John Schindler

Nevertheless, it can be stated that the mid-1970s IC reforms birthed by the Church Committee broadly served the country well for nearly a half-century. Recent years, however, have brought America’s spy agencies back to the dark place they were in the early 1970s: mired in scandal, operating beyond legal norms, exploited by a rogue president, sullied by partisan political games, having lost the confidence of much of the American public. The only difference between 1974 and 2024 is that the sides have switched: where Democrats then wanted to reform the IC from the Left, Republicans now seek to do so from the Right. Yet, the underlying issues are nearly identical. American spies need a revised governance system, adapted to a new era.

This sorry state of affairs is why I outed myself as a Deep State Dissident a few months ago. Despite being a former intelligence officer for more than one U.S. spy agency, and the son of two “lifer” NSA officials, I’ve had enough. The Obama and Biden presidencies have abused the spooks for their own partisan ends, and the rot now extends deeply and widely across the IC. Deep, systemic reform is required. Some of this can be accomplished by the incoming Trump administration alone.

Significant depoliticizing of the IC can be achieved simply by rewriting Executive branch rules regarding partisan political activity. Take the notorious “spies who lied” in Oct. 2020 about Hunter Biden’s seedy laptop, erroneously dismissing it as a Russian disinformation scheme, which probably led to Joe Biden’s election. That’s an easy one to fix, as I recently explained: