Former Trump CIA Director’s ‘Top Secret’ Memo—for Campaign Cash
Mike Pompeo’s pitch is just a glaring case of ex-intel officials getting involved in politics
It was an email guaranteed to grab my attention.
“A former CIA Director needs you to read this,” read the subject line. I hastily clicked it open, of course, and discovered, much to my surprise, I was being given “exclusive access” to a “Top Secret memo.” A reporter’s dream, even if, as I was instructed, all this was being shared on a “strictly off the record” basis.
Alas, the memo didn’t contain any national security secrets. Instead, it was a breathless fundraising pitch from Mike Pompeo, CIA director and secretary of state in Donald Trump’s first term, asking recipients to fork over money to Champion American Values, his political action committee, to help defeat Democrats in next year’s congressional elections.
“I’m sounding the alarm today because we’re heading straight for a turning point, the 2026 midterms,” Pompeo wrote in his “secret” memo. “If we don’t get prepared right now, the wrong people could take power [and] that’s just a risk we can’t take, it’s one we won’t survive.”
Needless to say, such hyperbolically—and deceptively— worded fundraising emails are nothing new. Indeed, they are pretty much baked into the business model. But the Pompeo email is indicative of a much larger, and unfortunate trend.
There was a time when the leaders of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, upon leaving office, generally forswore involvement in partisan politics, less they undermine the independence and nonpartisan reputations of the institutions they used to head. Those days are long gone. The same week I got the Pompeo email, James Comey, the former FBI director who Trump fired, posted a picture on Instagram of a seashell arrangement he came across on the beach forming the numbers “86 47.” Trump’s administration officials pounced, instantly launching an investigation into whether Comey was calling for the 47th president’s assassination. Comey quickly took the offending post down and said in a follow up he had no idea that “86,” in some circles, was associated “with violence” (although it clearly also has had many other meanings, most commonly in the bar and restaurant worlds). Still, he acknowledged, somewhat tellingly, he “assumed” the numbers he shared with the world were intended as “a clever political message” against Trump, not unlike the many he has previously posted over the years since being cashiered by the president in his first term.
“It’s not good that we’re there” but the willingness of former national security officials to speak out and spread openly political messages is understandable, argues Steve Cash, a former CIA officer who runs The Steady State, a group of more than 270 former intelligence, diplomatic and law enforcement officials who have banded together to protest the politicization of their former agencies. When it comes to the Trump administration, “we’re terrified,” he said on the SpyTalk podcast.
As Cash’s comment suggests, the trend of going public is indicative of the alarming polarization during the Trump era in which each side views the other as mortal threats to the future of the republic. In Pompeo’s case, the threat is “radical leftists” who would sell the country down the river rather than “standing up to America’s enemies.” In the case of Cash, and Comey, it’s the threat of Trump himself, having filled his national security team with avenging zealots, like FBI director Kash Patel, his deputy Dan Bongino and the newly named Justice Department “weaponization” chief Ed Martin, men best known for their determination to extract revenge against the president’s perceived enemies—especially investigators and prosecutors who had worked on cases involving Russian ties to the Trump campaign and the Jan. 6 riot.
“I think most of us would have preferred not to become involved in politics [after] a lifetime of working in the intelligence community,” said Cash about the members of The Steady State. But the group came together “because we think that this is an existential threat. I think that right now, American democracy, rule of law democracy is under threat in a way that is very similar to what we’ve seen overseas.
“Yeah, I know that that’s strong language,” he added. “It better be strong language” because the threat of an American autocracy is real, he said.
To be sure, Cash—who served in the Biden administration as a senior intelligence advisor in the Department of Homeland Security—certainly has plenty of fresh evidence of the Trump administration’s willingness to twist intelligence for political purposes, violating yet one more norm considered essential to responsible governance. Newly disclosed emails show that Joe Kent, DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s chief of staff, last month ordered intelligence analysts to alter their findings about the lack of ties between the Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro and the Tren de Aragua criminal gang in order to back up the president’s and Gabbard’s public position on a high profile controversy.
“We need to do some rewriting,” wrote Kent, a former Green Beret and MAGA loyalist, to the acting chair of the National Intelligence Council, “so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS.” (The National Council didn’t change its position and the council’s acting chair, Michael Collins, and his deputy, Maria Langan-Riekhof, were fired. )
What the emails reveal “is one of the cardinal sins,” said Cash. “It's a mortal sin in the intelligence community. Once you start drafting intelligence to support a policy, you're not drafting intelligence any more—you're now in the public relations business.”
It’s revelations such as this that, in Cash’s view, justify his and his colleagues speaking out forcefully in the political arena. (Last week, afterColl ins and Langan-Riekhof were fired, Cash fired off a letter on behalf of The Steady State to the congressional intelligence committees requesting an investigation into what happened.)
“We are citizens,” he told SpyTalk. “Politics is how decisions are made in a democracy.” But there are also risks and dangers of doing so, of being perceived as using one’s special access to intelligence secrets in order to score political points.
Biden Laptop Controversy
Most prominently: on the eve of the 2020 election, 51 former top intelligence officials, including James Clapper, President Obama’s director of national intelligence, and CIA directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Mike Hayden signed a public letter asserting that reports about the discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop—revealing all sorts of unsavory personal behavior and questionable business practices—had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”.
The letter had its desired effect. “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” read the Politico headline. Social media distribution of stories about the laptop were restricted. The problem? The letter was flat-out wrong. The FBI later authenticated the laptop and used it in the successful prosecutions of the president’s son.
“I think most of us would have preferred not to become involved in politics [after] a lifetime of working in the intelligence community,” Cash said.
But there are other dangers for former top intelligence officials when they immerse themselves in the political arena.
Consider Pompeo. After loyalling serving Trump in his first term as CIA director and secretary of state, he had hoped to return to office in the president’s second term as secretary of defense. But he was effectively blackballed, by no less than ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, over his reputation as a neocon hawk, not to mention reports that, while at the CIA, he considered a plot to kidnap Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Exiled, in the political wilderness in Trump’s Washington, Pompeo was no doubt seeking a clever gimmick to juice his political action committee when he sent me—and countless others—his “secret memo” email appealing for campaign cash. But prospective donors might want to think twice about whether all of the funds will go for defeating Democrats endangering national security, as his “secret” memo suggested. During the last campaign cycle, Pompeo’s PAC, Champion American Values, shelled out $42,000 for another purpose entirely: to buy copies of his new book, Never Give An Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, helping to elevate it to the best seller list.
That’s not in the Pompeo email. Evidently that’s really off the record.