Our new Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has been rattling a few cages in our national intelligence apparatus. A bunch of apparatchiks have been busted for totally inappropriate use of their agencies’ email systems and servers — we’re talking wildly, gobsmackingly inappropriate — and DNI Gabbard responded correctly by firing them.
Now, there are indications that Russia and China are seeking to recruit those now unemployed assets.
Foreign adversaries including Russia and China have recently directed their intelligence services to ramp up recruiting of US federal employees working in national security, targeting those who have been fired or feel they could be soon, according to four people familiar with recent US intelligence on the issue.
The intelligence indicates that foreign adversaries are eager to exploit the Trump administration’s efforts to conduct mass layoffs across the federal workforce – a plan laid out by the Office of Personnel Management earlier this week.
Well, of course they are. This is Intelligence-Gathering 101 stuff here.
Russia and China are focusing their efforts on recently fired employees with security clearances and probationary employees at risk of being terminated, who may have valuable information about US critical infrastructure and vital government bureaucracy, two of the sources said. At least two countries have already set up recruitment websites and begun aggressively targeting federal employees on LinkedIn, two of the sources said.
The adversaries think the employees “are at their most vulnerable right now,” another of the sources said. “Out of a job, bitter about being fired, etc.”
And were the shoe on the other foot, we would be doing precisely the same thing. Sometimes, you need to fire people and yank their security clearances; in this case, a whole flippin’ bunch of people were fired and their clearances yanked. And, from all indications, they had it coming and then some.
See Related: Gabbard: Biden Admin Knew About the Perverted Chats at Our Intel Agencies for Years, Didn’t Give a Damn
DNI Gabbard Orders Firing of Members of Pornographic LGBTQ Chat Groups in the Intelligence Community
Bear in mind that these were people who would have presented a danger of being compromised in any case, and were they still on the job with security clearances intact, that compromisation could have been orders of magnitude worse. Why? Well, here’s why, and I’m going to tell you.
DNI Gabbard expressed some concern that these people’s first loyalty was not to the United States nor to the agency that employs them, and she’s right to have that concern.
“They’re exposing themselves essentially by making this indirect threat using their propaganda arm through CNN that they’ve used over and over and over again to reveal their hand, that their loyalty is not at all to America. It is not to the American people or the Constitution. It is to themselves.
“And these are exactly the kind of people that we need to root out, get rid of so that the patriots who do work in this area, who are committed to our core mission can actually focus on that,” she said.
Firing these nuts was the right thing to do, as was stripping their security clearances. Now, some practices will have to be altered — the value of any information these people might have tucked away in the cobwebbed depths of their brains has to be somehow negated before they can spill the beans into Tsar Vladimir I’s or Chairman Xi’s ears. That’s something that the CIA, NSA, and so on should have a plan for. Information like this gets compromised; it happens, for one reason or another, all the time, and if anyone thinks that Russia and China aren’t trying to recruit American assets in those agencies at every waking moment, then they haven’t been paying attention.
And, yes, we’re trying to recruit assets in their intelligence communities as well. Welcome to always.
