Philip Giraldi — Revolving Door: How Security Clearances Perpetuate Top-Level Corruption in the United States

The problem arises when former officials use their clearances as bona fides to enhance their marketability for non-clearance jobs in the media or corporate world, particularly when those individuals are criticizing current government policies and behaving in a partisan fashion regarding specific candidates for office. Donald Trump was especially assailed by former officials John Brennan, James Clapper, Michael Hayden and Michael Morell before the 2016 election, all of whom continue to attack him currently, most particularly for the recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. During the 2016 campaign, Morell, who openly supported Hillary Clinton and is the designated intelligence on-air contributor for CBS news, deliberately linked the fact that he was ex-CIA Acting Director to his assertion that Trump was somehow an “unwitting agent of the Russian Federation” to establish his credibility. That type of activity should be considered abusive and an exploitation of one’s former office.

Agree. It's a conflict of interest, unprofessional and unethical. Intelligence should never be politicized and now intelligence politicization is being normalized in the US.

And the revolving door is a form of corruption. It needs to be locked shut by law.

Strategic Culture Foundation
Revolving Door: How Security Clearances Perpetuate Top-Level Corruption in the United States

Philip Giraldi, former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer, now Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest and founding member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

See also at SFC

Kissinger was talking with Edward Luce of the Financial Times about the current US President: “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time, to mark the end of an era, and to force it to give up its old pretences”. Later in the conversation, he qualifies this assessment by adding, however: “It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.”

Luce, as might be expected, imputes Trump’s meeting with President Putin to signal a possible putative nadir in American diplomacy, and a betrayal of US intelligence claims of Russian disruption of the 2016 elections – even citing the N.Y. Daily News headline that what Trump uttered there, constituted “Open Treason”.

But Kissinger, who briefs both Trump and Putin, evidently refuses to be drawn - to take Luce’s bait. Rather, he says, matter-of-factly, that the Trump summit had to happen: “It was a meeting that had to take place. I have advocated it for several years. It has been submerged by American domestic issues. It is certainly a missed opportunity. But I think one has to come back to something.”

Why was the meeting so crucial? And what is ‘that something’, to which we must “come back”? Luce dwells on Kissinger’s opaqueness of messaging and complains that it is hard to discern the direction of his economical discourse. But in fact, Kissinger lays it all out clearly, and in plain view – and that to which he is leading – is indeed, crucially important.…

Forcing the Surrender of an Era’s Old Pretences – Henry Kissinger

Alastair Crooke