Julia Curlee: “This is my Country, Too.”

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1:03Again, that's podsurvey.com slash best people. B-E-S-T-P-E-O-P-L-E. Thanks for your help. One of the things I said all those years after I briefed Vice President Pence was I would kind of cryptically tell people, you know, we're a better country. We're a more tolerant country than we sometimes appear on television, you know, that there's a secret, there's a secret tolerant America. It's in the closet, but I'm part of it. I've seen it. I've seen it. I've lived it. I've lived in this parallel reality. You know, where Mike Pence had a gay trans P.B. Brewer and nobody cared. Hi there, everyone. When the history of these times is studied, scholars and students and journalists will spend hours seeking to understand why we know and did anything, why no one in Congress or business or civic life did much more than just watch.

2:04Well Donald Trump burned to the ground, vital national security assets and infrastructure. They'll ask why members of both political parties proceeded basically business as usual to fund the government while Trump drove combat, tested and highly skilled qualified officers out of the military at a time when the country was at war. And if they stumble upon one thing vital to understanding what was happening during these times, we sincerely hope it is their writings and appearances of this week's guest, Julia Curly. She's been years briefing Vice President Mike Pence, the president's daily brief. That's the most important and sensitive and secret document that you might have never heard of, but it is how presidents make decisions about peace, about war and everything in between. She even served 68 days into the second Trump administration as well. And she did that until she was singled out online and then fired.

3:04Not for not doing her job, not for doing it badly, not for not showing up, not for being late, but for being transgender. Like so many other Americans, she's now serving her country by speaking out, by telling her story. And I am so deeply honored to have her here today. So this is the best people and this is Julia Curly. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you Nicole. It's great. I've been a fan for a long time. Oh, I read your piece and I wept and I was in the car. I was I was on family vacation. My daughter said, what mommy's crying? My husband was crashed. Why are you crying? And I said, I'm just reading the Atlantic piece again. And I have to say I want to hear everything about your story, but I have to tell you one of my first thoughts was it was the nicest thing I'd ever read about Mike Pence. I've heard that a lot. Really? I mean, just tell me tell me about first of all I worked in a white house and there was no one closer to the president I worked for than his briefers like the day started.

4:08And I'm sure it's always the case that that time is really sacred. Just talk about that time as Mike Pence is briefer. Yeah, well, so I mean, first we should say that the kind of briefer to principal relationship that I had the service in a white house like the dynamic between us. That used to be utterly unremarkable. This was the experience I'd had serving as a young analyst for the George W. Bush administration for the Obama administration into the first Trump administration. And it is remarkable how remarkable that that kind of a thing sounds now because it used to be that principles like the former vice president who reached that level of high office had a certain dignity. And they had commanded a lot of respect from the people that worked for them. And it was both ways. And it was how you inspired people to work for insane hours and miss their families and travel the world and give up so much of life's important moments.

5:12And I found working for him to be very normal in that in that tradition. And unfortunately just is an anomaly these days, which we can I'm sure we'll talk about. I mean, one of the things I wondered about briefing Mike Pence is that and I'm sure to some degree people felt like this about briefing dictating I mean Mike Mike Pence had been in the government longer than the president. He was serving, but the difference I guess is that Mike Pence had a reverence for the product and an understanding of it. Did that add to the import of briefing Mike Pence. Yeah, well, I mean, he was a demanding customer. And so it wasn't as if you have this person just you know it's just treating you nicely for no reason. I mean, he he needed the support that the intelligence community provided and from the very first briefing where I met him and he barks out tell me something I don't know. And we were off and you felt like you had to bring your A game every day because he was going to take the information you provided walk into a meeting with the president talk to a foreign government leader and represent the United States.

6:24And what I wanted to report with this which I'm sure is surprised many people given who I am and who he is was that we had a very good relationship and I'm just reporting it as it was, which was, you know, the kind of relationship that I had experienced and briefings for for previous presidents and and one that was the norm. He I thought use the intelligence community the way it was designed and that is a certain respect for the people who are collecting it. Understanding the risks and the expense involved in this vast enterprise of the US intelligence community and the respect was returned with the organization working to answer his many many many taskings. And so it was one of mutual respect and you would often give me assignments way above my pay grade which led to some drama a few occasions when he tells me to to go call the CIA director about the thing that you can't tell me because it's even too secret for me and I had to get on the phone to call the director about the thing you know the thing.

7:26And it was a great experience to be treated with that level of respect and and as a result it was no problem in putting in the you know what we joked as half days of midnight to noon six days a week. It was a great experience. Was there ever a request to not tell the president or his briefer what he'd asked you to do. No, not at all so the way it would work back during the first Trump administration is all the briefers would fan out with a core book of products that have been put together for the president's daily brief and then additional items that were customized for your principle so the vice president we get additional products. The president we get different things the treasury secretary different things but we all would come back to CIA headquarters and compare notes and once a day sort of level set what the entirety of the US government was was thinking on those on those occasions and he would often ask me what's going to the president or what what is the you know what are the latest taskings that will tee up that next policy decision.

8:37And so now it was it was transparent there were a few times where I had to let him know about the president's tweets because I had been up all night and and it seemed them and he would not have seen them yet but no it was it was a pretty transparent relationship. And then going the other direction was there ever an example where he expressed embarrassment or apologized after trump did things like say he believed Vladimir Putin more than he trusted his own intelligence officials. No no he was very much the person that you would see in public yeah yeah respect for the president and knowing the administration he served. I mean I guess I'm trying to understand is how different. This term is from that one because it feels like the vice president the first term had all the best intelligence available to the most senior leader in our country's government right and so whatever Trump was doing

9:37like pens at least had the benefit of all your expertise and all the analysis but this term feels so different and I wonder if you can just talk about whether it was different at the beginning and if it feels different to you now from the outside. Right so caveat that I have not served in a in the similar PDB capacity into this administration what I will say from the first term was while the president was known to not read the PDB quite frequently and was assumed to not take the briefing very often you would see. Very often you get very rare evidence that he had he had processed it or had any follow up questions the vice president read it every day and so everything went to the president he was reading plus two or three times the amount based on his own policy interests and there was a sense of seriousness across the west wing so I served him for over a year. But I had also served the deputy national security adviser brief pretty much every member of the cabinet at that point by the end about two years in total and this was an administration of adults of people that took their jobs very seriously use the multi billion dollar intelligence community apparatus drive answers to their questions to make sure the United States made decisions with the best information available.

10:52You know everyone from general Kelly to general master everyone across the senior levels of that administration I thought while I disagreed with them fundamentally on many policies they were all quite serious about using the US government and felt personally accountable for the results of the administration and I think that that is the biggest change is the the new administration the second Trump administration seems to not be concerned with the outcomes of their policies and an almost bizarre way. And so they have not used the intelligence community to my knowledge in the same manner that the first did they've concerned themselves with only providing the president with information that he wants to hear with blocking out contrary voices with firing officers who have provided analysis that is inconvenient and they're not treating the interagency process of running this most complicated entity in the world really the US government with professionalism and the United States. The nationals they installed lackeys and and people with primarily a political background in key positions of power again no offense putting a daytime talk show host in charge of the defense department.

12:04None taken I mean I couldn't agree more you compare that with with secretary Mattis you know four star general who've been to war multiple times who'd run massive organizations who treated the office with some reverence and seriousness knowing that people could die if they made it happen. Whether they made the right decision or not it was going to be a serious business of defending the United States around the world and so they took it seriously. This administration seems to be much more interested in appealing to an audience of one in the in the oval and appealing to a small group of people on the internet who have very conspiratorial and extremist beliefs and it's on tremendous harm to the institutions that are designed to support them to make good decisions. What has happened to the intelligence communities I mean we only see what ends up facing publicly which is you know the the the purges of so many people that it gets out to the press the turnover a top the confirmation hearings of the Clayton who couldn't say who won the 2020 election which I just wonder what's happening that we don't see.

13:15Well the two main harms that I would I would focus in on are you know first intelligence is only useful if it tells policymakers what they need to know not what they wanted to hear. And the example that you cited the confirmation hearing where he couldn't even bring himself to to say out loud who won the election because of fear obviously of what the president would think is a clear sign that the institutions have been cowed and the people that are leading them lack. The basic strength to tell the commander in chief what he needs to know and that along with the firing of some of the most respected senior intelligence officers and in my generation sent a clear message to the workforce that the basic idea that we exist to provide unvarnished objective analysis to our leaders was no longer welcome and that you could lose your career your your family could lose their primary income. And you'd be shown the door and so what has mostly happened is people have avoided any situation where they have to to speak truth to power in that way.

14:20And as a result that calls into question what is it all for this this multi billion dollar apparatus that we built so that they can make good decisions if the institution can't do that without facing personal irrevocable consequences. You know it was a structural feature of the intelligence community that a mid level or junior officer could tell a cabinet member of the United States that their policy was failing and here's the evidence and information and it was destroyed by a series of decisions by this administration who wrongly stupidly saw the intelligence community is the enemy within. And as a result they blinded themselves right away so it's been to their great detriment and the second area is this war on expertise which is related to the first which is that as a result of these purges of which you know a handful of people like me who are being thrown out or being marginalized because of who they are the much broader people having seen what's happening are simply leaving because they don't want to be part of an institution where they're great laborers where the risk is.

15:30They will take will not actually be used by the leadership and so at the 20 to 25 year mark of people's career like mine people who joined after 9 11 who have all of the attended experiences that you would expect of our generation of war zone deployments of support to to to difficult administrations but administrations of democratic and Republican backgrounds they're leaving and with them were taking people that have served in multiple wars. People wars chiefs of station that have served in multiple hard target countries they're walking out the door because they don't want to be a part of this anymore and and I don't have any numbers to quantify this but I can imagine that the recruitment of people coming into the intelligence agencies who would be replacing people like us who would be leaving mid career or late in our careers that has also been severely undermined by this administration. How could you in good conscious tell a young American especially one who might be from a minority background or LGBT that they should sign up for a life where they would serve their country but they could be fired at any minute for who they are.

16:38So it's been in a number of places truly generational damage to the intelligence community and while as we look forward there's hopefully an opportunity in the future to rebuild it will be very difficult to do so because of all the people that have left who just. Either they move away or they move on with their lives. Do you remember the new cycle in that it was after Donald Trump won in 2016 but it was during the transition and intelligence the leaders of the intelligence agencies and the Department of Justice all went up to. Tom coward of brief him and I think it's where he first heard about the dossier which I blotted out everything else that happened but one of the things that happens is he smears the intelligence agencies like in some to not see. I think it was a disgraceful disgraceful that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false and fake out.

17:39I think it's a disgrace and I say that and I say that and that's something that not see Germany would have done and did do I think it's a disgrace. I had a general hate not who'd been the head of the NSA during the bush years and went on to serve in Democratic and Republican administrations and he said that there's there's the damage right to having the president of the United States say that which is an obvious smear. But then there is this thing that that could also happen that will never really know about in the field where someone who is an intelligence asset just isn't sure anymore if the information they pass along we protected by the end consumer and that the erosion to the information is a thing that'll take years and years to sort of understand and assess and maybe even longer than that. Do you have any thoughts about that analysis. I mean, first of all, a great way of my or general aid and and completely agree with both of those points and I was serving at the time with the transition to the first Trump administration and I remember many conversations in the hallway about that.

18:55I mean, people were deeply offended that the incoming president would first compare us to Nazis. People these are we're people that have served America or entire lives and taking great personal risk. He'd also said a lot of positive things about Vladimir Putin, which is a CIA officer raise some eyebrows. And it was it was hurtful, but at the end of the day at that point at the administration, we all understood that this was the duly elected president of the United States. And we were going to put aside our partisan views if we had them or institutional biases to serve the incoming administration. And we did and there were many conversations where I had junior mentees who who were also LGBT who had heard his statements who saw the the trans ban of soldiers in the military who were deeply offended and wanted to say something. And I counseled them know that's not our role. Our role is to serve regardless of party. And so the organization really closed, you know, together and we we I think behaved professionally.

20:00And that that was the view going for most of the administration. And that was where it was kind of based on that experience that that my decision to stay into the second administration was based. But the second point you made about the overseas piece of this. America has an enormous magnetic pull, which has benefited our intelligence collection around the world. People are willing to risk their own lives and those are their families to commit espionage, capital offenses on behalf of the United States to provide us with information because they believe that the United States shares their values or that there's something for them. Maybe someday they'll get to come to America, but they believed in who we were. And they knew that the CIA was one of the most professional hardest working intelligence agencies on the planet that would protect. And for them to see first the United States turning its back on them, calling countries dirty names that that would humiliate them and.

21:04Yeah, I was I was trying to remember whether you were a PG 13 podcast. Yeah, we are decidedly not I've been on my best behavior. Yeah, I mean, but this is like cracking this this nut that I've done desperate to understand for 10 years like I understand. From being in the government myself, right that like the president is the customer not because you decide that, but because the American people have decided that right. So that's like a closed issue. And so the CIA is made up of people probably better than anyone in any other agency. It just like moving toward the things within their control, right. So we're going to take the best information. We're going to analyze it as best we can. And then the human element is that we're going to speak truth to the leaders because that's if we don't do that, there's no point in everything behind this, right. But if the president, your top customer, describes our allies basically as deadbeats, right. Like how do you orient the product for that customer? Well, I mean, it's a gaping wound at the center. And what do you do? You try to stop the bleeding. You try to patch over it. You try to get through it day to day.

22:10And you try to not make fundamental compromises of who we are as an intelligence community. But you know that the damage is there. And you try to explain to our foreign partners as best you can. And you do your best because at the end of the day, this is our country too. And one of the things we teach young analysts and why we teach them to speak truth to power, why we tell them that they need to serve administrations, regardless of their partisan background is if you fail to do that, if you really shade the truth or you don't speak up when it might be inconvenient, you might get off the hook. But the country will suffer. And you know, the other way around where if you speak truth to power and the hammer falls on you, you will suffer, but the country will benefit. And that's the calculus we teach all of our young analysts and we try to reward them for living up to those values, but this administration has been at war with that. I will say having lived through the full arc of this centuries foreign entanglements from Iraq to the present, I really thought we had learned quite a number of lessons about the importance of the country.

23:17About the importance of speaking truth to power, if a White House has a preferred narrative about a foreign countries, WMD program, it is critical that the intelligence community disabuse them of that viewpoint. And the same thing has has recurred in this administration where the White House had had a clear policy intent, whether or not the intelligence was able to get through, we see a president plowing forward with a Middle East war next to two of the countries that devoured my young adulthood. And somehow the best information in the world, the decades of understanding about, of course talking about Iran, didn't penetrate into the Oval Office and as we end up in this debacle of a war with no end in sight. And it's sad and depressing thing to be in your forties watching our own country seemingly commit a new version of the same failures we did in our twenties. And I wish I could still be on the inside, I wish I could still be fighting the good fight and I know many people are still trying to.

24:23But the country needs to know that what's happening now with the administration is not just a circus that you can tune out on TV. It is not just the persecution of small numbers of minority people that you may or may not understand. They are weakening the power of the United States in innumerable ways and they are prioritizing the interests of one person over the broader national interest and it's going to take decades for us to repair from this. We're going to take a quick break right here when we come back much more with former NSC director CIA analyst and PDB Brewer to former vice president Mike Pence, Julia Curly. Stay right here. When my mom got sick, she felt powerless. Insurance denied her meds. Her doctors talked over her and they couldn't agree on anything. She kept getting worse.

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27:36I think that's a good idea. I think that's a good idea. Clearly, Marco Rubio had to avail himself of the intelligence to believe the public news reports. Nobody in his cabinet told him this was a good idea. He went ahead anyway. What is your sense of the role that intelligence play? Well, I certainly do not believe this was an intelligence failure. This was a case where most of the warnings that you would want to deliver to a president were widely known and accepted by everyone in the community. Everyone else is known. Examination of aluminum tubes here and what are the dual use characters? It's like none of that. This was known. And in public war games and in public testimony, everything that has happened was available to them. Whether that is the fact that the Iranians with close to the straight-of-formos is one of the first and most important moves to impose costs upon the world in the US and its allies. That the killing of the Supreme Leader would be replaced by another Supreme Leader, probably of a more radicalized nature, that the Iranians would retaliate against the US bases in the region and that it would be very difficult to defend against them, that the Iranians might use cyber attacks against the American homeland.

28:50All of these things had been foreseeable and foreseen and were blown right through. So that's on the intelligence content itself. But there's also the structure around that intelligence that ensures that it is delivered and that other wrong or a bad analysis does not hit the president without the caviating and the analysis of what the intelligence community believes. If you've seen the Maggie Haberman Johnathan Swan book where they describe this scene in the situation room with the president singing across from the Israeli Prime Minister with Masad on the screen directly messaging the president that the war will go well. The people will ride up rise up. It's will be greeted as liberators all over again. And they persuade the president a whole scenario which I don't even believe the Israelis believe. Right. But they were very happy to get the United States to lead a war on their behalf to weaken the Iranian regime. And now we find ourselves in a place where there's no obvious way out where the Iranians have no interest in letting us off the hook.

29:57This was a scenario that anybody who had followed the Iran's calculus and its resilience and its government could have told you was going to happen. And I see no incentive for the Iranians to let us off the hook, especially before the coming midterms. How does it end? Tell me how this end question seems to always be the problem when we start a Middle East war. The people like you always ask to answer it. Right. Yes. Right. Here we are again. I think that what will likely happen is when the Iranians decide the moment of their maximum strategic leverage, if they can, they will force the US and a desperate US president to settle for almost certainly worse conditions that are around the table before the war started. And we will likely remain in strategic control of the straight-up hormones, whether it's to charge a toll or decide who gets to transit through to hold his leverage over the rest of the region.

31:03And the US has shown that despite having the best Navy in the world, despite having all of the most advanced technology, we are unable to defeat a country with no Navy that has denied us use of this straight. That's a debacle for American power. And we already see countries in the region making other security arrangements because they, the one thing that we were supposed to provide them was this. And we failed. And this is a regime that's that's famously used these kinds of strategic hostages to extract concessions from American presidents. And they're likely to continue doing so. And we don't have access on the ground to their nuclear program. We're not going to get a better deal than we had with the JCPOA. It doesn't seem like there's any good way out. And the president is likely, I think the administration is likely to settle for a significant concessions in order to end the war before it does true deep harm to it's to the administration's political future.

32:03What is the sort of ripple effect in terms of how China views Taiwan? Right. I mean, I think that the US adversaries in Moscow and in Beijing cannot help but take away the lesson here that America will start a war and be unable to finish it because the American people do not want to bear costs, especially for a war that we started. And nobody knows why. The case wasn't made to the American people. Why do you think they choose not to make the case to the American people? Well, the president's offered several maybe maybe three or four different political ends for this, whether it's the nuclear program or regime change or the straight of hormones. So I don't know who would be making what case. It would have to be the president. And he seems not to see it as his job to persuade any part of the country that didn't vote for him to explain what is the point of this enterprise. Other than just signaling strength and satisfying his wounded pride. Without without a clear end, there's no way to explain to the American people why this is worth it.

33:08If we were to pursue the president's ends, whether it's regime change of the Iranian regime or trying to get to a better deal on the JCP away, it would require an enormous dedication of force. A ground invasion of Iran, occupation of Iranian territory along the straight of hormones or deeper into the Persian Gulf. That no one believes the United States has the political will to do at this point. And so it just seems like they're kicking this down the road and not bothering to explain it. As a person who served in Iraq, it is seemingly amazing that you could walk around the streets of America of Washington, D.C. And most people don't even seem to know that we're at war, that the United States is dropping bombs on a country every night that Americans are dying. And perhaps that's how the White House wants it to be. But this is great stakes and it's doing a tremendous amount of harm to U.S. national interests because of it. What is the cost of having a country so detached from a war being waged in our name?

34:15There's a basic accountability mechanism that's been broken where the administration doesn't seem to feel itself accountable for a failed war because they're still being able to appeal to some small number of people on the internet that it seems to be its base. I think that Americans don't understand just how much damage has been done. I mean, they get it at the pump when they, you know, it's $5 for gas. But around the world, whether it's U.S. prestige or leverage for us to have favorable trade deals, America is on the decline everywhere. And China and other countries that do not, you know, as well, are taking advantage of these opportunities to fill the gap there. They were just a poll of what countries do you think will do the right thing? It was a global favorability poll. And China had surged past the United States in favorability and trust. And I never thought I would see that in my lifetime that the Chinese Communist Party would be perceived as a more predictable stable goodwill actor on the world stage.

35:24But the administration has managed it. If you were assessing the United States of America on behalf of an ally or an adversary, what would your PDB look like? I've thought about that several times. So first, I would be very concerned, let's just say I was an ally of the United States and I meant America well. I would be very concerned that what we are witnessing is a consolidating authoritarian government that has no intention of ever losing power and that is willing to do whatever it takes, even if it means sacrificing the true strength of the United States in order to ensure its success and durability and in the next election. And it is behaving in a way that's very similar to other consolidating autocracies. The ruling family is enriching itself overseas and in shady means. It is turning countries into tributary states. For example, with the Venezuela operation, which showed that the United States is still an amazing, incredible military that can accomplish whatever its task has been given.

36:33Completely unclear of what the ultimate goal there is and the flow of money that nobody seems to know where it's going but turning this country in our hemisphere into it, seemingly a subordinate tributary state would send the message to everyone else of what kind of a country they're dealing with. And so if I was a friend of the United States, I would be seeing the nature of America slipping away that the kind of country that would abide by its word that would see that there was a mutual ben mutually beneficial order that we could build when we always called it the rules based international order but it was just an order that all countries could feel like they were going to prosper and that it wasn't just some zero some game. They would see the United States now in a very different way that it can't be trusted it can only be trusted to do what's in its short term interests or in the interest of the leadership. Now if I were an enemy of the United States, first I would I would be gleeful and I would I would be patient because there's no reason to interrupt your adversary when they're committing suicide.

37:35They would be watching and letting the United States tear up its own alliances with its with its key partners which are enormously beneficial to the United States itself happily to let America divide and conquer its own allies and sit back and watch and then collect the benefits that would come with that and unfortunately that PDB which is one I would not want to have to write would have a good news story which is that until there's a change of administration it's unlikely that it might be a good news story. And it's unlikely that America's self induced decline will be arrested. How would you assess the detachment that we talked about before in the context of the Iran war of the American people to the things that are very clearly a threat to US national security. How would you try to explain why people aren't in the streets protesting the purging of people like yourself from the intelligence agencies. I mean like how would you try to explain why the American people seem to be sleepwalking? I don't have any special insight into the public apathy.

38:39I'm probably the wrong person to ask having spent so much of my adult life both in a secret intelligence agency and overseas but I imagine that a lot of it has to do with the kind of collective action problem that we all face which is things are bad but you know at the end of the day I've got to go home and feed my family and take care of the people that there were a lot of people who are not in the world. The people that rely on me and the cost of doing something always falls on the individual. Whereas the benefits is enjoyed by by the collective what I do know is that it's really important especially as we head into those few moments of accountability that we have in our country the midterms coming up in November that the general election in 28 that people really get engaged because serious damage has been done to them. And they're in their future well being by the conduct of this administration and there's only so much time left to reverse course.

39:39And they need to be made aware of that and one of the reasons why I'm trying to tell my story is that while people have been suffering and there's been a long term decline in people's expectations for their own future in the United States. They have been sold this idea of an enemy within to distract them from their own interests that the things that they really should be focused on. And I'm at the middle of one of those campaigns I was serving in the White House at the end of the Biden administration with the incoming Trump administration. I was watching on the sit-room TVs at some ungodly hour of the night these commercials that would come on you know which attacked the the president's Democratic opponent saying that you know she is for they them Donald Trump is for you and they threw 200 million dollars at a campaign with grainy images of bearded trans people you know storming the women's room in order to demonize people like me.

40:40And this is a tactic that I wrote PDB's about that in Russia or Iran or Hungary the leaders who can't run on their economic record prosperity they've started a foreign war that they cannot finish this is what they do they distract you they say that over there down the corner you can't see them you don't know anything about this minority group but trust me when I tell you that they're the real problem that I can't fix your life for your kids future but I'm telling you I'm protecting you from this unseen enemy within over there. And that's exactly what they've done to trans people that's exactly what they're doing to other minorities and people need to wake up to that to that fact or once we've been purged they will just move on to the next group because they will always need an enemy within to distract you from the real business of improving people's lives which they have failed so manifestly. Did you ever have a moment those ads were playing around the clock they proved depressingly effective did you ever moment where you're like I'm not going to work for these people.

41:42Of I had many of those but constantly but the but I told myself that this was just politics that you know I first I served in the first term you know I had I'm the trans woman that had worked for Mike Pence it's going to be okay right I mean I had done that. I mean I had believed fiercely in the idea of nonpartisan service and and while this you know truly debasing treatment of of one group of Americans and turning people against each other I still felt like it was my duty to stay and if they were going to get rid of me they were going to get rid of me but I wasn't going to do them the favor of walking away and when the administration came in and on the third day of the administration came in and I was going to do that. I was going to do that and on the third day of the administration they fired all the other 160 NSE directors and just left a handful of us including me and they asked me to stay and said I was indispensable. I felt like okay that was terrible and it was a huge self inflicted wound but okay I'm here they need me I'm in this chair I'm going to continue to serve as long as I could and I did and for a total of of 69 70 72 days.

42:57I was treated well by this administration that had been demonizing people like me on the outside and the story I was telling myself the whole time was that you know if not me who and I'm going to do my best because this is my country to. What I didn't really understand was this idea that they needed me they needed the expertise that I could provide I needed my labors but they didn't want anyone to know I was there because someone decided that having a trans person was a political liability and it was inconsistent with the public story that they were telling. People and I didn't really see it I regret and tell it like hit me tell it tell it was me who was being the one purged and that was a hard. Reality to face that you know we tell ourselves in the country that you can rise as far as your talents can take you.

43:57We we teach our young officers that even you who comes from nowhere can rise to serve a president of the United States but at the end but at the end of the day is as I titled my piece I was the wrong kind of American. What do you do to stay in love with your country when it didn't love you back. You get a lot of reminders of what an amazing country we are you look for it. One of the things I said all those years after I briefed vice president Pence was I would kind of cryptically tell people you know we're a better country we're more tolerant country than we sometimes appear on television you know that that there's there's a secret there's a secret tolerant America. You know the closet. I've seen it. I've lived in this parallel reality you know where Mike Pence at a gay trans people for nobody care right for years and hundreds of people in the eye knew my story and like nobody nobody talk.

45:03And it was fine because we were all Americans and so I think that country is still out there still meet them every day you know I've been I've been overwhelmed with people since I wrote the piece in the Atlantic or reaching out to me to say thank you for speaking the thing we all know. Especially within the government people that they can't speak out for fear of being fired I've heard from from dozens of parents of trans kids that were worried terribly about the country that their kids are going to grow up in. And people just to remind me that that like that country still out there we still we still exist. And you know until we start teaching our children that you know America is only for some and not for others if we change the you know the the E pluribus in part of you know on our currency it's still there we just have to have to believe in it and fight for it.

46:03My conversation with Julia Curley continues right after the bright will be right back. There's only one North Sempic. Hello I'm ozempic because this ad is 30 seconds I can't get into everything I'm FDA proof to do so I'm just going to play my jingle again. But first ask your doctor about which FDA approved uses of me the ozempic pen may be right for you call 1 8 3 3 ozempic or visit ozempic.com to view the medication guide and learn more about ozempic some aglatide injection 2 milligrams only novo Nordisk makes FDA approved ozempic now here's that jingle again. This episode is brought to you by SoFi the everything app for smarter money your money should work as hard as you do but most of us leave it sitting and checking doing nothing. SoFi checking and savings changes that competitive a p y no account fees and a direct deposit bonus terms apply make your money move at sofi.com slash smart money sofi get your money right so

47:10SoFi checking and savings is offered through sofi bank in a member FDIC. All of us trans are in real danger and whatever it is it's closing in. It started with just a few lost hairs here and there but now more and more of us are disappearing every day. But listen we think we have a plan. A way to stop the shedding. Pantene abundant and strong go now. It's not too late. Pantene abundant and strong it's a three step system that reduces hair loss by 85% only the strongest will survive the shedding. What I find harrowing about the things you written are sort of the hinge points right you you were asked to assess the trend a aragua until that that is the predicate for their first big swing at mass deportations and sending people to do process to see caught like can you just take me inside the other I think of them as to the movie sliding doors like sliding doors moments where where it might have come over or another you know was there a constant tension what was that like.

48:20Well that case you that you raise a trend or or or was one of the first big ones that showed the sort of nature of the the new Trump administration and how different it was going to be so I'm acting senior director for intelligence programs someone on behalf of Stephen Miller comes to me and says that Mr Miller would like an assessment that establishes that the material government is directed this Venezuelan street gang to invade the United States and my response is that I'm not going to be a little bit more serious. Let's put that in the form of a question. It's like not I get I get where you I mean it was obvious from the beginning where they were going they're trying to establish the predicate for the Indian and the attack and for establishing that this this drug trafficking cartel is on dating the United States and so we did we sent it to the national intelligence council who dutifully came back with what we believe which is that this is a Venezuelan street gang and it's criminal and it's motivated by the profit you know and not through some political objective of invading the United States. And of course it got someone fired for it two of our best officers who many of us looked up to but what that showed us was that they wanted to control the message and the messenger they wanted to make sure that the intelligence community was

49:35a pliable tool that could support the administration's position in court. And we saw that again with the Iranian nuclear program where the director of the DIA provided an assessment to the Congress that we had not in fact the Iranian nuclear program and ended up being fired for it because a contradict to the president. And seemed to notice that several months later the administration seemed to now agree with the head of the DIA who they had fired that we have not destroyed the Iranian nuclear program. Wow. Yeah, there was lightning. Wow. Yeah. I was listening to our conversation. Yikes. All right. Steven Miller's throwing light and bolts from from above. Wow, man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad we saw the power here. All right. So the God of Thunder and the read. Yeah. God of Thunder. And a little bit more to. I'm telling when they go study this they're going to listen to this and they're going to say, oh my God.

50:35This is how it's not bad it was like God waited on that one. Again, I only consume what's public facing but it does feel like one of the early public facing examples of them trying to insert the intelligence community early in a policy process to implement and judges have called out, uh, talk, launched by name on the Kilmar Brego Garcia case, accusing top lunch of reverse engineering criminality. This feels like an instance where right the White House sought to reverse engineer intelligence. Right. They wanted to demand what the intelligence product said they wanted to determine who could deliver the message they wanted it to support their policies, their goals in court. Every, every White House is entitled to its, to its own political objectives. That's not what I'm objecting to, but you have institutions of our government that are supposed to be a political that are supposed to be providing you with objective truth and it might be inconvenient. But that's the apparatus we've built to help you make better decisions. So you know the consequences of decisions before you make them a couple weeks ago now, the one comment that the White House is made on my article and the media that I've done is they

51:43is one of the things they said was that officials of the US government are, you know, been entrusted with great responsibility. They need to fulfill and carry forward the president's America first agenda. And when they said that, it was like they were validating the very thing I've been trying to say, which is that intelligence officers are not here to advance the political agenda of any particular president. We serve the Constitution, we serve the office, we don't serve the man. And they seem to believe that all officers of the US government are personal employees of Donald Trump. And that is not the nature of our political system. The law is not there for them to use, you know, rule by law to achieve specific outcomes. And they seem to treat the Constitution in our laws as something malleable, rather than something sacred that is important to the success of a country and values. And that first episode, whether it was Trend or Orohrawa or the Iran nuclear assessment, at every opportunity they've taken to use the powers of the federal government, the ability to fire people to send a message to the rest of the workforce that the nature of our government, you know, what a foreign country would say the nature of the country.

52:59The country would say the nature of our regime has been changed to be one that supports the president, rather than the president supporting the rest of us. One of the things that Republicans used to do at the very beginning of my career politics, I started in politics and campaigns was between elections elections didn't go on forever. They would go support election processes in young democracies. And I wonder, either as someone assessing the sanctity of our elections or the way Trump and the White House might use intelligence agencies to interfere or so distrust in our elections, how would you assess the threat ahead of the midterms? Yeah, so I mean, this is all historic ancient history. On your first, yeah, I was there too. I was briefing senators, you know, some names that you recognize, Lindsey Graham and John McCain, as they went overseas to help young democracies and talk to them about how we, even if you're not the party in power, we all play within certain rules and the idea of a loyal opposition.

54:01It was really important to promote democracy around the world to Republicans and I've served more Republican administrations than Democratic administrations. Something has fundamentally changed in politicizing every aspect of our foreign policy and now our intelligence and homeland security organizations and it's very concerning. It's something that I'm now working very much on through my employer through law fair and in the context of the upcoming election. I'm looking at two big things. One is the politicization and the selective declassification of intelligence to support the White House and the president's preferred narratives about the upcoming elections. And so the best example of this was the president's prime time speech, where his administration worked through CIA to declassify a bunch of intelligence that reportedly supported his allegation that the election in 2020 was stolen from him or that there was a vast conspiracy involving foreign actors to do so.

55:02If you bothered to read the paper that they produced the raw intelligence they put out, they did not say what he said they said. And it didn't take much analysis to just looking through what they put there that they were vastly overstating what these raw reports had said. But that did not stop the president's most, you know, virulent supporters on the internet from saying directly that CIA and FBI have now validated our belief that the election was stolen and that was the point. So the predicate was put down that intelligence is supported it and that there was now this apparatus of a task force at the White House run by political operatives who now have access to very highly classified intelligence and willing partners at departments and agencies at the CIA were willing to play along with that and produce documents that report to support the president's attack on the legitimacy of US elections. So that is first and foremost the thing that I'm watching and I'm very concerned with because I don't know what would stop them from doing that on the eve of the election saying that a foreign government has now decided that the following 15 precincts who all happen to be key contested districts that this foreign adversary the United States all favor the democratic candidate and have been interfering there.

56:21And so at minimum that is influence operations with CIA participating directing at the American people which is an egregious abuse of our intelligence community all on its own. If it produces a predicate for seizing ballots or seizing voting machines also a tremendously harmful thing and we don't have to imagine much when we saw the former DNI Tulsi Gabbard literally going to a crime scene that they said was was happening down in Atlanta. These are not the job of an intelligence officer we're supposed to be focused on foreign threats in foreign countries not investigating US elections and so they've already laid down precedent for all these things that I would be very worried about and I don't know what would stop them on the other side of things you see institutions like the Department of Homeland Security who are looking at voting machines that the United States uses and saying that there are components made in China in these voting machines and therefore we enhance the United States. We inherently believe that they're susceptible to hacking and that this now lays down the predicate that if they want to go in and try to seize these voting machines that can either disrupt the counting of votes that could cast out into the outcome.

57:33I've got news for you every piece of electronics in America has Chinese components in it and if we don't have real intelligence that there has been real hacking real votes changed in the infrastructure which they have never produced that kind of information. There's simply laying down a predicate for domestic interference in our elections using our security apparatus as to legitimize it and so that's very frightening that we're basically counting on the restraint of the administration not following through on the predicate that they've already laid down. The best thing I think we can do is to call them on it and to alert the America people that this is a real threat that we have a federal system that local authorities do not have to comply with these federal orders they administer their own elections in our country. And that no amount of federal threatening should require them to do things like turnover voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security it's just not their job and they just don't have the statutory basis for that so I think that for warned is for armed and I know a lot of people who I'm in touch with are very concerned and we're trying to get the word out.

58:45I like to think that what happened in Minneapolis and Chicago and what happened around the no Kings protest that I think when people do focus in on threats like that. The people are still our best hope when people hear this information when people understand how they're misusing things have you seen enough activism to make you hopeful that people when they see this will take to the streets and defend their neighbors and their communities and the right to vote. Yeah, I mean you brought up the Minneapolis case I was still in the government and I will tell you this the shock that that sent through my colleagues you know where all people that that had been through the wars of the first decades of the century and and had seen what it was like to be on the ground in a war zone and now we're watching Minneapolis looking like Baghdad and masked government agents pulling people out of cars people being shot through their windshields. People being executed by you know after they've been disarmed on the ground and you just wondered like where am I. How did this happen and then where is the accountability to the people that did that.

59:53Instead they're just whisked away and hidden by the government who doesn't want its own agents to be held accountable like this is not the way we work this is not America. So first of all it was just an enormous shock but what I will say though in the aftermath of that and then in the following protests that I've seen you really do see the public open its eyes to these things and not believe the lies that they're being told right and beginning to mobilize and I think that that if I may as a CIA officer who's studied foreign opposition moments that have that have resisted consolidating authoritarian regimes. There's a few things that make them successful you know one is things like the famous like don't comply in advance to stay engaged in your in your locality to get to know your neighbors to organize organize organized those are all really important things but if I were going to isolate one trait that separates the movements that succeed and resisting their their authoritarian leaders in the movements that fail it's the the oppositions that hold together against common goals that substance.

1:01:00That's subsume their differences until after they take power and putting aside your differences of approach and making partners with with people you wouldn't normally unite with and and not elevating factional disputes above all other things I think that's critical because the other side is trying to do that they're trying to divide and conquer the persecution of trans people is one of those things to try to wedge different factions of the opposition. Apart from each other and just to not fall for it and to see what the regime is trying to do to you and we will figure those issues out once you know the fundamental threat to our way of life and political system have been addressed. Yeah like the program actually side has to hold right so that we can then go to bait tax cuts or you know universal health care what I want to understand why you think attacking trans people. Trans people is such a go to and and why with some segment of the population it's just this casual cruelty that you can just drop an insult.

1:02:09In this category on like a daytime cable and why is it tolerated why do people not see it as you because I think you're absolutely right the practices the point right you you demean divide ostracize purge and then you just move on you know they don't say great. We're done everybody is at risk if anybody who is trans is at risk why do people not draw the line there and defend their trans neighbors and colleagues and friends. I think there were a tiny group that people do not see us as sort of a normal part of their lives and they are susceptible to the images of trans people which have been pretty unfailingly negative since since forever it's baked into Hollywood into media that you know there's just something inherently hilarious about a man in and dress. That's the kind of the most generous version of this you know growing up as a young kid the only images of trans people available to me in the 1980s and 1990s and into the 2000s really was I think there was serial killers on on Hitchcock movies there were.

1:03:23People on Jerry Springer who were you know daytime talk shows that were just objects of derision and you know chanting crowds of freaks on television kind of like a circus act is how we were portrayed. And then where I came from in Hawaii we were sex workers and why could you and so I knew I couldn't possibly be a person like that and that kind of unrelenting negative image of people like me was in the water until. It's still there obviously but you know for most of the adult voting age population it was definitely the default I didn't meet my first trans adult in person until I was 30 there was just no one that I could look at and say yeah okay I can I can be like that I can I can be a trans person and I can be a CIA officer I can be a professional with a family and a normal life. And they're so precious few people like that the very few trans people that most people know are like celebrities are there.

1:04:25In possibly attractive young trans people or they're sad and and you know and portrayed for pity I mean just there's no middle age professional trans person who's just trying to live their life in the. Just grocery shopping on the other on hold yeah this is the most radical thing that that that I'm doing right now is yeah it's just being normal average and normal you know middle age white lady out in the world you know it's just it's the revolution that I'm but I'm bringing with with my going public and I think that that's it that the first first and foremost it's just unfamiliarity and then the negative images nothing to counter act them we go through this right I mean we go through these. Go through these patterns of learning about a group of people destigmatizing the worst you've been told about them whether it's racism or homophobia I mean we're old enough that when when I was a kid the word gay was just a pejorative you know you get stuck in traffic and you'd say that was gay right and people internalize that that message and so I think we're at that stage of the trans experience and in public and the more.

1:05:37The more that people can see that we're just that the trans agenda that we bring is basically leave us alone like let us live in the world those are my demands I think there are handful of people who have changed what we know and understand about these times very small handful and you're one of them and you layer on top of it all the reasons why. You wouldn't want to be telling your whole story and so I admire you so much and I'm so grateful to you for all this time for the thunder for all of it thank you so much thank you Nicole is great. Thank you so much for listening to the best people all episodes of this podcast are also available on YouTube you visit ms.nl slash the best people to watch. This is the very last episode produced by bicky vergilina who launched this podcast we love for dearly and we wish her all the best in her new adventure. It's also produced by max dickheads and i and tatter g our associate producer is Nico been wala go dar with additional production support from query Robinson Claire grubberg and delia haze our audio engineers for this episode or Bob Mallory and has he been a mod for ed.

1:06:50Katie lous our senior manager of audio production pat burkey is the senior executive producer of deadline white house bragg gold is the executive producer of content strategy isha turners the executive producer of audio and metal and heringer is senior VP in charge of audio digital and long form search for the best people wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to follow the series. Yes is Angus Maximus this partner has one pound of hot using cook to water and just be it's more faith in a quarter pounder the battle of clothes and for only 599 even regular juice can afford it like that guy. Give me that big old burger yeah. He hold Angus Maximus only 599 the cold senior available for a limited time of participating restaurants tax on included not valid for use within a combo or in combination with any other offer or discount.