. Gabbard has been enough to cost NSA officials their jobs.”
Gabbard’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Tuesday’s firings come as Gabbard is working to reduce her staff by nearly half, according to Axios.
Former federal officials have raged at the firing of Nguyen and the pulling of security clearances for other U.S. officials on political grounds.
Former CIA Director William J. Burns wrote in The Atlantic that the removal of public servants was part of a “retribution campaign” that he described as a “war on public service and expertise.”
“It is about breaking people and breaking institutions by sowing fear and mistrust throughout our government,” he said. “It is about paralyzing public servants—making them apprehensive about what they say, how it might be interpreted, and who might report on them. It is about deterring anyone from daring to speak truth to power.”
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