{"id":4011,"date":"2026-07-27T22:41:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T22:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=4011"},"modified":"2026-07-27T22:41:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T22:41:15","slug":"trumps-intel-operations-are-endangering-us-all-ex-cia-analyst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=4011","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s intel operations are endangering us all: ex-CIA analyst"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

President Donald Trump has politicized America\u2019s intelligence-gathering operations to an unprecedented degree, and a former CIA analyst who worked for Trump\u2019s NSC is now raising the alarm.<\/p>\n

Read more \u2018I feel this anger\u2019: MAGA senator takes \u2018unusual\u2019 jab at Fox News and Newsmax<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIn 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,\u201d Julia Curlee, a former CIA analyst and an NSC director for Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, wrote for Lawfare on Monday. \u201cEarlier 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\u2019s own finished analysis would not support.\u201d<\/p>\n

As one example of Trump\u2019s politicizing intelligence, Curlee described how members of the CIA with expertise in Venezuela were fired when they did not back the administration\u2019s position on taking over that country.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwenty years later, days after taking office, the second Trump administration tasked the National Intelligence Council (NIC) to assess whether the Venezuelan regime had directed Tren de Aragua\u2014a criminal gang\u2014to invade the United States,\u201d Curlee wrote. \u201cThe question, from Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, matched nearly word for word the predicate for the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, last invoked in World War II to intern Japanese, German, and Italian nationals.\u201d<\/p>\n

She added that she knows this firsthand because she tasked the Venezuela assessment.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was the NSC\u2019s acting senior director for intelligence programs across the transition\u2014Biden\u2019s last week, Trump\u2019s first,\u201d Curlee said. \u201cI knew the NIC, the intelligence community\u2019s most senior, most deliberate analytic body, would carefully weigh the evidence and reach a consensus position. How much rode on that judgment became clear when the administration carried out lethal strikes on alleged drug boats off Venezuela and, in January 2026, sent U.S. forces into Caracas to seize Nicol\u00e1s Maduro himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

She added, \u201cThe NIC did not give the answer the White House wanted, concluding that Tren de Aragua had not entered the country at Maduro\u2019s direction, undercutting the administration\u2019s case in court. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard denounced the finding, and her chief of staff, Joe Kent, pressed the acting NIC chair to \u201crethink\u201d it. When he held firm, Gabbard had him walked out of the building, ending the career of one of the country\u2019s most accomplished analysts.\u201d<\/p>\n

From there, Curlee lists other ways that Trump has pushed out people in the CIA and other intelligence agencies for engaging in work that the president disliked for purely political reasons.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom its first days, the second Trump administration treated the intelligence community not as an instrument of the state but as an enemy within: a \u2018deep state\u2019 that had allegedly lain in wait for the president during his first term,\u201d Curlee wrote. \u201cThe aim was explicit: Put career civil servants \u2018in trauma\u2019 to make them not want to come to work. At the CIA, that program arrived on schedule.\u201d<\/p>\n

She continued, \u201cFirst they came for the people. On day one, the president revoked the clearances of 51 former officers who had spoken on Russian election interference. A month later, amid the purge of trans service members, the DNI fired 100 trans intelligence officers from 15 agencies. In May 2025, she fired two senior analysts over the Tren de Aragua assessment. And in August 2025, Gabbard publicly revoked 37 more clearances\u2014including that of one of the intelligence community\u2019s most respected experts on Russia\u2014seemingly without irony, for the \u2018politicization or weaponization of intelligence.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Curlee said that Trump then denounced findings that had previously been proven beyond reasonable doubt, from Russia\u2019s meddling in the 2016 presidential election to warnings about white nationalist terrorism, violence against LGBT people and assessments about women\u2019s reproductive health.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd the threat did not stop at termination,\u201d Curlee pointed out. \u201cFormer CIA Director John Brennan was referred for criminal investigation and interviewed by the FBI over the same analysis the administration had set out to discredit. The lesson reached every desk\u2014a clearance, and with it a livelihood, could be revoked with a phone call; a career could end in front of a grand jury. By mid-2026, the president was describing intelligence that contradicted his preferred reality as \u2018treason.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more McConnell\u2019s hometown newspaper blasts him for mysterious absence<\/a><\/p>\n

Curlee also warned about Trump politicizing intelligence during his July 16th speech falsely claiming that China had meddled in the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to Biden.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe president delivered a primetime address alleging that China had interfered in the 2020 election, built on a mass declassification of election-related intelligence assembled by the White House\u2019s Government Transparency Task Force\u2014a body created to comb the classified archives for material to amplify the president\u2019s election claims,\u201d Curlee wrote. \u201cThe release put raw reporting before the public to overrule the intelligence community\u2019s coordinated conclusion that Beijing \u2018did not intend to try to affect the election.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

She also wrote that \u201craw reporting is dangerous in public precisely because it is raw. A dissemination from the field carries source descriptors and reliability caveats so that the reader knows how much weight it can bear; it has not yet been weighed against the rest of the collection, evaluated for source quality, or reconciled with what the community already knows. That is what analysis is for. Strip away the caveats, and it stops being intelligence and becomes ammunition.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to wronging individuals who dedicated their lives to protecting American lives and democratic institutions, Curlee said that this also causes America to blunder into conflicts like the ongoing war against Iran.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen officers watch their colleagues fired and stripped of their livelihoods for reaching unwelcome conclusions, the institution does not need to be ordered into silence,\u201d Curlee opined. \u201cIt has been taught.\u201d<\/p>\n

She concluded, \u201cThe damage inflicted by the Trump administration will take decades to repair. A generation of officers with irreplaceable skills and expertise has walked out the door, and the barriers to return\u2014a fresh background investigation and polygraph, and a hiring system built for entry-level recruits rather than returning senior officers\u2014make them far harder to bring back than they were to lose. Skepticism is also justified about whether any reform could restrain an administration willing to bend the law.\u201d<\/p>\n

Curlee is not alone in warning against Trump\u2019s politicization of intelligence. Earlier in July, The Atlantic reported on a survey of intelligence agents saying they felt pressured to bow to Trump\u2019s political agenda.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe survey, which covers last year and was sent to members of the agency\u2019s analytic workforce, combines multiple-choice questions with an open-ended section where respondents can give feedback in their own words,\u201d The Atlantic reported. It later added, \u201cAmong the analysts\u2019 concerns was last year\u2019s dismissal of two senior career intelligence officers after one of Gabbard\u2019s deputies tried to rewrite their assessment that Venezuela was not directing a criminal gang, Tren de Aragua. The administration wanted to claim the opposite to create a legal basis for deporting Venezuelan immigrants.”<\/p>\n

In April former CIA director William J. Burns furthered this observation to explain how America entered its ongoing war against Iran.<\/p>\n

\u201cPresident Trump\u2019s war of choice with Iran has paid little attention to our past mistakes and added many of his own,\u201d Burns argued. \u201cHe assumed that bombs and assassinations could bring about regime change. He misread tactical military success as a workable strategy. He made policy choices based on Presidential Id and court politics. He negotiated on the fly with little forethought or planning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Trump faces one humiliating defeat after another<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump has politicized America\u2019s intelligence-gathering operations to an unprecedented degree, and a former CIA analyst who worked for Trump\u2019s NSC is now raising the alarm.\u201cIn 2025, I watched from inside the White House and at the CIA as the intelligence community came under assault:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4010,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump\u2019s intel operations are endangering us all: ex-CIA analyst - Next Address America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=4011\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump\u2019s intel operations are endangering us all: ex-CIA analyst - 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