What They Want to Hear: The Politicization of U.S. Intelligence | Lawfare
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Julia Curlee
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Intelligence is useful only if it tells policymakers what they need to know, not what they want to hear. That distinction—between informing power and flattering it—is the oldest problem in the craft, and the U.S. built an apparatus of analytic standards, layered review, and ombudsmen to protect it. I served as a President’s Daily Brief (PDB) briefer to the vice president, in analytic leadership at the CIA, and as a National Security Council (NSC) director in both the Biden and second Trump administrations.<br>In 2025, I watched from inside the White House and at the CIA as the intelligence community came under assault: senior officers fired in public, clearances revoked for dissent, decade-old assessments denounced by the CIA director in the press. Earlier this month, the campaign reached the raw intelligence itself, as the White House declassified selected reporting to sustain election interference claims that the intelligence community’s own finished analysis would not support.<br>This article separates the legitimate friction between intelligence collection and policy from the political pressure now corroding the intelligence community, maps how politicization works and how it has led to ongoing policy disasters, and proposes reforms to restore the community’s integrity.<br>Case Study: Two Analysts, 20 Years Apart<br>BAGHDAD — MARCH 2005<br>“Curlee,” the general pointed. “Out of your seat.”<br>I’d spent the night before in a bunker, hoping to survive it, in a war started after our intelligence community failed to challenge what the White House wanted to hear. Now it was my turn.<br>I stood as the general sat at my laptop, finger tapping delete. In seconds, minimal progress became progress. The graph showing attacks rising—gone. The general stood and shot me a glance. “I’m on with POTUS in an hour. Print it.”<br>I did.<br>THE WHITE HOUSE — JANUARY 2025<br>Twenty years later, days after taking office, the second Trump administration tasked the National Intelligence Council (NIC) to assess whether the Venezuelan regime had directed Tren de Aragua—a criminal gang—to invade the United States. The question, from Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, matched nearly word for word the predicate for the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, last invoked in World War II to intern Japanese, German, and Italian nationals.<br>I know—because I tasked it.<br>I was the NSC’s acting senior director for intelligence programs across the transition—Biden’s last week, Trump’s first. I knew the NIC, the intelligence community’s most senior, most deliberate analytic body, would carefully weigh the evidence and reach a consensus position. How much rode on that judgment became clear when the administration carried out lethal strikes on alleged drug boats off Venezuela and, in January 2026, sent U.S. forces into Caracas to seize Nicolás Maduro himself.<br>The NIC did not give the answer the White House wanted, concluding that Tren de Aragua had not entered the country at Maduro’s direction, undercutting the administration’s case in court. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard denounced the finding, and her chief of staff, Joe Kent, pressed the acting NIC chair to “rethink” it. When he held firm, Gabbard had him walked out of the building, ending the career of one of the country’s most accomplished analysts.<br>Two analysts, 20 years apart: a junior one—me—who rolled over before a four-star general, and a senior one who held the line and lost his career for it, show the pressure analysts face from their superiors. We are taught to speak truth to power knowing that if we stay silent, the country bears the cost of the failure—but that if we do, the cost may be ours alone.<br>The Assault on Analysis<br>What happened to the NIC chair was not an aberration—it was the plan.<br>From its first days, the second Trump administration treated the intelligence community not as an instrument of the state but as an enemy within: a “deep state” that had allegedly lain in wait for the president during his first term. The aim was explicit: Put career civil servants “in trauma” to make them not want to come to work. At the CIA, that program arrived on schedule.<br>First they came for the people. On day one, the president revoked the clearances of 51 former officers who had spoken on Russian election interference. A month later, amid the purge of trans service members, the DNI fired 100 trans intelligence officers from 15 agencies. In May 2025, she fired two senior analysts over...