Trump’s First Move Against the Deep State: Revoking Security Clearances
The 47th president just showed he’s serious about reigning in the American security apparatus.
There’s a certain poetic justice when powerful creatures of the Leviathan who used their immense influence to help sway public opinion in the critical hours of a presidential election are stripped of the coveted badges that name them members of this elite cadre of men.
That is just what President Donald Trump did in an executive order signed on Inauguration Day, yanking the security clearances of 51 former intelligence officials who signed a letter that helped to silence the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 election. This includes John Brennan, James Clapper, Leon Pannetta, Michael Hayden, and yes, John Bolton.
“For those who say the penalty will impair their livelihoods, I recall one of Secretary of State George Schultz’s maxims: trust is the coin of the realm. Well, If you violate the trust you forfeit the coin,” noted R. Jordan Prescott, a private defense contractor who knows of what he speaks.
There are 2.9 million (by last count) security clearance holders in the country and a backlog of almost 300,000 waiting to get into this club. But if you live and work in the Imperial City, you know that the above members form a VIP circle in which they have been able to trade their credentials and access to America’s secrets, along with their years at the top of the federal food chain, for very lucrative positions on the outside, fashioned to influence power inside. The clearance is the calling card. It’s like taking away a cowboy’s gun. This hits them where it hurts.
“Many retired Intelligence Community senior officials remain active as contract consultants to the U.S. government or as board members and advisers to defense and intelligence contractors who value their continuing connections to sitting U.S. government officials,” says George Beebe (full disclosure: my colleague), formerly of the CIA, at the Quincy Institute.
“These positions depend to a significant degree on retaining active security clearances. Trump’s decision to revoke those clearances will have a material effect on the ability of these retired officials to serve as USG contractors or play the role of ‘rainmaker’ for companies seeking contracts with the Intelligence Community,” he added.
It is not clear how many of the 51 former intel officials have active clearances today, but the fact that several of them have already lawyered up indicate that they do and are already demanding “due process.”
Critics say they should have thought of that before signing a letter that said the New York Post story about emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020 “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
“We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement—just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” the letter read.
This was enough to silence or degrade the story in major newspapers and disappear it on social media, including the powerful engines of Twitter and Facebook. Meta (Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted as much years later. There was an info op, but it wasn’t Russian. It turned out there was a laptop, and emails, and the Russians had nothing to do with the story, as confirmed long after Biden won the election.
The letter, signed by 51 ex-officials, many who had axes to grind with Trump and/or had worked for and supported Democratic presidents and candidates in the past, indulged the Russian boogeyman narrative right before (and in many cases) during the early voting. If Americans hadn’t been paying attention, Joe Biden himself amplified the contents of the letter during the October 20 presidential debate and on 60 Minutes when he charged that “the intelligence community warned the president that Giuliani was being fed disinformation from the Russians. And we also know that Putin is trying very hard to spread disinformation about Joe Biden.”
The signers politically weaponized their status (as they had for years) and are now finally paying a price.
“[They] breached an important unwritten rule against IC [intelligence community] involvement in domestic politics, and it should indeed be penalized,” said Beebe. “Like any private citizens, retired IC officials have every right to free political expression and can and should support whatever candidates and parties they prefer. But when these individuals act collectively in ways that suggest that their views flow from information not accessible to the broader public, they by implication inject the IC itself into domestic politics in damaging ways.”
According to a 2024 congressional investigation, two of the signers—the former acting CIA director Michael Morell (later described as the organizer of the letter) and former CIA Inspector General David Buckley were confirmed by the CIA to be on the payroll, working for agency contractors, when they affixed their name to the letter. Trump’s own administration was literally working against him.
When their letter and the narrative it weaved started unraveling in 2023, the signers struggled to “clarify” their assessments about the laptop story. They blamed the media for hyping their letter. “There was message distortion,” Clapper told the Washington Post then. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said.” Apparently Biden hadn’t appreciated that nuance before running with the “distortion.”
“Suspending clearances will take a bite out of former appointees’ income as consultants and defense industry executives. This action probably makes the new administration happy, but it does not address the far more serious conduct many are guilty of,” says the retired Colonel Doug Macgregor, a TAC contributing editor.
Indeed the connecting tissue in this pantheon of players is not only their hate of Trump (many had been involved in anti-Russia campaigns and other “letters” and media denouncements of Trump throughout the 2016 and 2020 elections), but also noteworthy are their actual “expertise” in government. Many of these ex-officials helped to get the United States into war, stay in war, illegally spy on Americans, and lied about the CIA torturing people during the darkest periods of our recent history.
John Bolton hasn’t seen a war he doesn’t want our men and women to fight. Brennan and Morell justified torture. Hayden set up the NSA spying against Americans. Clapper lied about it. Mike Vickers, another signer, was once heralded as the “man hunter” for his brilliant shaping of the U.S. counterterrorism operations after 9/11.
Today, Vickers is a member of the Board of Directors of BAE Systems, Inc., one of the most profitable arms contractors in the world. Brennan has been a consultant with Kissinger Associates. Morell and Panetta are consultants with Beacon Strategies, Clapper is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (which received some $10 million in DoD/U.S. government funding since 2019) and Bolton is at the Rhône Group.
Not a bad place to land, and with the golden parachute of a security clearance no doubt. Security clearances last five to 15 years, depending on the level. One can easily obtain one a) if they are as high profile as these folks and b) if they are working for anyone who is representing the government as a paid contractor.
“There is no reason for former intelligence officials to hold high-level security clearances except to enrich themselves as pundits and consultants at the peoples’ expense,” noted the former State Department officer Peter Van Buren, also a TAC contributing editor. “When they turn that gift around into partisan politics, such as the ‘Laptop Letter,’ losing their clearance is the least punishment they deserve.”
Status is everything in Washington, as one former CIA analyst and clearance holder told me, and a clearance is like having a knighthood in the Middle Ages: “It was a key social mark and without it you were nothing. This is similar.”
It is not clear how many of the 51 signers will lose their “mark” and for how long, considering that attorneys are already lining up to fight Trump’s order, but it is clearly a shot across the bow warning the Deep State that weaponizing its access for political chicanery won’t be acceptable behavior in this town again, at least for a while.
The post Trump’s First Move Against the Deep State: Revoking Security Clearances appeared first on The American Conservative.
