Inside Trump’s National Security Dumpster Fire (W/ Julie Curlee) | Mona Charen Show

I do grieve that we're losing quality people like you, but it is all part of this CF, I won't use the bad word, that the second administration... I prefer dumpster fire in my world. There you go, dumpster fire. Welcome to the Mona Charan Show. So glad you could join me today. I am delighted to welcome Julia Curley, who was a career CIA officer, spent about 20 years in the service of her country. And unfortunately, because of the nature of the current administration, was forced out of a job that she loved. But she is in a unique position, I think, to give us insight into what is going so badly wrong with the American government today. Julia, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Mona. It's great. I've been a follower of your work for a long time. Thanks. So I wish I could say I'd been a follower of your work, but I didn't have a security clearance. Or at least I haven't for many decades. I once did. But actually, you know, the fact that I did once have a security clearance and worked in the Reagan White House means that I have at least a passing familiarity with the National Security Council and what it does and what it is, or at least what it was many decades ago. Of course, I'm sure it's changed in many ways, but I was really moved by your description of your service, about how this was a lifelong dream of yours to serve as a CIA officer. So can you tell me just a little bit more about that? You grew up in Hawaii. What made you want to be a holder of American secrets? The honest answer is, I don't know. It sort of arose out of the primordial ooze, you know. I was a barefoot kid on the beach, a small beach town in Hawaii, and I always wanted to see the world, you know, what's over that horizon. And that's pretty common in Hawaii, isn't it? People just want to get off the island. Yeah, a little bit. You know, it still has my heart. I still get back as much as I can. But I just wanted to travel. And it just got into me from a young age. And I talked about it a little bit in the Atlantic piece. It was instilled into me by my grandfather, who was from an immigrant family from Ukraine, that, you know, we came to this country with nothing. They took us in and now you owe. You got to step up and do your part. So public service, combining with a desire to see the world, maybe a little bit of wanderlust. I just, I really wanted to have a life like I got to lead, which is an amazing sentence to know that at age seven, I had a clear idea of where I wanted to be. And here I am, a middle-aged woman who got to live most of that. Yeah, very much so. I mean, you were one of the elite CIA officers who got assigned to brief the president and the vice president. You talk about that. So we'll get back to the reason for your removal. Well, you resigned. You weren't actually fired, right? You were just made acutely uncomfortable. Running out of synonyms for being sacked. I was removed from the White House. I ended up resigning from the CIA, who was my primary employer. Right. Okay. And that was because there was sort of a jihad against anybody who was not what you say in the Atlantic piece, but not the right kind of American, right? You're trans and that is just considered disloyal ipso facto. Anyway, but let's talk about something else that you've been writing a lot in Lawfare, where you have landed. Congratulations. And these pieces I found very interesting because you talk about the breakdown of the whole security apparatus. And of course, we're watching it in real time. We're seeing the Iran debacle. And you talk about how because of these purges of people who know things, people who have area expertise, people who have language knowledge and so forth and decades of experience, it's kind of a self-immolation going on in the intelligence. Maybe that's too strong. I wouldn't say so. No? Okay. We hit the self-destruct button and we're going to find the bottom. You were there during the first Trump administration, right? And it wasn't as bad, right? They didn't do this kind of wholesale. So tell me about the difference between Trump one and Trump two. Yeah, thank you. Honestly, it really is almost a type change. It just fundamentally is different from the top to the bottom. So as you said, I was serving as a president's daily briefer for the intelligence community. I was assigned to serve the vice president, Mike Pence, at the time. And so I spent about two years supporting the Trump White House and all, both Pence and virtually every other major cabinet official. I briefed the president on Air Force One. I supported national security advisors like H.R. McMaster. It was different, obviously, because we had a president with a Twitter finger. But for the most part, in my experience, it was somewhat normal. In that way, there was an NSC. There was an interagency process. There was a place for intelligence to get injected into decision making. Why would we spend billions of dollars if not to use the information that we acquire at great expense and vast risk for the people involved? And so it was largely a working administration. And I had a great experience working for the vice president, who was an avid consumer for intelligence, and really used it the way I would hope it was designed. So you put that over there with two years of that and thinking that, boy, it's probably going to be the same. You know, the classic analytic error of assuming that what happened before will continue. I'm serving in the Biden administration as a director for intelligence programs. I made the acting senior director at the turn of the administration coming in. First three days, it seems familiar. You know, a lot of familiar faces from the first term. Day three, as we said, they hit the self-destruct button. And that's where it really kicked off for me, when they fired 160 or removed 160 NSC staffers in a phone call, and it just ripped the wiring out of the national security system. Can I interrupt just out of curiosity? OK, so you're there, you're on the inside. What did people think? What was the scuttlebutt within the agency and within the intelligence community more broadly when Trump named Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, somebody who arguably would have had trouble getting a security clearance? Yeah, correct. I mean, it was one of those early signs that political loyalty or a desire to fight the enemy within the deep state, allegedly, would take precedence over competence. And that they would put a conspiracy theorist who had unusual views about the Russians in charge of the DNI. That was a pretty dark early sign. However, historically, the DNI has not been the most powerful office within the intelligence community. So there was still a little bit of hope that, well, how much harm could she really do, which is actually what the president said, according to the Maggie Haberman book. Yeah. So unfortunately, it turned out quite a bit. And what about Radcliffe at CIA? Was he OK? I think, if I'm remembering correctly, you didn't have too many problems with him. Or did you? Well, in the first term, there was trouble getting confirmed because of his lack of intelligence background in office. He did some problematic things, but he wasn't at war with the institutions in the same way. In his new capacity as the director of the CIA, unfortunately, I think my perspective and that of others, while he comes across as a more reasonable person, especially by comparison with Tulsi, there's no accusations that he's consulting with his guru. He's still presiding over a system where CIA officers are being fired for providing analysis, for standing up for the values of the organization, or for work that was done seven, eight years ago, because they happen to provide analysis that disagrees with the president. Oh, yeah. Let's talk about that one. They went back, because of the president's insane obsessions, they went back to the report that had been prepared about Russian interference in the 2016 election, where the intelligence agencies had concluded that, yes, they tried to... And then the Senate Intelligence Committee, including Marco Rubio, issued a report that basically ratified that conclusion. So then what happened when they came back into office for Trump 2.0? Well, it was one of the early, and unfortunately, not the last cases of selective declassification in an attempt to smear the president's political enemies. So Ratcliffe oversees a review of the 2016 assessment and points out what turned out to be possibly valid issues with the coordination and the product itself, a confidence level not fully conveyed in the way it should have been. And so they issued a new memo that confirms the same bottom line analytic view, which is that the Russians attempted to interfere in our elections. But if you read what Ratcliffe said in the statement or what the White House had put out, the headline was never supported by what was put out in the actual review. And this is a pattern which has followed again and again and again under Tulsi selectively declassifying information. And then it culminates in the president himself giving this election speech a few weeks ago where he's citing information that when you read down into the documents, don't say what he says they said. So this has been a repeated issue that's politicizing the intelligence community. So this is just, this is utterly consistent with the way the Trump administration is behaving across the board in other areas as well. You point out that when you're doing this about national intelligence matters, it can lead to catastrophe. And so why don't you talk a little bit more about that? Maybe the trend to Aragua situation or, you know, the China, whatever. Yeah, of course. There has been a true assault on the truth telling objective, nonpartisan organs of our government that are supposed to provide objective analysis to help the president make good decisions. He can make a different decision. He can ignore the analysis. That's fine. But what really makes this administration different is this retaliation against individual people and the message it sends to the workforce that if you cross us, if it was 10, even if it was 10 years ago, we will come after you and jeopardize your ability to pay the bills, to pay your mortgage, to feed your family. So you better not either say what we don't want you to say or say exactly what we want you to say. So it's truly been an assault on the foundation, really, of good decision making and decision advantage for the United States. On the example that you brought up about trend to Aragua, this intersects with my story. When I was the director for intelligence programs, in those 69 days, I managed to survive. In the Trump administration, Stephen Miller asked me to send out a tasking that would ask if Maduro had directed the— What's a tasking? Sorry. Sure. Yeah. So basically, one of the key functions of the White House's intelligence office, like I served in, is that we would translate policymaker questions into answerable— I'm trying to not use the word tasking— answerable requests from the intelligence community. These are not actually requests. These are demands— Demands. Yes. Which would then get written and farmed out to the right analysts and then coordinated, edited, and then delivered to the senior-most customers. And so on this question of whether this Venezuelan street gang was directed to invade the United States, that is the predicate for the Alien Enemies Act. And it was clear from the beginning what the right answer was supposed to be. And of course, the Nick Chairman and his deputies stood by— Nick is? Sorry. The National Intelligence Council, which is the— I know because I read your piece, but listeners may not be up on the acronyms. I speak mostly in acronym. Yes, I know. You are a true government bureaucrat. It doesn't fade easily. So the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which is the senior-most intelligence body that's supposed to produce the most considered consensus assessments, along with his deputy, assessed that this group— No, it's a gang. It's not engaging in a political effort to invade the United States. And when that leaked out and it undermined the administration's position in court, they fired them for it. And these were some of the most— OK, so a supporter of Trump would say, well, of course they fired him, fired them, because you're not supposed to leak that stuff. Well, it was never proven that they were the leakers. They simply distributed the analysis that that's the facts. And unfortunately, even though now I'm on the outside, unfortunately, sometimes information gets out. And in this case, it was embarrassing. And so they went back to those senior leaders and tried to get them to change their assessment to what the president wanted to hear. They refused. And that was a fireable offense. And these were some of the most respected analysts in the intelligence community. And it sent this just chilling effect through the workforce. And we really haven't recovered from that. So it isn't just that you know, some people get fired and that it's completely unjust. These are fine public servants who've done nothing wrong. It's also the chilling effect that it has on everybody who remains behind, because they're terrified that if they put a foot wrong or don't say what the president wants to hear. Let's take a minute and talk about laundry. Are you somebody who is very particular about how things smell or are you somebody who just gets a kick out of something being unbelievably fragrant? So I happen to love laundry sauce. This is laundry sauce. And I did not think that laundry could smell better than the stuff that I had been using Tide. OK, but this is laundry sauce. Here are the little capsules. It comes in a million different scents. This is my favorite Egyptian rose. Let me tell you why, because it really lasts. So you wash your clothes with this and you know that feeling when you first take them out of the dryer and you sort of inhale and it's so nice and then it fades within about 15 minutes. Now with these, it actually continues to smell great. You can put on a shirt the next day that you washed the previous day and you get that lovely aroma and also that beautiful cleanliness of it. It really it's not just that it smells good. They also do a really nice job of cleaning. If they didn't, I would not be telling you this. So for a limited time only, our listeners get 20% off their entire order and all you have to do is use the code Mona at LaundrySauce.com That's 20% off your order at LaundrySauce.com with promo code Mona. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. It is time to make Laundry Day the best day of the week. I do look forward to using Laundry Sauce because I love this aroma and I love the cleanliness. This reminds me of the huge brouhaha that we had about politicized intelligence before the Iraq war, right? And the question was, did they pressure the intelligence agencies to produce intelligence that would fit their preconceived notions about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction? And that was a fair argument. But in that case, I mean, did anybody actually get fired for not producing the desired intelligence? Not that I'm aware of, not directly. The biggest issue in that case, though, I think was the failure to correct the White House's preferred intelligence and the White House's effort to cherry pick the information. This is like that dialed to 11. This is the White House actively firing officers who don't produce the preferred narrative. And that just didn't, that did not happen under President Bush. That did not happen in the first Trump administration. But I think that a key point here, and it actually goes to something. So just a few days ago, or a couple days ago, the White House attacked me and the Atlantic article that I put out. And the point they made was that officials are entrusted with advancing the America First agenda. And when I saw that, it struck me that that is not the job of the intelligence community. The job of the intelligence community is not to provide a preferred narrative to advance the president's political interests. And it's this confusion or malice, the active desire to not hear what you don't want to hear and to suppress dissent, that has led them into these disasters, which I'm sure we'll talk about especially leading up to Iran. We're going to get there. But, you know, it is thoroughly consistent with their philosophy because, you know, this is also an administration that views the Department of Justice as Trump's lawyers, right? Not as independent actors who are pursuing impartial justice. And so that is very similar, a very similar mindset. OK, so we talked about Trinidad and Tobago. But tell me a little bit about how you think the whole Signal Gate thing is a reflection of the loss of expertise. Yeah, well, so I was in the White House as that was going on in the intelligence directorate and had absolutely no involvement. No one had thought to include the people that would normally set up a very classified high level meeting between principals. And I think that what we all saw in the publicly, you know, released information was just amateur hour. Yeah, there was no detailed intelligence assessment setting the groundwork so that everybody's operating on the same set of facts. No options development. No senior briefing. Where was the intelligence community injecting reality into this discussion? All we saw was, yes, men trying to anticipate what the president wanted. And that has been the classic failure mode of this administration, where they prioritize loyalty and public signaling to the people on the Internet or an audience of one in the Oval Office rather than outcomes. And they don't seem to feel responsible for disastrous outcomes in the real world, as long as the narrative is right, as long as the man at the top feels like things are happening, like he wants to happen, like he feels strong. And it's been really disorienting for a person who spent their whole life embedded in bureaucracy and dedicated to process and efficiency and effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy to see not America first, but really Trump first, really the priorities of one man and his personal image and sometimes his deep insecurities about things that happened in the past, like the election, overriding all other matters of state. And it's been really concerning. And so I think that to round this out, you've had the attacks on the truth-telling organs of our government paired with the destruction of the normal administrative process. The NSC is what I'm most directly writing about that would have, even in a scenario where the president makes a bad decision, they would have still been able to take care of things in a war of choice that we started. There was no evacuation plan for U.S. diplomats, their dependents, and a half million Americans from the Middle East. Again, in a war we started. And that's an unbelievable breakdown in whole of government planning that seems inconceivable to me, but I guess- And you mentioned in your piece that people, Americans, frantically were calling the State Department for guidance about how to get out. And they were getting a recording. They were told they were on their own. Right. Whereas countries like Germany and Britain kicked into gear and they evacuated their citizens. It's just truly embarrassing in the incompetence that went into this. But I don't think it's an accident. There was a clear plan to destroy what they were calling the administrative state. And now, of course, we're living with the results. Just another minute on that because I do think it's really important to stress why these things are important. There's a constant critique that we have way too much bureaucracy. And I'm actually sympathetic to that critique. I do think that often we have too much bureaucracy, too many bumps in the road to get anything done. And streamlining is always- should be open for conversation in any well-functioning organization, including the government. But they, of course, take the battle axe approach of just hacking away without any rhyme or reason and without recognizing why those things are there in the first place. And you go through why we had set up the NSC. It was for a globe-spanning superpower that has a lot of considerations and many allies and has to take into account and you say this, that the NSC includes input from not just the intelligence community, but Treasury and Commerce and the State Department and others so that you- I think you called it the whole-of-government approach so that we make sure we're not overlooking anything, right? Right. So I 100% agree with you. Having sat through hundreds of hours of policy meetings, we could definitely be more efficient and no one more than people like me have suffered through that. And I've served in Republican and Democrat- I've served in more Republican administrations than I have in Democratic administrations. And in many Republican administrations, you have CEO types, senior businessmen who are used to experts at running large organizations and they're very efficient about that. And they see themselves as responsible for the outcomes of their organizations, their businesses. And this is the most complex organization on the planet, the U.S. government. But what we have now are not those types, not the CEO. We have ideologues who instead of focusing on the nuts and bolts of governing and effectively producing our foreign policy seem to be more focused on the internet and Twitter. And I don't understand why they think they're not going to be held accountable for the terrible results that we can all see around us or pay at the pump, which is affecting every American. So they're going to say, I imagine, well, look at Venezuela. That was a fabulous success. And that was because we got rid of all those pesky bureaucrats and we just did what we wanted. Well, there's no question that the U.S. military, when given a task, is the most powerful, best fighting force on the planet. And we should all be very proud of that fact. And I hope it survives the politicization of the General Officer Corps and the other assaults on nonpartisan service there. But clearly in the case of the Maduro raid, it was an incredible tactical achievement. But where was the State Department? Where was the day after plan? As far as I could tell, it was just improvised and they effectively decided to leave in place the same regime that we had just kidnapped, detained its leader. The Chavistas are still running Venezuela and they may be giving us a payoff every month. It sounds as if, and I'm not entirely sure where the money is going, but that is the outcome we wanted. We just want tributary states in our hemisphere. I don't know what the end goal was. We talked about regime change, of course. I don't see much regime change. No. Yeah, that's... And that's when everything goes right and is clean, right? And so when we engage in much more complex overseas efforts like in Iran, where there didn't seem to be an understanding of the likely response of the adversary, that they would close the Strait of Hormuz despite longstanding war games in public, that that was an obvious Iranian response. And so we see decision after decision based on bad information and then no execution and follow through. And I think that should be obvious at this point. Yeah. So Iran is the case where it all just falls apart. Not just falls apart, but it's obvious that we are dealing with incompetence here and really quite devastating incompetence. So can you describe what led up to this decision? What was the interagency process, if any? What was, you know, what input were the decision makers getting? You mentioned the Strait of Hormuz has been war-gamed and planned for for decades. What happened? So I'll be clear up front. Just I was not in the White House at that point. I was purged back in April of 2025. What I do know is what I see and what I have heard. And so to just give a quick overview of the interagency and the NSC-led system. So there's multiple layers of the NSC. At the top, what we saw in the, issue with the leak where they put Jeffrey Goldberg on the call, that was the principal small group. So that should be the highest level below the president of our senior leaders talking. These are people- It should have been in a SCIF, right? First of all, I briefed most of the people in the White House. I'm the one that briefed them on what was acceptable and not for working with top secret systems. And I never mentioned that you could use your cell phone. In fact, I seem to remember answering a couple of questions on that in the negative. That was inconceivable. But the point I was trying to make is that these principals have their day scheduled in 15-minute increments. They are not detail-oriented. They're not deep in the weeds. They haven't been following the Iranian regime all of their lives. And most of them didn't have much of a foreign policy background. Beneath them, you've got deputies who have marginally more time. And so you have these very top levels. But what really has occurred is everyone below that deputy, the assistant secretary levels who make the trains run on time, the true experts in the regions on functional issues like counterterrorism, those meetings were effectively stopped or only allowed at the behest of Stephen Miller. And that evisceration of the working-level orchestration of all the instruments of national power was destroyed, seemingly on purpose, within the first three, four months of the Trump administration. And it has never recovered. And so that is what explains a lot of the planning failures that went into the Iran war, the lack of planning for sufficient minesweepers, not consulting with our allies and partners, not having an evacuation plan, not having a true plan to plus up the strategic petroleum reserve. You just go on and on and on where you would have had in the months leading up to a war, as we did in the many other wars that I participated in, in the planning. And you would have had all of those pieces taken care of so that even if it was a bad idea, we wouldn't all suffer catastrophic consequences for it. And you've seen mostly just improvising since then. I can just give you two examples. So we couldn't clear the Strait of Hormuz of the Iranian minesweepers. We didn't have enough of our own. So we then turned to our allies and partners. In a war we never consulted on them. In a war where we've been berating them for not coming to our support with our hat in hand, asking if they would now help us, bail us out to clear the Strait of Hormuz of mineweepers. And they said, no, as one would expect. And it just boggles the mind that the interagency process was not allowed to work, to head off these perfectly predictable consequences. And now we're in a situation with the Iranians where there's no clear way forward to achieve our nebulous political aims and you have within the Department of Defense, there was a note that came out a couple of weeks ago that said they were pleased with the Department of Defense. Provide us ideas via email on how we could break the stalemate in Iran. And my response to that was like, God, if only there was some sort of council that could focus on national security, that could provide the president with options, well-developed, thinking through the economic instruments and the diplomatic and military. And it's just amateur hour all the way down, whether it's that or sending the president's relatives and real estate brokers to deal with hardened revolutionaries in Iran. It's just wherever you look, you see incompetence. Now, let's talk about these mass firings. So I don't know that there has ever been a president who has come into power believing that he was at war with his own intelligence officers who are there to serve him, who are there to give him the best information they can. I'm not saying that everybody who's in the intelligence community is a fan of Trump's, though obviously there are some because you point out they were providing names to Laura Loomer, somebody within the administration, within the intelligence community was obviously telling her things. This president came in believing that the whole intelligence community was his enemy rather than Russia, China, Iran. So he and his minions set about firing, and they did this also in the defense department and other places, but they set about firing people for being women, for being gay, for being trans, or for providing intelligence that the administration didn't like. Is that pretty much accurate? Did I leave anybody out? Well, it's hard to keep track. Yeah, so he emerged from his first term with the lesson that the true enemy, the adversary, was not Vladimir Putin, was not the Chinese, it was not North Korea, it was the enemy within. And he was quite explicit about this point. And I admit that I, even in the run-up to Inauguration Day, didn't really believe it. Part of why I didn't believe it is that it was my firm experience through my career, especially with the National Security Council, that these are the hands, the arms, the eyes and ears of the president. They work for the president. And without them, there's no way to coordinate the interagency and ensure that the president's policies are being implemented as he wishes. And so it was incredible to me that they would pluck out their own eyes in this early days. But it is based on this misguided assessment from the first term that the nonpartisan deep state had laid within, waiting to take him down. When anyone who has spent a career in intelligence knows that we are a nonpartisan civil service. We are public servants. We do not serve the man. We serve the office. We take an oath to the constitution, not to Donald Trump. And almost everyone I knew was willing to serve in the first and second Trump administration, despite the fact that when he took power the first time, just days before he took the oath, he'd been comparing CIA and other intelligence agencies to the Nazis. And so it took every ounce of professionalism back then to put those things aside. But unfortunately, the attacks on the IC are now so complete that at this point, you're not seeing so much the mass firings, but you are seeing the mass exodus where people have just had enough and they have to move on with their lives. They don't want to live in perpetual fear that just they'll do something wrong or they'll be the wrong kind of person and they'll be fired. And so this is a key point where I've tried to connect the two, where I tell my individual story about being a trans person purged. But this is a tiny number in a broader group of people, whether they said the wrong thing or whether they don't look right to Pete Hegseth or whatever it is, it's the same assault. It's really the same purge. And it is weakening us. It is not simply a diversity for diversity's sakes and kumbaya. This is weakening our power around the world. And one of the reasons why I had to come forward and to resign is to be able to talk about these things. I can give you another example of just another one of these pieces where just completely misguided assumptions and actions weakened US policy. So in the initial days of the administration, we had Doge, we had Elon running around and just thumping his chest as he fed USAID into the woodchipper. At the same time that was happening, I'm in the White House, I'm in the NSC, and we're trying to implement this president's, one of his top priorities, which was to correct the imbalances of critical mineral supplies, which are in the hands of the Chinese and which is a real strategic vulnerability for the United States. Guess what was the primary influence tool that the US was using to pry open those markets where these critical minerals were located? USAID. So at the same time that we're feeding one of the key tools of US policy for US interests into the woodchipper, we're losing the ability to execute the president's own priorities. And was there a meeting where that was decided? No. Yeah, so explain that a little bit further. We were giving aid through USAID to a number of African countries that they relied on for massive humanitarian programs. And this generated goodwill, right? For things like then dealing with issues of critical minerals. Right. You could use the word leverage, in the president's lexicon. And when you take away your own leverage, it's amazing that the other side doesn't want to do you favors, especially when China is ready and willing to come in with cut rate, better contracts and provide them a great deal. And we'll sweep up those critical minerals that the Americans want. And they've done precisely that. And the same has happened with the Voice of America. And then beyond the critical minerals situation, the using of tariffs and denial of assistance to countries that are critical to a potential war with China. So we ripped away assistance from Philippines. We're trying to renegotiate things out of Japan. It's just, it's like the right hand never knows what the left hand is doing, or if the right hand is sawing off the left hand in the process. Yeah, and South Korea. How difficult is it after such, you mentioned, we're plucking out our own eyes. How difficult will it be to restore that expertise if we ever get to the stage where we have a sane government again? How hard would that be? This is decades of expertise. Yeah, I think that to begin with, it will matter a great deal if we're doing this in 2029 versus 2033, which seems like an enormous, like a hundred years from now. And I think just, when you think about people are the glue, we're the things that, the machine doesn't run on its own. There's just, there are people at every step of this. I think that the institutions can snap back. The memory of what right looks like can snap back. The people though are gone in many cases. Either they've moved on with their lives. They know that every four years they could be subjected to these kinds of mass firings. Many have moved away from the area. This was the whole, kill the administrative state and salt the ground beneath it. And they've succeeded to a large degree. So it is going to take a generation to get back the experts, the technical hires. You just can't grow a 20-year CIA analyst overnight or a multi-tour chief of station overnight or people that had unique experiences like serving in multiple wars. You never know when you're going to need them. And unfortunately, we've thrown a lot of those people away and it's going to take a generation to build back. I hope people won't misunderstand why I'm putting it this way. In the past, like in the 60s, it was a firing offense to be discovered to be gay in a lot of these organizations. But there was at least a simulacrum of a justification, right? Because it was considered shameful. It was considered a secret that people had. And therefore, they were considered to be prime targets for turning by the enemy. They could blackmail them with their secret. And so if you were found to be gay, you got fired. And these days though, I have to say, it wasn't a secret that you were trans. It wasn't a national security matter that somebody could blackmail you with this knowledge, right? Or this information. There's no conceivable justification. There is no reason on earth that you being trans had any effect on your work whatsoever or the others. These days, that just has completely evaporated as a justification. Yeah, so at first, glad you brought it up because today on Lawfare, we just released a paper that me and a couple other former CIA officers wrote, which is the history of LGBT people at CIA going back to the OSS. And it is a story of what you just said. It's the fear of blackmail, but it's a fear based on actions resulting from the US government's own actions. If you make it a fireable offense to be gay, you now have something that can be blackmailed. Whereas if you didn't and you allowed people to be themselves, then what are you going to blackmail them over? True, although it wasn't just the US government. It was the whole culture that regarded this as shameful. And so it was, yeah. Right, so that's the culture then creating a security risk. Yes. In my case, so I transitioned in 2013. In plain sight, I had a team of 20 people. We were working the Iraq war, but like hundreds of people knew that my old name, my new name. And so, and in that experience, it was effectively a big, nothing significant to report. As terrifying as it was for me, most people just wanted to get back to work because we got another PDB to write about the war in Iraq. Yeah. And they were professionals and they moved on. And I spent then 13 years serving up to the highest levels of our government. I briefed President Trump on Air Force One. I worked for Mike Pence for over a year. Yeah, it wasn't a security risk in my case. Otherwise, we just don't send people to do those kinds of jobs. And so, I think that it is really important that we look at the assault on diversity programs and all of this. What you're doing is you're not just, whatever the overreaches of DEI, and we can talk a lot about that, I'm sure. What has happened is not to just eliminate your ability to have a pride parade. What has happened is you're driving people out of the workforce. Yeah. And that includes multi-tour chiefs of station who happened to be gay. That could include technical cyber operators who also speak Chinese. I mean, these are real people. And also are Republicans, you say. Yeah, well, in the purges last year that I was most directly a part of, we're mostly of Republicans. Yeah. We're multi-decade servants who had served in and out of government, who were rock rib Republicans, but weren't apparently extremist enough for whoever called in Laura Loomer. Yeah. So, one of the people who you talk about in your Atlantic piece is Mike Pence. And I have to say, I wasn't surprised that he was decent and a good guy about this, and basically greeted your mother and held her by the hands and said how proud she must be of you. And just like he was a decent, good guy. And I'm so glad that you had that experience. But at the same time, I still struggle to reconcile the fact that he could be so personally decent and professionally decent in this treatment of you and I'm sure others. And of course, he did the absolute right thing on January 6th, for which I give him all praise. But the fact that he ever signed on with Trump in the first place was, you know, just a failure of backbone and integrity. And so people are endlessly complicated, right? It's true. Trust me, on this point, I'm taking a lot of flack, and it's mostly from the left, I think. Oh, because they didn't like the fact that you had nice things to say about him? Yeah, well, that I reported what happened, which was, I don't know what's in his heart. He and I, I'm sure, disagree on innumerable subjects about our politics. But when it came down to it, he was a decent, kind person who treated me with great dignity. He was kind to my family. But more importantly, he took the job seriously. He religiously took the intelligence briefings. He used them in policy context to make better decisions. And so I felt like having been through this experience, I owed it to tell that part of my story, which I think explains a bit of the shock of the second term in my case. So as you reported, you know, I'm in his office with my mom, who had had a terrible time with my transition. It was really hard on her. And here I am, and Mike Pence is holding my mom's hand and saying, you must be really proud of your daughter. And so there's a lot of sentences that begin with the phrase, if Mike Pence can't. So it's just, I really thought that we made it in terms of acceptance. Yes. People don't have to affirm my gender identity or march in a pride parade, but I do need to use the bathroom. And I do want to not be driven out of my profession because of who I am. And I really had thought that we had cleared a threshold. And unfortunately, we've fallen a long way since that point. Yeah. And one of the most frightening sentences in the English language is that Stephen Miller has a huge role in all of this through the White House. And of course, Laura Loomer, who I don't know what goes on with her, but all right, Julia, this has been so enlightening. And I really, I mean, hats off to you for your courage. It really is inspiring. And I just, I do grieve that we're losing quality people like you, but it is all part of this CF, I won't use the bad word, that the second administration- I prefer dumpster fire in my world. There you go, dumpster fire that we're living through. But I do hope that you'll still continue to be a voice for sanity and for good national security planning and thinking. And I wish you nothing but the best in your future career. I do hope so. And thank you so much for inviting me on. This was really a pleasure. Pleasure too. Thanks.