FBI, DoJ, CIA Political Purges Create Security Nightmare

A small but growing number will be tempted to sell secrets, experts say

It's an “actuarial certainty,” knowledgeable intelligence sources say, that some people holding security clearances will turn coat and commit treason sometime during their career, or after they’ve left their jobs with plenty of national defense secrets in their heads. The triggering moment, they say, often comes when they feel they’ve been mistreated by their employer.  Like being unfairly fired.

That’s just during normal times. That percentage just got a boost with news of “widespread, abrupt terminations” at the Justice Department and FBI.

“One Justice Department lawyer was suspected of being fired because he used a ‘he/him’ designator in his email signature,” The Washington Post reported Thursday. “People interviewed say they believe another lawyer was ousted because of a message he put on social media. Others told to leave may not mesh with or may be disliked by Trump’s political appointees, the people said. And some are suspected of speaking to the media without authorization.”

The purge is full on at the FBI, where career officials are being strapped up to polygraph machines and queried about their loyalty to Director Kash Patel and his sidekick, rightwing firebrand Dan Bongino.

“The moves, former bureau officials say, are politically charged and highly inappropriate, underscoring what they describe as an alarming quest for fealty at the F.B.I., where there is little tolerance for dissent,” The New York Times also reported Thursday. “Disparaging Mr. Patel or his deputy, Dan Bongino, former officials say, could cost people their job.”

This latest news comes in the heels of earlier high level purges of anyone connected to the Trump-Russia investigations,  prosecutions of Jan. 6 riot defendants, or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs. 

“The removals appear more individually targeted — and are happening in smaller numbers — than the high-profile ousters of senior Justice Department and FBI officials in the early months of President Donald Trump’s second term, when he vowed to clean house at the department that had brought two criminal cases against him,” The Post’s Perry Stein added. “They are unrelated to the mass reductions-in-force and reorganizations that Trump has launched at many other federal agencies, which the Supreme Court has said may move forward for now.”

As we reported in March, intelligence officials and experts are worried that the politically driven cuts were increasing the vulnerability of suddenly unemployed national security workers to the blandishments of foreign intelligence services, including those of allies treated badly by the Trump regime. One government worker was recently arrested when trying to peddle secrets to Germany.  

The purge “does create a bigger vulnerability,” Susan Miller, a recently retired former head of CIA Counterintelligence, told me during a SpyTalk podcast in March. “Let me just put it this way: I can't say for sure it'll create a spy, but if you fire people and they don't have the money … you're going to end up with more people that might have a vulnerability.” 

The information they have “is highly valuable, and it shouldn’t be surprising that Russia and China and other organizations — criminal syndicates for instance — would be aggressively recruiting government employees,” Theresa Payton, a former White House chief information officer under President George W. Bush, told the Associated Press after the first wave of firings last spring.

Dr. David Charney, an Alexandria, Va. psychiatrist who has interviewed some of our most notorious turncoats, like the FBI’s Robert Hanssen, told me back that “of course” he was worried about the security ramifications of mass firings at the Defense Department, FBI, CIA and other agencies that traffic in highly classified secrets.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I asked Charney, with 10 being the worst, how much greater is the insider security threat today than it was before the Trump-Musk purges?

“It’s not much more than one and a half or two on the 10 point scale…because virtually all the people working in the IC are actually very loyal and patriotic and decent people,” he said. “They’re not gonna blame the country. They do have a value system that's very solid.”  

But, echoing the views of a prominent CIA mole-hunter years ago, he said: “It's an actuarial certainty that some small percent of them—for X, Y, Z reasons—will just cross the line” and sell out their country ”at any given time.” 

“So even though it’s a tiny percentage,” he added, “if the recent firings bump the percentage liable to committing treason up to 1.25 or 1.5 percent, that's enough to be alarming.” 

Early in his administration, Trump ‘s Office of Personnel Management invited just about the entire 2 million-plus civilian workforce to resign in exchange for pay and benefits through September. Lower court rulings put much of that on hold, but this week the Supreme Court said the Trump administration could move ahead with mass layoffs.  In early June NPR reported that nearly 60,000 federal jobs had evaporated, including sensitive jobs at the State Department and elsewhere. Thousand more are coming.

If Charney and other intelligence experts are right, that’s 600-plus potential moles are on the street, with more to come.