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Oct 05, 2023

Where in the world is…CIA director Burns

Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day in

Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day in 1769, the Associated Press tells me, Daniel Boone first began to explore what is now Kentucky.

CIA Director William J. Burns has traveled the globe extensively since taking office, regularly meeting his foreign counterparts and some world leaders, bringing to bear the skills he honed as a respected career diplomat for decades on the mission of the intelligence chief he is today.

In May, Burns became the highest U.S. official to visit China since President Biden took office (Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman went there in July 2021). The secret mission, first reported by the Financial Times, came as Washington has looked to calm tensions with its most serious global rival.

U.S. officials who discussed the trip with news outlets took pains to emphasize Burns met with Chinese intelligence, not political leaders, and that he stayed in his lane. As CNN reported, one official "explained that the trip was an intelligence-to-intelligence engagement, not a diplomatic mission." That concern was foremost in The Daily 202's conversations with U.S. officials on this topic as well.

CIA directors travel overseas regularly and host their counterparts on U.S. soil. The agency does not preview his trips or comment on them on the record. Burns's travel is consistent with that of some of his predecessors, according to an official familiar with his schedule.

"Intelligence is one more communications channel that the White House does leverage," the official said on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. That puts Burns in generally the same category as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, or national security adviser Jake Sullivan, all of whom have traveled extensively overseas.

The White House did not acknowledge an email asking what factors lead Biden to send Burns abroad rather than other members of his foreign policy or national security teams, and whether he reports back directly to the president upon his return.

Burns came to the CIA after three decades as a career diplomat that saw him rise to the State Department's upper echelons, including a very brief stint as acting secretary of state in 2009. Of note: He spent years in Moscow as an embassy staffer and later as ambassador, giving him a unique perspective on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

An inventory of his known overseas travel by The Daily 202 found more than a dozen destinations, starting with an April 2021 trip to Afghanistan. He returned there in August to meet the Taliban's de facto leader, Abdul Ghani Baradar. (Sending a State Department official might have implicitly conferred political legitimacy on the Islamist militia's government.)

The New York Times recently reported Burns has taken three dozen trips overseas as CIA director.

His prominence in the administration hasn't gone unnoticed overseas. Here's the former French ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud:

Burns, a seasoned diplomat, I know well, is playing a discreet and central role in this administration. He is one of the most balanced, realistic and constructive US diplomats I have ever met. https://t.co/k2mCLIdaBg

Arguably his most high-profile, high-stakes trip took him to Russia in November 2021. He met with Yuri Ushakov, a former ambassador to the United States advising Putin on foreign policy, while the Russian president phoned into the gathering.

In a February 2023 interview with CBS’ Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan, Burns observed: "Even in the most deeply adversarial relationships, and that's certainly what our relationship with Russia is today, it's important to have those lines open, and the president believes that."

We asked our colleague Shane Harris, who covers intelligence and national security, for his perspective.

See an important political story that doesn't quite fit traditional politics coverage? Flag it for us here.

"Embattled CNN chief executive Chris Licht is out at the cable network, capping weeks of tumult within the company following a highly criticized town hall with Donald Trump and a scathing article that portrayed Licht as all but failing at his job of barely a year. Staffers were notified on Wednesday morning by David Zaslav, chief executive of parent company Warner Bros. Discovery," Elahe Izadi, Jeremy Barr and Will Sommer report.

"House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) released a resolution Wednesday to hold FBI Director Christopher A. Wray in contempt of Congress for not fully complying with a subpoena. Comer said his panel would vote on the resolution Thursday," John Wagner reports.

"House Republicans will examine D.C. election laws Wednesday in their latest hearing digging into the city's affairs, an opportunity for them to advocate for stricter voting laws in the deep-blue city," Meagan Flynn reports.

"She’d been hiding in plain view for nearly a quarter-century, a fugitive from American justice, accused in a federal indictment, along with her then-husband, of not paying a servant they brought with them from Brazil, who lived under brutal and physically abusive conditions, essentially enslaved at their home in a Washington, D.C., suburb," Manuel Roig-Franzia reports.

"McKinsey's work for SVB in 2020 and 2021 — which has not been previously reported — was sharply criticized by the Federal Reserve in its sweeping report on what caused the second-largest U.S. bank collapse since 2008. The Fed found that McKinsey had "failed to design an effective program" for assessing SVB's problems and produced a report filled with 'weaknesses,’" Todd C. Frankel and Daniel Gilbert report.

"In a rare example of a bipartisan climate policy, momentum is growing on Capitol Hill for a plan to tax imports from China and other countries with looser environmental standards," Maxine Joselow reports.

"A federal appeals court panel appeared skeptical on Tuesday of calls to impose a nationwide freeze on Obamacare's rules for no-cost coverage of preventive care while litigation continues — a move the Biden administration warned would threaten access to a range of services for millions of people on employer-sponsored insurance and Obamacare's individual market," Politico's Alice Miranda Ollstein reports.

"The US Space Force is set to launch a constellation of satellites this summer to track Chinese or Russian space vehicles that can potentially disable or damage orbiting objects, the latest step in the burgeoning extra-terrestrial contest between superpowers," Bloomberg's Anthony Capaccio reports.

"Climate change is remapping where humans can exist on the planet. As optimum conditions shift away from the equator and toward the poles, more than 600 million people have already been stranded outside of a crucial environmental niche that scientists say best supports life," ProPublica's Abrahm Lustgarten reports.

"President Biden on Tuesday announced his administration was sending $115 million in funding to repair the water infrastructure in Jackson, Miss., where long-standing issues in the system have plagued the city for years and left residents last summer without running water for days," Amy B Wang reports.

"Biden's two nominees are both set to fill judicial vacancies in Louisiana: Jerry Edwards, Jr. is a top federal prosecutor in the state, according to a forthcoming White House announcement that POLITICO reviewed, while Brandon Scott Long is a former deputy chief of staff to FBI Director Chris Wray," Politico’s Betsy Woodruff Swan reports.

"White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients has been quietly calling members of President Biden's Cabinet to deliver a subtle message: If you plan to leave, please do so in the next few months," Axios's Hans Nichols reports.

"Significant damage to the dam and hydroelectric power plant on Ukraine's front line early Tuesday poses strategic challenges for both sides ahead of Ukraine's much-anticipated counteroffensive," Samuel Granados and Ruby Mellen report.

"All of the harsh criticism is a bit unfair to Licht. In particular, his skepticism of left-wing causes, and his view that people who don't agree with the left are constantly attacked and shamed, isn't some outlier stance. These ideas are regularly expressed in many of the nation's most prominent news outlets. If you spend a lot of time talking to White men in Democratic politics, as I do, you have to nod along as comments like Licht's are made, even if you don't agree with them, to signal that you are a reasonable person worth talking to," columnist Perry Bacon Jr. writes.

"Hard-right Republicans, still angry with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's handling of the debt ceiling bill last week, sank a GOP procedural vote Tuesday in a show of strength in a razor-thin majority," Marianna Sotomayor, Leigh Ann Caldwell, Amy B Wang and Paul Kane report.

At 12:15 p.m., Biden and Vice President Harris will have lunch.

Smoke from #CanadaFires on approach to DC - just amazing. pic.twitter.com/IeahNu2oDx

Read more: Where wildfire smoke is hitting the U.S. the hardest — and when it will end

Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.