According to former CIA analyst John Gentry, who worked in the nation’s top intelligence agency for 12 years, the U.S. intelligence community is filled with liberal Democrats whose bias against conservatives and Republicans only came to light thanks to the rise of Donald Trump.
In an extremely revealing article for the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Gentry reserved harsh criticism for former CIA Director John Brennan, former DNI James Clapper, and former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, accusing them of tarnishing the intelligence community’s reputation with their hostile, partisan public remarks against President Trump.
While Gentry insisted that the CIA was still doing good work in the field and producing high-quality raw intelligence for the president, he was concerned that analyses from those at the top of the agency was being filtered through a liberal mindset and distorting the reports.
“A considerable body of evidence, much of it fragmentary, indicates that many CIA people have left-leaning political preferences,” he said.
He said that that while the politicization of intelligence was nothing new, what Brennan and Clapper did in 2016 was unique and destructive.
“In 2016 observers of U.S. intelligence began to wonder if the CIA’s once-firm prohibition on partisan politics had changed, and to ponder whether a new kind of politicization had arisen: namely, institutionally embedded, partisan bias,” Gentry wrote. “The attacks on Trump were unprecedented for intelligence officers in their substance, tone, and volume. Critics went far beyond trying to correct Trump’s misstatements about U.S. intelligence; they attacked him as a human being.”
This is one of the few times we’ve seen a former intelligence expert criticize these Obama-era leaders of betraying the cause of the CIA, and we can only imagine that’s because speaking out comes with a heavy price. The Washington establishment is a closed circle, and it’s likely ten times worse inside the intelligence community. You don’t speak out against your fellow spies, or you risk getting blacklisted from all of those sweet private gigs.
But we appreciate Gentry’s candid exploration of what’s gone wrong with the CIA and the other intelligence agencies. We don’t expect everyone in the CIA’s leadership ranks to be free of any and all political bias – it’s probably not even possible to achieve such a state of mind. But when you’re so eaten up with hatred towards the sitting president that you feel the need to tweet about him, write books about him, and devote your private life to assailing him as a president and a human being, something has gone off the rails.
Worse, they are using their intelligence credentials to make Americans believe they have some special insight into the “danger” Trump poses to the world. This is why Trump stripped Brennan of his classified clearance, and it’s why he was right to do so.
We need our intelligence agencies to either decrease their partisanship or at least keep it better under wraps. Yes, they should serve the sitting president and his foreign policy interests, but for them to get heavily involved in our elections is a mistake that costs them credibility every time they do it.
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