Our once stellar intelligence community has morphed into an intelligence cabal By Pete Hoekstra

[Geee]

Fox News

The partisan behavior of past and current leaders of the Intelligence Community is a rot that continues to expand

 

 

Having spent 10 years on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, including more than six years as either the Chairman or Ranking Republican, I developed a deep appreciation for the work of what is often called the "Intelligence Community" (IC). I also was thoroughly impressed by the quality of the men and women who worked in the trenches, often in hostile and very dangerous locales. They were, and I suspect most still are, great patriots. 

Sadly, that cannot be said about many of the higher-level professionals who lead the community as demonstrated by their actions over the last number of years. The Hunter Biden laptop episode is just the latest dagger in the side of the Intelligence Community, but it needs to be put into a larger context regarding the IC leadership’s shift in focus. The partisan behavior of so much of the past and current leadership of the Intelligence Community is so bad, it might be more accurate to call it the "Intelligence Cabal." It is a rot that continues to expand.

Consider the unfortunate answer that the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper provided to Senator Wyden in a 2013. Asked the simple question of whether the IC was conducting mass surveillance of Americans, Clapper falsely answered, "No sir. Not wittingly." As revealed a few months later, the National Security Agency had been collecting the metadata for nearly every call and text on American networks. While not necessarily partisan, this deceitful behavior by Clapper would become a disturbing pattern for him and other IC leaders.