UPDATED: How To Reform The CIA and FBI
Sorry--I have no bright ideas. And that's the point. What I'll offer is a quote from a retired CIA Station Chief, Bradley Johnson. The quotes are from a 20 minute interview--so just a snippet. Please don't belabor me re the site that this appeared at. My point is simply that, in my experience, this guy is absolutely right. Even if Trump were not, as Tucker Carlson says, ‘horrible at hiring people’, he'd still be facing a nearly insuperable task in attempting to root out the embedded resistance at the Intel agencies. Read this and weep for the country:
Do you think the top floors of CIA still have a “protect the Deep State” agenda?
“All of the agencies are that way, the FBI, the CIA, NSA, the State Department, they are all that way. The pipeline to leadership in all of the federal agencies that are in the intelligence community have been controlled by the left for a long time. The only people who make their way up through that pipeline and get into positions of leadership are the “resist” Deep State types of people. So they’re all that way, there’s no exceptions to that. It’s not what talking heads say, ‘Oh, there’s good people there, purely professional there…’ That used to be that way, but that’s no longer that way. That was all consolidated under Obama, and that’s the way it stays, and unfortunately Trump hasn’t had the chance to fix that yet.”
I will repeat what I said recently in the context of the Hasan case, that the rot set in well before Obama. I suspect that Johnson would agree and would add that his point is precisely that the Obama years "consolidated" this transformation. Part of his "fundamental transformation" of America.
On reforming the CIA and the other Intel agencies that have been co-opted by globalists and leftists:
“It’s a tough problem, and I would say that anyone I’ve talked to that are retired ‘agency’ and people like that, that I know, we’ve all concluded that essentially it cannot be fixed with what’s there, and I think that’s the bottom line.”
Speaking about the bloated numbers of personnel at the Intel agencies, and how a RIF [Reduction In Force] might improve the situation, or instead, might be used by the dominant leftists to target the remaining conservatives for firing:
“I would say there’s no patriots left, certainly not at the leadership level. At the working level, yes, but those people essentially, you have to keep your head down and your mouth shut, because if it comes out that you’re a conservative, you’re destroyed, your career is over. It’s not that you necessarily get fired on the spot, but you’re never going to get a good job, and the only way to get promoted and move up is to have a good job that tics off all those things that are required to go to the next level, and that’s how they control the pipeline. There’s a lot of laws controlling the promotion process, but there’s no laws controlling how jobs are handed out, and that’s the way that the liberals have taken it over inside all of these federal agencies. Many years ago at [the] State Department, and in recent decades at the rest of the agencies. So a RIF, especially at the higher levels, there’s no conservatives to target, so it would only be to the good. It would be a net win to do a RIF of any sort at any of these agencies.”
UPDATE: Pat Lang, who runs Sic Semper Tyrannis , offers a readable perspective on the numerous intel failures the US has experience in relatively recent years, while the IC became ever more politicized. It's a good read: Burn CIA and FBI to the ground? Start over?