Disgruntled CIA Officials Begin Self-Deporting From NSC

The Washington Post has an op-ed today from someone who purports to have resigned from the CIA because his sensibilities can’t stomach working for a Trump administration. The clown in question is

Edward Price worked at the CIA from 2006 until this month, most recently as the spokesman for the National Security Council.

He goes on about how working for the CIA was his boyhood ambition but now, after 15 years of service, he has tossed it all away:

Nearly 15 years ago, I informed my skeptical father that I was pursuing a job with the Central Intelligence Agency. Among his many concerns was that others would never believe I had resigned from the agency when I sought my next job. “Once CIA, always CIA,” he said. But that didn’t give me pause. This wouldn’t be just my first real job, I thought then; it would be my career.

That changed when I formally resigned last week. Despite working proudly for Republican and Democratic presidents, I reluctantly concluded that I cannot in good faith serve this administration as an intelligence professional.

His primary objection seems to be that the NSC is not being run the way that he wants it to run. That and a particularly raw kind of Trump-hate. He goes on and on, lambasting Trump and his decisions and then says:

To be clear, my decision had nothing to do with politics, and I would have been proud to again work under a Republican administration open to intelligence analysis. I served with conviction under President George W. Bush, some of whose policies I also found troubling, and I took part in programs that the Obama administration criticized and ended. As intelligence professionals, we’re taught to tune out politics. The river separating CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., from Washington might as well be a political moat. But this administration has flipped that dynamic on its head: The politicians are the ones tuning out the intelligence professionals.

Keep in mind that this guy was on the NSC when a virtual Iranian agent named Ben Rhodes was its deputy director and when that NSC pushed giving Iran nuclear technology and nearly $2 billion in cash. So I guess the aesthetic is what this guy finds most important.

When I read this my first thought was “f*** this guy.” If you are a professional you serve the nation not the man. If you are repulsed by the man you leave. You don’t make a press announcement. That is virtue signalling of the cheapest sort for you aren’t criticizing the man at the top, you’re actually criticizing your colleagues who see things differently.

This kind of malarkey has been my gripe with the intelligence community for a decade. They have simply been spoiled and pampered and praised to the point that they think they are the masters rather than the servants of the President, the Congress and the People. They’ve managed to do that while not serving the nation particularly well. Along the way, the CIA, in particular, has taken on a quasi-political role. As I’ve posted on several occasions, it was really clear that the CIA decided to wage open warfare on President Trump virtually from the moment the election was called. The shabby spectacle of a serving CIA director appearing on television to attack the credibility of the incoming administration was a sight I never thought I’d see in America.

It is entirely possible this guy left in a fit of overwrought self-importance. But there are questions that should be asked. Why did he leave last week? Indeed, why did he resign instead of simply going back to the CIA? Does he really expect Trump to be president forever? Did the leak investigation that has been launched to find who has been providing classified material to the media have anything to do with his decision to suddenly resign and is it a coincidence that he hails from the NSC press office? Doesn’t “resigned in protest” look better on a resume than “fired for leaking secret material?”

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