By Jack Phillips
A Georgetown University professor who formerly worked for the CIA warned that he believes the U.S. intelligence community has become so politicized that they will attempt to interfere with the 2024 election.
“My guess is that 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,” Dr. John Gentry told Fox News this week.
He made reference to the Hunter Biden laptop story that was broken by the New York Post with just two weeks to go before the 2020 election, asserting that multiple current and former intelligence officials sought to downplay the revelations contained in the article about the Biden family business deals to “help the Biden campaign.”
“I long have thought we are likely to again see former intelligence officers be politically active against Trump or whomever the Republican presidential candidate is next year, and I expect leaking to resume,” Mr. Gentry, a former CIA analyst, said. “The activities of ‘formers’ have resumed already, a bit before I expected.”
He also pointed to an article that was written by a former CIA official, Marc Polymeropoulos who had helped write an open letter that included a number of former high-ranking intelligence officials after the NY Post laptop story was published, and a former FBI worker, Asha Rangappa. They argued that the story was part of a disinformation campaign and cast doubt on the credibility of the claims.
“Asha Rangappa once worked at the FBI and also was openly anti-Trump, though as a relatively junior former, she attracted less attention than many,” Mr. Gentry alleged. “I think it is worth closely monitoring these people. Many have compromised their credibility by actions such as the ‘Laptop 51’ letter.”
“So, put all these things together, and I’m pretty confident that we’ll see a reemergence of activism,” Mr. Gentry said among current and former U.S. intelligence officials.
In 2023, then-newly disclosed emailsrevealed that the former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morrell, who helped draft the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter, wanted that document to be used as a “talking point” for the Biden campaign.
“Trying to give the campaign, particularly during the debate on Thursday, a talking point to push back on Trump on this issue,” Michael Morell, a former top official at the agency, wrote in an October 2020 email. He was writing to former CIA Director John Brennan, who had served under the Obama administration and who later worked as a contributor to MSNBC.
After Mr. Polymeropoulos drafted the letter, Mr. Morell edited it, he said in the email. Earlier plans were to write an opinion article, but it turned into an open letter, Mr. Polymeropoulos told House lawmakers.
“I don’t recall how it morphed from what I thought was an op-ed into a letter. He did mention to me that someone in the kind of Biden world had asked about doing this,” he said.
During the second debate in October 2020, former President Donald Trump frequently made reference to the so-called “laptop from hell” and invited a former Hunter Biden associate, Tony Bobulinski, to the debate after Mr. Bobulinski confirmed some of the NY Post article’s assertions.
In response, then-candidate Joe Biden referenced the letter written by the officials, saying that “there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said … five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage.”
Disputing the letter’s claims, John Ratcliffe, the former director of national intelligence under the Trump administration, said publicly that “Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”
In the Fox News interview, Mr. Gentry said that he believes the left-wing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) push in the CIA and other intelligence agencies has led to the aforementioned politicization.
“It was an effort half a century ago to get more women and minorities into the intelligence community,” he said. “This 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.”
The former CIA analyst then claimed that it was Mr. Brennan, the former CIA director, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who helped “transform the federal workforce” and started 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 … to be politically active.”
But the DEI push, Mr. Gentry added, has demoralized some of the federal workforce, including those in intelligence agencies. “There are a lot of people who are unhappy about it because it’s politicizing the workforce, and it’s dividing the workforce among people who believe in DEI policies and those who don’t,” he said.
