A Georgetown University professor who spent 12 years as a CIA intelligence analyst is warning that DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) efforts and the overall politicization of the intelligence community have become a \u2018significant\u2019 problem and that he is confident those agencies will attempt to interfere with the 2024 election similar to their efforts in 2020.<\/p>\n
\u2018My guess is that the the proverbial deep state within the intelligence community will reemerge because presumably a Republican candidate will again be seen as a threat to the internal policies that many intelligence people like,\u2019 Dr. John Gentry, author of the new book, \u2018Neutering the CIA: Why US Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences,\u2019 told Fox News Digital.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Within days of the bombshell New York Post story that detailed the contents of Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 election, 51 former intelligence officials signed onto a letter in an attempt to discredit the laptop, saying it \u2018has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
The CIA approved the publication of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter, according to documents obtained by Fox News Digital in 2023.<\/p>\n
Gentry told Fox News Digital that downplaying the Hunter Biden laptop was \u2018clearly political\u2019 and that a highly placed source told him \u2018in no uncertain terms\u2019 that it was done \u2018explicitly\u2019 with the \u2018intent to help the Biden campaign.\u2019<\/p>\n
He said there have already been signs in recent weeks that current or former intelligence agency members will be active in 2024.<\/p>\n
\u2018I long have thought we are likely to again see former intelligence officers be politically active against Trump\u00a0or whomever the Republican presidential\u00a0candidate is next year, and I expect leaking to resume,\u2019 Gentry said. \u2018The activities of \u2018formers\u2019 have resumed already,\u00a0a bit before I expected.\u2019<\/p>\n
Gentry pointed to a recent article from Marc Polymeropoulos, a CIA official who retired in 2019 and was the co-lead of the Hunter Biden laptop \u2018open letter,\u2019 and former FBI employee Asha Rangappa that warned of the dangers of Trump\u2019s rhetoric on the campaign trail.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018Asha Rangappa once worked at the FBI and also was openly anti-Trump, though as a relatively junior former, she attracted less attention than many,\u2019 Gentry said. \u2018I think it is worth closely monitoring these people. Many have compromised their credibility\u00a0by actions such as the \u2018Laptop 51\u2032 letter.\u2019<\/p>\n
A major issue over the past few decades, Gentry said, was the introduction of DEI policies at the major intelligence agencies, including the CIA, that shifted attention away from day-to-day operations to a more \u2018woke\u2019 political agenda.<\/p>\n
\u2018It was an effort half a century ago to get more women and minorities into the intelligence community,\u2019 Gentry said. \u2018This was done under the rubric of affirmative action. It gradually became more of a policy through the Clinton administration. But it took a significant step forward, or not, depending on your perspective, when President Obama signed an executive order designed to improve diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce.\u2019<\/p>\n
Gentry told Fox News Digital that discussions about personal politics didn\u2019t happen during his time at the CIA but that sources in the intelligence community during the Obama years told him that standard was largely \u2018gone\u2019 and political activism was \u2018common.\u2019<\/p>\n
Two of the main drivers of the more politically active intel agencies, Gentry explained, were former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.<\/p>\n
Gentry said Brennan and Clapper were both \u2018\u2026 very strongly supportive of Obama\u2019s desire to transform the federal workforce, and so they began to accelerate this process and did a number of things from the standpoint of policy actions, in terms of specific recruitment efforts, for example, and they pushed their employees to be more concerned about diversity and inclusion issues and, even in Brennan\u2019s case, to be politically active.\u2019<\/p>\n
Gentry told Fox News Digital that there is no doubt that DEI and politicization within the intel agencies have had a negative effect on morale with the rank-and-file workers.<\/p>\n
\u2018There are a lot of people who are unhappy about it because it\u2019s politicizing the workforce, and it\u2019s dividing the workforce among people who believe in DEI policies and those who don\u2019t,\u2019 Gentry said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018And even in the Obama period, the analysis director had people who were beginning to talk about, quote, \u2018soft totalitarianism.\u2019 That was a direct result of Brennan\u2019s top-down, politically driven policies; the totalitarianism being a reminder of the Soviet Union and China and so on. Well, this has a number of effects in terms of performance and in terms of credibility.\u2019<\/p>\n
Gentry said his book will hopefully help readers \u2018appreciate that there is a significant political problem within the agencies\u2019 and that former members of the intel community saw how effective they were in damaging Trump in 2020 and \u2018no one was criticized.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018So, put all these things together, and I\u2019m pretty confident that we\u2019ll see a reemergence of activism,\u2019 Gentry said.<\/p>\n
In a speech at the Aspen Security Forum in July, CIA Director William Burns addressed the issue of politicization inside the intelligence community.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018My obligation, and President Biden reminds me of this frequently, is to offer the best intelligence that we can collect and analyze straight up, even when that\u2019s inconvenient to policymakers. I spent enough time on the other side of the table to know when it\u2019s inconvenient to, when somebody\u2019s telling you that the big new idea is actually not so big, not so new, and not so effective,\u2019 Burns said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018Our job is to be straight about that, whether it\u2019s welcome downtown, at the White House, or other parts of the executive branch or not. It\u2019s not an easy role to play, but it\u2019s an incredibly important one. It\u2019s one I take seriously. I know Director Haines does and others across the US intelligence community. That\u2019s what our officers do their very best to provide.\u2019<\/p>\n\n
A Georgetown University professor who spent 12 years as a CIA intelligence analyst is warning that DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) efforts and the overall politicization of the intelligence community have become a \u2018significant\u2019 problem and that he is confident those agencies will attempt to interfere with the 2024 election similar to their efforts in <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":13505,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13504","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}