A former CIA director who, for criticizing President Donald Trump, has been threatened with imprisonment and faces an actual prosecutor has a message for America: The nation is in danger by how our intelligence is being politicized
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“This administration is redirecting counterterrorism professionals not to go against those terrorist groups and the ones that really worry us, but to go against undocumented workers,” former CIA Director John O. Brennan told MS NOW’s Michael Steele on Thursday. “The government sees these phantom violent groups on the left, like Antifa, whatever. And so there’s a neutering of capability, but also a misdirecting of a lot of the capabilities that still exist, not against the threats and the areas that we really need to be concerned about, but toward other politically motivated directions.”
He added, “I know, that’s such an important point because it levels up for me, Director Brennan. One of the things that this country continues to fail at, and that is recognizing the homegrown variety of domestic terrorism that has plagued this country since the Civil War. One of the things this report points out is how the Trump administration has broadened the designation of terrorist organizations to include gangs and cartels, as well as designating Antifa, which isn’t a structured organization. It’s an idea. They’re anti-fascists, right? Anti-fascism as a domestic terrorism organization. How does this undermine our national security at the expense of Trump’s political goals? Because you’re going again after political opponents, as opposed to going after real domestic homegrown terrorism, which we’ve experienced here in the United States.”
Brennan went on to point out that there are neo-Nazi groups in the United States and elsewhere, such as Germany, that Trump refuses to confront, even as he targets leftists. In order to prosecute his political enemies, left-wing groups and undocumented immigrants, Trump is ignoring terrorists — both right-wing and others — that actually endanger American lives.
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“We want to stop these terrorist activities upstream, not when somebody is ready to set off a bomb, but to see them when they’re starting to gain the financing and put together the capabilities, to make the contacts and relationships, to start to plot and plan,” Brennan told Steele. “These are the things that, again, federal, state and local officials are supposed to be doing, as opposed to going after these politically motivated objectives that really make this country less safe.”
Brennan is not alone among CIA veterans to call out Trump’s politicization of intelligence as a threat to America’s national security. Former CIA analyst Julia Curlee said the same thing for Lawfare in a Monday article.
“In 2025, I watched from inside the White House and at the CIA as the intelligence community came under assault: senior officers fired in public, clearances revoked for dissent, decade-old assessments denounced by the CIA director in the press,” Curlee wrote. “Earlier this month, the campaign reached the raw intelligence itself, as the White House declassified selected reporting to sustain election interference claims that the intelligence community’s own finished analysis would not support.”
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