Michael Ellis

Michael Ellis held several high-level intelligence community roles within the Trump Administration and was “named in the Articles of Impeachment in failing to comply with lawful subpoenas to appear before Congress.” Ellis was accused of serious ethical misconduct in the Ukraine scandal. He also led the effort to block the memoir of former National Security Advisor John Bolton, an effort that briefly led to a Trump DOJ criminal investigation and civil lawsuit against Bolton, both of which were dropped in June 2021. Ellis was one of at least four Trump insiders who burrowed their way into the national security apparatus as career federal employees, when he was sworn in as General Counsel to the NSA in January 2021, at the order of Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.

Ellis’ first Trump administration role was as the deputy legal adviser to the National Security Council (NSC). In this position, Ellis was one of two White House officials who provided Representative Devin Nunes—Ellis’ former boss when he was general counsel to the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence—with intelligence reports indicating that Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance conducted by American intelligence agencies who were investigating Russia’s meddling with the 2016 presidential election. (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has long authorized surveillance of agents of foreign powers, which has led to Americans in contact with foreign agents being incidentally surveilled though they are not the targets of the electronic surveillance.) Nunes, who has been described as a human shield for Trump, then reportedly briefed the White House before his colleagues on the Intelligence Committee. As the New York Times reported, though Ellis and his ally, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, did not appear to have broken the law, it appeared they sought “to use intelligence to advance the political goals of the Trump administration.”

Ellis was accused of serious ethical misconduct in the Ukraine scandal. According to Alexander Vindman’s first-hand account that he provided to Congress under oath, it was Ellis who came up with the idea of moving the memorandum of the phone call to the highly classified server. As reported in Just Security, following the Ukraine call, Vindman, along with his brother who was an ethics lawyer on the NSC, immediately met with Ellis and then top NSC lawyer John Eisenberg. As Vindman later testified, he told the lawyers that he thought what happened on the call was “wrong,” that Ellis first raised the idea of placing the call summary into the highly classified system, and that Eisenberg as the senior official in the room signed off on the idea giving it “the go-ahead.” As Ellis’ predecessor in the Obama administration, Tess Bridgeman noted, White House and NSC counsels do not typically “make the call about the level of classification of a document or what system that document needs to be stored in.” Additionally, if the sensitivity of the information was related to politics as opposed to national security, their actions represent “an abuse of that system and potentially an attempt to actually cover up wrongdoing or criminality.”

In March 2020, Trump tapped Ellis to be the Senior Director for Intelligence on the National Security Council. As Just Security wrote, this role: “can be a pivotal one within the Intelligence Community… The position serves as the focal point for coordination between the White House and the [Director of National Intelligence (DNI)] on a range of issues — from setting the president’s intelligence priorities and providing guidance to the DNI on policy matters, to determining who in the U.S. government is granted access to covert action programs and other sensitive operations.” According to Ned Price, former National Security Council spokesperson, in this position Ellis would be “a critical voice when it comes to what to share with Congress and the American people regarding what we’re learning about foreign efforts to interfere in the 2020 election. He also will be in a position to prevent dissemination of foreign intelligence that paints an especially unflattering portrait of Trump.” This position placed Ellis next to acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, as well as Kash Patel, who had recently moved from the NSC to the DNI’s office.

While Senior Director, Ellis led the effort to delay and block former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened. Trump’s DOJ claimed the book “will damage the national security of the United States.” However, Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the ACLU, countered that the motion was “all hat and no cattle,” adding, “the audience for this filing is not the court; it’s the president.” Ellis intervened to review Bolton’s manuscript after an “intensive four-month review” by Ellen Knight, a career NSA staffer responsible for the prepublication review of materials written by council personnel. Working closely with the former NSA director, Knight made many changes to the manuscript before telling him there were no more edits to be made in April 2020. Ellis claimed in an attachment to the suit that the manuscript contained classified information, listing six separate examples, which were related to a broad category of sensitive information, including a particularly restricted form of top-secret data. The suit against Bolton was later dropped after the book was published.

In the wake of Biden’s victory in November 2020, the Trump administration chose Ellis to be the General Counsel of the National Security Agency, a career position. He was one of three finalists for the job but did not receive the highest score among the candidates from the review panel. Former General Paul Nakasone, Director of the National Security Agency at the time, was reportedly not pleased that Ellis was directed to be hired over career officials at the NSA. The move also raised concerns among national security experts that it was an attempt by the Trump administration to install a loyalist in a sensitive and senior position — one with visibility into the activities of other U.S. spy agencies. As Nancy Pelosi wrote in a letter to Acting Department of Defense Secretary Miller: “The circumstances and timing — immediately after President Trump’s defeat in the election — of the selection of Mr. Ellis, and this eleventh-hour effort to push this placement in the last three days of this administration are highly suspect.”

This type of installation of a political operative into a career position, which is often referred to as “burrowing in” and makes it difficult for the next president to fire the person, involves a complex process of procedures and approvals. A few days before Biden’s inauguration, Miller ordered Nakasone to install Ellis as the NSA’s top lawyer, and on January 19th, the day before Biden’s inauguration, he was in place. Susan Hennessey, former lawyer in the NSA Office of General Counsel, wrote that the hiring of Ellis “appears to be an attempt to improperly politicize an important career position.” The Biden Administration placed Ellis on administrative leave once in the White House and in April 2021, Ellis resigned from his position.

After his resignation from the National Security Agency, Ellis accepted a Visiting Fellowship at the Heritage Foundation. Ellis has made numerous claims about the growing Chinese communist threat. In multiple essays, Ellis rails against the Biden Administration for pulling the plug on the Trump Administration’s “China Initiative,” which the ACLU says was “framed in dangerous, overbroad terms… [and] was accompanied by xenophobic, anti-China rhetoric from the Trump White House… [and by] the FBI director that cast suspicion on virtually anyone with family or professional ties to China.” They added that such claims “encouraged racial profiling and discrimination.”

Over and over, Ellis asserts that China is the greatest military and economic threat to the United States (not Russia) and has claimed the Biden administration shows “weakness in the face of multiple forms of Communist China’s aggression.”

Ellis has also written on U.S. cyber security—one in which he uses a China hack as a hypothetical—and security clearance policies. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he criticized the 51 former intelligence officials who wrote a letter saying the Hunter Biden reporting has the telltale signs of a Russian information operation. And, without any acknowledgement of his role in politicizing intelligence, Ellis claimed there are “Few things are more corrosive to our democracy than the suspicion that U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies are playing politics.”

Before working for Nunes in the House, Ellis was an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve. He was also president of the Yale Federalist Society chapter and clerked for federal district court judge Amul Thapar and Jeff Sutton on the Sixth Circuit.

Ellis was also the general counsel and the corporate secretary for Rumble, the “alt-tech” online video platform that was Trump’s fallback social media site after he was banned from Twitter. Rumble actively courts right-wing commentators and dark web conspiracy theorists, and currently partners with Trump’s Truth Social. Before Ellis was hired, Rumble received investments from Peter Thiel and Senator J.D. Vance.