FPI / September 15, 2021
Geostrategy-Direct
Any objectivity the U.S. intelligence community had prior to the 2016 election of President Donald Trump was all but erased by intel officials who undermined Trump’s presidency and conspired to help elect Joe Biden in 2020, a former CIA analyst said.
Former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden, among others, were so consumed by their stance against Trump that they aggressively pursued opposing political agendas from 2016 to 2021, John A. Gentry, a former CIA analyst, stated in a journal article.
Brennan, Clapper, Hayden, and many other high-ranking intelligence officials were frequently used by sitting intelligence officials to leak damaging information, Gentry said, adding that their anti-Trump efforts continued even after Trump left the White House in January 2020.
“Current and former U.S. intelligence officers in unprecedentedly large numbers politicized intelligence in their opposition to candidate and then President Donald Trump,” Gentry stated in an article in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence.
“The activists consistently refused, and still refuse, to accept responsibility for the politicization or the damage it caused to intelligence and broader national security.”
Brennan, Clapper, Hayden and others, including former FBI Director James Comey, saw their anti-Trump efforts as justified, according to Gentry, because the Trump was considered by them to be a national security threat who had to be ousted from office.
Trump as president spoke out against U.S. intelligence failures but also praised and supported — often in private — many of the spy agencies’ activities and programs.
Gentry, in the piece headlined, “Trump-Era Politicization: A Code of Civil–Intelligence Behavior Is Needed,” called for new guidelines for former spies similar to those followed by most former military officers to avoid politicization of intelligence agencies and their products, according to a report for the Washington Times by security correspondent Bill Gertz.
The outpouring of leaks of intelligence and criticism of Trump during his administration was described by Gentry as “an astonishing reversal of the longstanding norm at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and elsewhere in the U.S. intelligence community that professional intelligence officers served all presidents as well as possible in apolitical ways, no matter the personal politics of intelligence officers or presidents’ views of intelligence.”
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