US intel officials waged war on Trump

 Bill Gertz:

U.S. intelligence officials waged a politicized campaign to undermine President Trump and his administration, and the politicization undermined American security, according to a former U.S. intelligence analyst.

John A. Gentry, a former CIA analyst, stated in a journal article that former high-ranking intelligence officials were frequently used by sitting intelligence officials, to leak damaging information.

Many “formers” directly or indirectly helped elect current President Biden and defeat Mr. Trump in the 2020 election.

“Current and former U.S. intelligence officers in unprecedentedly large numbers politicized intelligence in their opposition to candidate and then President Donald Trump,” Mr. Gentry stated in an article in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence.

“The activists consistently refused, and still refuse, to accept responsibility for the politicization or the damage it caused to intelligence and broader national security.”

Mr. Gentry names many of those he says were politicized, including both high-ranking and mid-level former agency employees.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden, among others, aggressively pursued political agendas in opposition to Mr. Trump from 2016 to 2021, Mr. Gentry said, and their efforts, ongoing despite Mr. Trump leaving the White House in January, damaged the credibility of once-objective spy agencies.

The three officials and others. like former FBI Director James Comey, saw their anti-Trump efforts as justified, according to Mr. Gentry, because the former president was considered a national security threat who had to be ousted from office.

Mr. Trump as president spoke out against U.S. intelligence failures but also praised and supported — often in private — many of the spy agencies’ activities and programs.

Mr. Gentry, in the piece headlined, “Trump-Era Politicization: A Code of Civil–Intelligence Behavior Is Needed,” called for new guidelines for former spies similar to those followed by most former military officers to avoid politicization of intelligence agencies and their products.

The outpouring of leaks of intelligence and criticism of Mr. Trump during his administration was described by Mr. Gentry as “an astonishing reversal of the longstanding norm at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and elsewhere in the U.S. intelligence community that professional intelligence officers served all presidents as well as possible in apolitical ways, no matter the personal politics of intelligence officers or presidents’ views of intelligence.”

The resulting political attacks on Mr. Trump “amounted to a massive display of politicization ‘from below’ — that is, by intelligence producers — a previously unpardonable breach of professional ethics,” he stated.
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This unethical conduct should not go unpunished.  None of these people should ever be trusted with US intelligence information in the future.  They have helped to saddle the US with the most incompetent President in history with the election of Biden.  I suspect that many of them also participated in the Russian collusion hoax coup attempt against Trump.  Hopefully, the Durham investigation will focus on that too.