When the Obama IRS was found to be targeting groups with the words “Tea Party” and “Patriot” in their titles for aggressive scrutiny, the fiction of an unbiased federal bureaucracy was forever shattered. The politicization of the Internal Revenue Service should have been frightening enough for anyone. But perhaps even more terror-inducing is the now obvious left-leaning political bias in the federal law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering communities.
Prior to people such as John Brennan (shown), James Clapper, and James Comey, it was an inviolable rule that the FBI, CIA, NSA and the Pentagon didn’t get involved in partisan politics. If it wasn’t obvious that that rule is no longer in effect by listening to the Trump bashing from the likes of Brennan and Clapper on CNN, along comes an article written by former CIA analyst John Gentry detailing an institutional left-wing bias in America’s intelligence gathering institutions.
“A considerable body of evidence, much of it fragmentary, indicates that many CIA people have left-leaning political preferences,” Gentry said, while adding the caveat, “less evidence show that political bias influences CIA analyses.”
Gentry acknowledged that “bias may have crept into CIA analyses.”
In 2016, those biases became obvious as members of the Obama intelligence community began working actively against Republican nominee Donald Trump in his campaign against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“The attacks on Trump were unprecedented in their substance, tone and volume,” Gentry wrote. “Critics went far beyond trying to correct Trump’s misstatements about U.S. intelligence; they attacked him as a human being.”
Gentry also condemned former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell for having the audacity to shill for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. Morrell believed that his stint as a CIA bureaucrat gave him the bona fides to tell ABC’s This Week program in August of 2016 that he “would trust [Hillary] with the crown jewels of the United States government.”
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Gentry claims that Morrell stepped well outside of his purview by endorsing Clinton. “He [Morrell] was trained and authorized to ‘make the call’ about foreign intelligence issues within the classified, internal world of the U.S. government…. He did not recommend policies, including voting choices.”
Gentry concluded that the bureaucracies of the intelligence communities were packed with leftists during the Obama administration as a result of underhanded, demographics-based hiring policies.
“The U.S. government has traditionally and wisely declined to ask its job applicants and civil service about their political affiliations,” Gentry explained. “But [the Obama administration] got around the policy by mandating hiring from demographic groups known to be generally pro-Democratic.”
Objectivity and impartiality are goals that are difficult to achieve under the best of conditions. But it seems the Obama administration was working directly opposite of such goals and actively looking to create a left-wing bias among the intelligence community.
An unwritten rule used to exist where former administrators in the intelligence community would camouflage their political opinions publicly. Brennan and Clapper have completely negated that rule with their constant complaining and blathering about Trump on cable news shows. Other former officials, such as former national intelligence officer Paul Pillar and former deputy director for intelligence John McLaughlin have also appeared on left-wing media such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and MSNBC to bash the current president.
“In the past, intelligence officials usually bit their tongues when presidents criticized their work, recognizing that they sometimes make mistakes, that they work for presidents in an unequal relationship, that their job is to help all administrations succeed and even on occasion be scapegoats for political leaders’ failed policies,” Gentry wrote. “That said, some intelligence officers have long leaked information to the press.”
But now leaks have become commonplace. “Unnamed sources,” while always used by the news media, are now the norm rather than the exception. It seems that any former intelligence official with a political ax to grind now feels perfectly justified in airing grievances in the national news media. Gentry reports that even the Pentagon has been affected by a left-wing institutional bias.
According Gentry, under Obama the editors of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s intelligence report were ordered to “avoid specifically identified terms that might trigger criticism of administration policy.”
“That clearly stated policy of politicization provoked no apparent reaction of any sort from analysts,” Gentry said. “DIA analysts seemed comfortable with politicization by omission.”
Gentry’s report was written prior to the release of the Mueller report and Attorney General William Barr’s assertion that members of the U.S. intelligence community spied on Donald Trump’s campaign.
Such actions are specifically why the term Deep State was coined.
In Washington, it used to be naively assumed that, although both sides of the aisle had political differences, ultimately, both parties and the attached bureaucracies had the best interests of America at heart. While Republicans and Democrats nitpicked over policy differences, the machinery of government hummed quietly in the background, with each bureaucracy doing its own thing whether it was collecting taxes, getting tanks built, or gathering intelligence on foreign countries.
Perhaps that should have never been assumed. It certainly can’t be assumed anymore.
Photo: AP Images
