The 2024 election is in full gear. But it may be fixed from the start.
Because the CIA just delivered this awful news to Donald Trump.
A Georgetown University professor who worked as a CIA intelligence analyst for 12 years warns that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts and the overall politicization of the intelligence community have become a “significant” problem, and he is confident that those agencies will attempt to interfere with the 2024 election in the same way they did in 2020.
“My 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,” Dr. John Gentry, the author of the recently released book, “Neutering the CIA: Why US Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences,” stated in an interview with Fox News Digital.
Within days of the explosive New York Post story revealing the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election, 51 former intelligence officials signed a letter attempting to discredit the laptop, claiming it “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
According to papers discovered by Fox News Digital in 2023, the CIA allowed the publishing of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter.
Gentry told Fox News Digital that downplaying the Hunter Biden laptop was “clearly political” and that a high-ranking source told him “in no uncertain terms” that it was done “explicitly” with the “intent to help the Biden campaign.”
He stated that there have been indications in recent weeks that current or former intelligence agency personnel will be involved in 2024.
“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,” he said. “The activities of ‘formers’ have resumed already, a bit before I expected.”
Gentry cited a recent essay by Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA official who co-led the Hunter Biden laptop “open letter,” and former FBI employee Asha Rangappa that warned of the perils of Trump’s campaign rhetoric.
“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,” he said. “I think it is worth closely monitoring these people. Many have compromised their credibility by actions such as the ‘Laptop 51’ letter.”
Gentry cited the implementation of DEI policies at key intelligence organizations, including the CIA, as a major issue in recent decades, shifting focus away from day-to-day operations and toward a more “woke” political agenda.
“It was an effort half a century ago to get more women and minorities into the intelligence community,” he explained.
“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.”
Gentry told Fox News Digital that discussions about personal politics did not occur during his time at the CIA, but that during the Obama administration, sources in the intelligence community told him that standard was essentially “gone” and political activism was “common.”
Former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were two of the key drivers of the more politically involved intelligence institutions, according to Gentry.
Gentry said that both Brennan and Clapper were “… very strongly supportive of Obama’s 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’s case, to be politically active.”
Gentry told Fox News Digital that there is little doubt that DEI and politicization within intelligence organizations have harmed morale among rank-and-file employees.
“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.
Gentry said he hopes his book would help readers “appreciate that there is a significant political problem within the agencies” and that former members of the intelligence agency saw how effective they were at harming Trump in 2020 and “no one was criticized.”
“So, put all these things together, and I’m pretty confident that we’ll see a reemergence of activism,” he said.
Stay tuned to The Federalist Wire.
