At least 13 percent of defendants arrested in the Jan. 6 investigation have current or former law enforcement or military affiliation. Now, Figliuzzi writes, this craziness is being found in some of the 18 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. He’s referring to posts in various internal intelligence community chat rooms.
Figliuzzi referenced the work of veteran national security reporter Jeff Stein in SpyTalk, a newsletter covering U.S. intelligence, defense, and foreign policy, who has written that “by late in the third year of the Trump administration the system was afire with incendiary hate-filled commentary.”
Dan Gilmore, a 30-year veteran of Navy and NSA cryptologic systems, wrote in an internet post that eChirp, the intelligence community’s version of Twitter, is “a dumpster fire” of hate speech directed at minorities, women, gay people, transgender people, and Muslims.”
“Hate speech was running rampant on our applications,” he said. “I’m not being hyperbolic. Racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamaphobic, and misogynistic speech was being posted in many of our applications.”
Even more frightening, Gilmore wrote that “on top of that, there were many employees at CIA, DIA, NSA, and other IC agencies that openly stated that the January 6th terrorist attack on our Capitol was justified.”
Not surprisingly, CIA veterans told Stein that “partisan political talk in the office was rare until Trump took office and appointed Political Hack/Trump Lapdog/Putin Enthusiast (my terms) Mike Pompeo as its director. Then, “pro-Trump sentiment arose mostly in the action arms of the counterterrorism programs staffed largely by military veterans.”
You can read Figliuzzi’s column here.
This is scary stuff. There are literally racists who support a violent insurrection to overthrow a free and fair election working in agencies that are supposed to stop things like that. These are people discharged to protect all Americans who think that some Americans are garbage.
A conspiracy theorist could imagine a scenario where these folks work from within to help overthrow an election or a government run by Democrats and install illegitimate leadership, which could include Trump returning to the White House.
I don’t think that’s going to happen. I base that on the hope that we have enough good people in these agencies to prevent its pro-treason sector from gaining enough of a foothold to do that type of damage.
Still, it’s pretty disturbing and another example of projection by the GOP when it claims there’s a Deep State. It looks like the Deep State is really on their side and is in support of their corruption and treasonous activities.
These agencies have to be cleaned up immediately. Both the House and Senate intelligence committees say they are aware of the allegations and are reviewing them. Figliuzzi offers these suggestions:
*Each intelligence community head should cease sponsorship of chat rooms that permit anything other than work-related professional intelligence collaboration.
*Intelligence community agencies should make reviews of social media and chat room postings a regular part of background investigations.
*The directors of each intelligence community agency should initiate reviews of internal chat room postings to identify their employees and contractors who espouse violence or support attempts to forcefully overturn a valid election. Discipline or admonishment should be the consequences of inappropriate communications.
*The intelligence community agencies should make reviews of social media and chat room postings a regular part of background investigations for employment, and for the periodic reinvestigations required for continuation of a security clearance.
Sounds like good advice to me.
All this underscores the real threat to democracy and the rule in law in our country. It highlights the stakes in the 2022 and future elections. The more power Republicans have the worse it will get, and the more the vile activities by what is now hopefully a relatively small amount of people who are comfortable with violating their oath of office will increase.
Like the good members of the intelligence community, we have to outnumber and control these threats, by our day-to-day actions, our activism, and our votes.
When you think about it, we have no other choice.
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Musings of a Nobody 