Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is canceling the security clearances of 37 current and former intelligence officials, including Samantha “Sam” Vinograd, a former assistant secretary for counterterrorism, threat prevention, and law enforcement policy in the Department of Homeland Security. Based on recent events, Americans have a right to wonder why any former intelligence official should retain a security clearance. Consider the case of Mike Morell, never confirmed by the Senate but two-time “acting” director of the CIA.

Hired in 1980, Morell rose through the ranks and became the CIA’s briefer to President George W. Bush. On Sept. 11, 2001, there was nothing in the president’s daily briefing (PDB) about terrorists crashing hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The worst attack on the American homeland since Pearl Harbor took the CIA completely by surprise. In his 2015 book The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism—From al Qa’ida to ISIS,” Morell describes CIA director George Tenet evacuating the CIA compound.

After 9/11 the CIA became, in effect, the Bureau of Secret Prisons and Waterboarding (BSPW). Enter Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, a name straight out of Evelyn Waugh or P.G. Wodehouse but a major player in the CIA. As a CIA agent, Foggo drew complaints for assaulting a cyclist and failed to report numerous contacts and relationships with foreign women, creating a possible security risk.

Despite the shaky record, CIA director Porter Goss picked Foggo for the third-highest post in the agency. Thus positioned, Foggo steered classified contracts worth millions to companies controlled by his lifelong friend, Brent Wilkes. Foggo also pressured the CIA to hire his mistress and expedite her security clearance. The woman was totally unqualified but Foggo punished those who criticized her.

Morell mentions Foggo’s arrest, but not the 37 months he served in federal prison. To be fair, Foggo was hardly the only corrupt official. For the post of CIA executive director, Goss selected Michael V. Kostiw. He withdrew after it was revealed that Kostiw left the CIA 20 years earlier after being arrested for stealing a $2.13 package of bacon from a supermarket.

On Goss’s watch, deputy director and former acting CIA director John E. McLaughlin resigned. Maybe it was something about Goss’s New England provenance and reversible name. As it happens, McLaughlin was part of that deck of 51 “intelligence officials” signing the letter calling the Hunter Biden laptop “Russian disinformation.” So was Mike Morell, the CIA’s point man who claimed that the 2012 attack in Benghazi, which claimed the lives of four Americans, was all about a protest over a video. As Hillary Clinton said the next year “what difference, at this point, does it make?”

Among the more outrageous claims in Morell’s book is this howler: “The CIA as an organization, and CIA officers, including me, in no way allowed politics to influence any of our actions or decisions with regard to Benghazi.” There is also his assertion that politicians “have a hard time remembering that we serve Democrats and Republicans with the same professionalism and dedication,” a statement that Morell’s career belies.

Morell left the agency in 2013 and in 2014 joined CBS News as contributor on intelligence and national security. On Aug. 5, 2016, Morell authored “I Ran the CIA: Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton” in The New York Times. The former first lady, he said, was “prepared, detail-oriented, thoughtful,” while Trump was “not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.” And so on.

Much like Mike Morrell, if Samantha Vinograd ever countered any terrorist threat, nothing has become public. It is known that Vinograd held a security clearance, and like Morell she became a national security contributor for CBS News. If people decided to call CBS the CIA network it would be hard to blame them.

When Trump pulled John Brennan’s security clearance Morell called it “dangerous,” but that wasn’t the issue. In 1976, Brennan voted for the Stalinist Gus Hall, candidate of the Communist Party USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. The CIA never should have hired Brennan in the first place, as he confirmed in his 2020 book Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies at Home and Abroad, a volume that, like Morell’s book, is freighted with CIA ad copy.

“The worst way to build an intelligence service is to set a bureaucracy on its rails and let it roll on, perpetuating itself.” That was Angelo Codevilla, an informed commentator on intelligence explained in his 1992 study Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century. According to Codevilla, writing in 2020,

Intelligence officials abuse their positions to discredit opposition to the Democratic Party, of which they are part. Complicit with the media, they leverage the public’s mistaken faith in their superior knowledge, competence, and patriotism to vilify their domestic enemies from behind secrecy’s shield.

Tulsi Gabbard is right to yank the security clearances of partisan serial prevaricators masquerading as intel officials. At some point Gabbard needs to shift the Russia hoax probe to Attorney General Pam Bondi. “America’s Intelligence agencies are the deep state’s deepest part, and the most immediate threat to representative government,” explains Codevilla. Congress should take this advice and break up the corrupt, partisan CIA.