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Grenell is due to appear alongside other senior officials in a pair of classified briefings, one of them to all members of the House and Senate, who will get the briefings separately.
Unlike the other senior officials slated to brief lawmakers — according to the list of names obtained by CNN — including the heads of the FBI and the National Security Agency, Grenell is not steeped in election security matters.
The President’s naming of Grenell, who at the time was the ambassador to Germany, was met with howls from Democrats and criticism from intelligence professionals because of his lack of national security expertise coupled with his fierce partisan loyalty to the President.
Grenell would be expected to give the “overview brief,” a former senior intelligence official said, and the detailed questions from lawmakers would be answered by the other senior officials. They are to include the NSA’s Gen. Paul Nakasone, FBI Director Chris Wray, acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf and the head of DHS’s cyber directorate, Chris Krebs, said two sources familiar with the officials scheduled to appear.
Whether Grenell will be accompanied by the intelligence official who set off the firestorm before he was named acting director is unclear. Shelby Pierson, the intelligence community’s election threats executive, said in a statement that she was keeping her job at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence amid early fears Grenell would purge the office’s upper ranks.
ODNI did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Monday.
However, a senior intelligence official denied that Pierson had told lawmakers that Russia was actively aiding Trump’s reelection effort.
Briefings on election security by senior officials to the congressional intelligence committees are somewhat routine. Briefings by the directors of the various agencies and the DNI are not as common. The day after Grenell started his job, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the March 10 briefing.
“American voters should decide American elections — not Vladimir Putin,” the California Democrat tweeted. “All Members of Congress should condemn the President’s reported efforts to dismiss threats to the integrity of our democracy & to politicize our intel community.”
Grenell has made no public statements since he started as acting intelligence director, a role the White House has said is just temporary. No one else has been pushed out and Grenell has appeared to want to tamp down concerns by, in part, sending a letter to the ODNI workforce saying he’s “committed to leading the IC with a nonpartisan approach.”
Grenell was spotted touring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with Trump late last week and over the weekend posted photos on Instagram of himself with the President on Air Force One as well as at the President’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago.
Making Grenell the acting director may have been part of the calculation to get Ratcliffe confirmed. Current and former administration officials say that national security adviser Robert O’Brien and others thought the outcry following Grenell’s naming would make it easier to get a candidate approved by the Senate.
CNN’s Jeremy Herb and Vivian Salama contributed to this report.
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