Lawfare Daily: Censorship Incentives with Julia Curlee and Mike Feinberg

The Lawfare Podcast

This episode of Lawfare Daily explores the pervasive censorship incentives within the U.S. intelligence and federal workforce, particularly under the second Trump

Key takeaways

• Security clearances serve as a powerful tool for personal targeting and career sabotage, even without formal process or appeal.
• Many former intelligence and FBI personnel who were purged or pressured to resign remain silent due to economic and familial pressures.

Main topics

• Censorship incentives in federal government
• Impact of security clearance revocation on career survival

Notable quotes

They're the ones who actually have the most they can say and can shine the brightest light on what's happening. But they're working for companies that have explicitly told them or implicitly suggested that under no circumstances are they to do so.

Conclusion

The episode underscores how systemic fear and economic pressure create an environment where public dissent is

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) They're the ones who actually have the most they can say and can shine the brightest light on what's happening. But they're working for companies that have explicitly told them or implicitly suggested that under no circumstances are they to do so. Speaker 3 (0:23) It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittes, Editor-in-Chief of Lawfare with Public Service Fellow Julia Curley and Senior Editor Speaker 1 (0:32) Mike Feinberg. At the end of the day, you know, people have families. They have mortgages. They've got to send their kids to college. No one else is going to do that for them. And so it is fully understandable why people would not speak. And that's what we're trying to describe, this incentive system and the punishment system on the other side of that. We're talking censorship, Speaker 3 (0:55) not the kind where the government tells you that you're not allowed to say something, just the kind where you already know you're not allowed to say it. Why aren't more former intelligence community figures and FBI agents speaking out? We're going to tell you why. So, Julia, I want to start with just having you articulate the issue that led you to write this piece. We're going to get into all the details and all the things that you argue in it. But why did you sit down to write this piece in the first place? Speaker 1 (1:35) So there's this idea that everyone knows, but no one is speaking. And it's a phenomenon that I spent a career studying at the CIA about foreign countries that I suddenly found applied to my own life, where the things that I overheard at the Langley Starbucks that everyone took as a matter of faith, God, everyone knows, no one was saying out loud in public. And having gotten to experience it firsthand, where having been purged from the White House, looking for work on the outside, I went through all of the categories that you'll find in this piece of attempting to land on my feet and move on with my life and finding that all the doors were sealed unless one condition was met, which is that I kept my mouth shut. And so I wanted to find a way of articulating that. And of course, having landed in one of the few places where it is possible to write. public and the latest in a storied line of individuals that are similar to me, I felt like it was important to put this down and to get the word out on this point and then to point toward things that we might do to make dissent, to make speaking more survivable for people like us. Speaker 3 (2:52) All right. So we're going to talk about the Public Service Fellowship, which you talk about in the piece a little bit later. Speaker 3 (3:01) Let's start with some basic numbers. How many people, first Julia and then Mike, who had jobs in the general vicinity of yours? are in a position to speak publicly Speaker 1 (3:20) now and have done it. I think there's a time element. So there are people in the intelligence community from many years ago who have spoken, and I've been with them on podcasts. Speaker 3 (3:32) Right. But I don't mean the world of formers. I mean, people who come out of government. Under some form of duress, whether it's because they've been fired or because they've been it's been made clear to them that there's no future for their careers or because, like in Mike's case, you know, he has the wrong friends and they've found out about it and they've made clear that. Either you're going to resign or you're going to go through an internal hell. I mean, there's some kind of duress in the last two years and who've come out and have spoken publicly about it. Speaker 1 (4:18) Yeah. So if you just look at in the intelligence community for CIA, DNI, DIA, as far as I'm aware of the people who've left in the second Trump administration, it's me. And I don't know if that's true. I would love to believe it's not true. But I have not found anyone who was in a similar position as myself and has been able to both land on the outside and speak publicly about their experience. Speaker 3 (4:46) And Mike, what about you? How many we have? There's a sense that lots of FBI people have spoken, but that's partly because. Jim Comey is a famous public figure. And because Andy McCabe has, right, there's this whole line of people over the last 10 years who've come out and have spoken. But what about in the universe of people who, like you, have lost their jobs and careers either directly or indirectly? In the second Trump administration, how many have spoken publicly? Speaker 2 (5:26) In terms of specific individuals who have spoken in the way to which you're referring, interviews, podcasts, specifically about their own situation, I can think of offhand four, not including myself. Then there is one more individual who spoke about it in, two individuals who spoke about it in the context of political campaigns when they were running for Congress and primaries. And then there's a group of individuals that spoke out in a New York Times narrative history piece and a group of individuals who spoke out in a Justice Connection video announcement. Now, those last two groups probably share 75, if not more, percent of the same membership. But when you consider that we are well into the dozens, if not hundreds, of individuals who have either been fired voluntarily, prematurely curtailed their careers under threat of being fired. or left earlier than they had ever planned to simply because of the overall environment. It's not a high percentage. Speaker 3 (6:47) And Julia, what would you estimate, Mike estimates the number is for the FBI between dozens and hundreds. What would you estimate in the larger intelligence community? How many people are we talking about? Speaker 1 (7:05) If we're talking about people that were like by name fired because of their association or purged because of who they are, it's a really small number, actually. But if you open the aperture a little bit about the broader workplace cuts, whether we're talking about like State Department, INR people, or DNI, where hundreds of people have been laid off for no reason other than just a vague sense that there's a deep state enemy within and these performative. cuts for the White House. I mean, I think it's in the hundreds, but it's kind of a different, it depends on what you're talking about. But even among those people who were not by name fired for their imagined offenses, precious few of them have also not spoken out because of the same dynamic that we describe in the piece about the extreme difficulty of finding work in the Washington area, in a company town, with an administration that is willing to jerk your clearance with a phone call. and render you unemployable in your own profession. Speaker 3 (8:04) All right. So let's, with that as a setup, and you've now given away what the subject of this conversation Speaker 1 (8:11) is, Speaker 3 (8:11) Julia, let's talk about the atmosphere and let's talk about why people aren't talking. So sketch it out for us. You have person X who's been either individually targeted, maybe named in an executive order as having their security clearance stripped, or just is part of this large doged community or rift community that Bill Pulte is cheerfully creating. And is angry about it and knows it's wrong and feels targeted by it. And yet there is an incentive structure that is making you guys unusual in being willing to sit in front of a camera and have a conversation with me. Describe what is creating that dynamic. Speaker 1 (9:08) So I think. It is a few things, you know, one, and maybe chronologically dealing with the phenomenon is right. So the administration is led by people who during the Biden administration, nursing their wounds from the first Trump administration, became convinced that there was a deep state enemy within that had a lot, you know, lay in wait for the president and had a plan if they got back into office to go after their political enemies. And so from day one alone, they discovered that, among other things, the clearance. is a powerful weapon to personally target individuals you deem to be opponents of the administration and materially damage their lives. And so I was sitting in the White House as a director for intelligence programs on the first day of the administration when I find out in the press the dozens of names of people who have now lost their security clearances via executive order and announced via tweet, no review. No process. They clearly came in with a list of names that they were going to go after. And that was the first thing that sent shockwaves through the federal workforce, sending notice that we will reach back in time. These were alleged offenses that either had something to do with the 2020 election or the 2016 election. We will go back almost a decade, find your alleged crimes, and then we will strip you of your key fact ability to earn a living. And everybody saw it. There was no appeal, certainly not at the time. And lots of people who had their clearances stripped had other material reasons to not contest what had happened to them in public. What remained of their employability, and I know many of these people personally, and I won't talk about their individual circumstances, they're still, even if they lost their clearance, they're still working in a company town where ultimately the largest employer is the federal government. The largest source of contract money is the federal government. And if you're now relying on that income stream, even if it isn't classified to pay your mortgage, send your kids to college, or in some cases you might have your own family members still left in the government who could be punished, you're going to be quiet. And they did. And so the phenomenon has been that there were... series of retaliatory moves early in the administration, and they've continued occasionally. But for the most part, the message was sent, and what we're describing in the piece is self-censorship. And it's what you're not seeing. It's the piece that never gets written rather than the individual whose voice just, you know, it's self-censorship is what I'm trying to say. Speaker 3 (11:44) Yeah. So, Mike, how much of it in the FBI is a security clearance thing? Speaker 2 (11:50) So this is where it gets a little bit interesting, specifically for the FBI. This was a trend I noticed actually in the waning days of the Biden administration, in that when individuals would get what we called OPR, which is you become the subject of an internal violation of some sort of rule or law. And when they'd get investigated and the administrative penalty was not as stringent as it seemed the seventh floor, the leadership of the FBI, would have liked. We started to see a lot of times them taking a second bite at the apple by once the OPR was finished, having the security division do an entirely separate review of whether it was appropriate for the person to hold on to their clearance. And what happened to, I'm not going to say a lot of people, but to at least some, is individuals who thought they had cleared the barrier of the internal investigation, and while they got some form of punishment, they knew they would keep their jobs, would find all of a sudden that they were in some form of double jeopardy. Speaker 3 (13:10) Because what hadn't been done in the OPR investigation was being done in the context of their clearances. Speaker 2 (13:17) Correct. And... I think this was really short-sighted by Bureau leadership because it was the very sort of thing that a less principled administration could leverage to its advantage going forward. And where it might have been a rarity under Ray and Biden, I suspect it's becoming much more something regularly happening at the Bureau now. Speaker 1 (13:50) I would add in this