Reminder on Obama's Cabinet tensions at time of Rogers Trump meeting
But the most significant clash Rogers has had may be with his boss, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.
Within weeks of taking office in February 2015, Carter was focused on cybersecurity and cyberwarfare as one of his main policy interests. His first visit to a domestic military installation was Ft. Meade, Maryland, where the NSA and Cyber Command are headquartered.
That interest only intensified in the spring of 2015, when a U.S. raid led to the death of ISIS leader Abu Sayyaf and confiscation of ISIS computers that provided a treasure trove of information. Suddenly, intelligence analysts were sifting through ISIS documents and finding records of members’ communications. It was the makings of a roadmap for penetrating the group’s command structure.
Shortly after that, there were renewed calls from the Pentagon to ramp up cyber operations against ISIS. One U.S. official told The Daily Beast that Carter wanted Rogers to more aggressively hack ISIS so that it could not spread its propaganda worldwide or recruit new members. U.S. hackers did launch a campaign against the terrorist group aimed at disrupting its communications networks and trying to mislead fighters with false information. But the process stalled, and in Carter’s estimation, Rogers was not doing enough, the official said.
It’s unclear whether the men disagreed about a specific program or an overall approach. But Carter also had designs on splitting the NSA and Cyber Command, both of which Rogers’s currently directs. The internal thinking at the agency has been that the NSA would in the future be led by a civilian, which would put Rogers was out of the running for the job.
Rogers hasn’t been opposed to splitting the roles, but he has favored a slower approach, whereas Carter, joined by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, has pushed to implement the changes more quickly.
With Rogers on the wrong side of a policy as his boss, and his support lacking among rank-and-file employees, he was in a politically perilous situation. One person familiar with internal discussions told The Daily Beast that last Wednesday, senior NSA officials “got wind” that the Post was preparing a story that would report Clapper and Carter’s recommendation to the White House that Rogers be removed from his position. The next day, Rogers met in New York with Trump.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-did-team-obama-try-to-take-down-its-nsa-chief