The Steady State Sentinel is produced by The Steady State, a community of former national security professionals who spent their careers safeguarding the United States, at home and abroad. Today, we continue that mission by staying true to our oaths to defend the Constitution, uphold our democracy, and protect our nation's security. Join our expert hosts as they interview field-tested guests whose unique experiences shed light on the crises and challenges facing our nation. Welcome to the Steady State Sentinel podcast. I'm Lauren Anderson. This is one of our special four co-host episodes, which we'll be doing periodically. I'm joined today by Peter Mina, John Seifer, and Jim Lawler. But before we begin, I'd like to take a minute to frame our conversation. It's not about a particular policy decision, but about something each of us has experienced. There are moments in public service and in life when you feel a line is being crossed. when the justification for an action or the action itself diverges from what you know to be true, and when questioning that feels and can be risky. To me, these are ethical Rubicon moments. They're about integrity and truth, about the safeguards meant to protect the rule of law and the norms that restrain power, especially where government power touches people's lives every day. Each of us experienced versions of those moments. We've made different choices under different pressures, and none of them were comfortable. What unites us is the shared recognition that those experiences reflect the fragility of our norms, they discourage dissent, and they make it easier to manipulate institutions when loyalty is valued over candor. This conversation isn't about hindsight or settling scores. It's about what it feels like before history judges. And when we, as professionals, have to decide whether to speak, whether to push back, and what the cost of silence might be. And this isn't theoretical. We're hearing from people that we all know who are still serving, who are uneasy about how authority is being used today, and about outcomes that seem increasingly predetermined and broadcast out on social media. So today we're going to talk about those moments, how we navigated them, and what they demand of us now as professionals and as people who know how these systems work. And Peter, I would love it if you would start for us. Thanks, Lauren. Look, this is probably one of the hardest but most important responsibilities of being a public servant. And, you know, it is a real world decision because it's not just, hey, am I doing the right thing or am I not doing the right thing? For so many of us, we have families, we have responsibilities with, you know, kids in school or being the sole breadwinner. And so there are consequences that we all think about, particularly in today's environment of, okay, yeah, I think this is wrong and I need to speak up. But what does that mean for me and my family? especially in a lot of places where you have couples that are both federal employees. And so not only are you placing potentially yourself at risk, but also your partner. And so for me, I think I've had a handful of those moments over the course of my career. You know, some I handled probably not as well as I would have liked. you know, maybe I sort of fell into that, you know, concern about, well, you know, what, what's going to happen to me. And others, I think, as my career went on, and I actually took on more progressive leadership positions, you know, you at a certain point, you find your voice. And I think that, you know, for a long time, you know, it's so easy to think about, oh, well, you know, I have my boss so-and-so if, you know, basically if stuff hits the fan, he or she'll be there to, you know, provide cover. And then the next thing you know, you look back and you're like, oh, wait a minute, I'm the cover now. And so there were definitely a couple of times, you know, certainly in the last few years, I can think of at the end of the first Trump administration, I had a boss who honestly was probably looking to dismantle the office. and you know i was getting my performance review and we were talking about you know kind of what uh this person's expectations for this political pointy and um there was basically a conversation about loyalty uh and at a certain point i just said look i will do what you say as long as you follow the law um and you know that could have gone in any number of different ways and you know i had a situation where that same supervisor you know while my performance rating might have been good like the write-up was all you know basically that i was some sort of political hack um as well as you know some of my colleagues uh and then there have been other times where you know look regardless of administration you have appointees that want to make decisions not necessarily always exclusively because they make the most operational sense, but because there's a political aim. And, you know, particularly when you are reporting to a political, that's your first line supervisor. That's an extra set of pressure because oftentimes you are charged with carrying out that objective. And so being able to have that kind of candid conversation with your boss to say, hey, I don't think that's such a great idea, you know, I think is really important. And, you know, and I'd be, you know, foolish to say that doesn't come with risk. But, you know, I think that's what being a public servant is all about. Like, this isn't about, you know, serving your boss or serving the secretary or serving the president. It's serving the American people. And at the end of the day, I just got to a point, particularly as my career progressed, it was much more important to me to be, you know, able to look at myself in the mirror, and honestly, to do things and have a career that my family was proud of. And that to me was the bottom line, regardless of, you know, what may happen as a result of my decisions to my, my career. I mean, even even right now, as I left DHS, you know, I took a gamble, I could have very easily just, you know, put my head down, accepted a reassignment, called it a day. But at the end of the day, this was not, this is not what I signed up for. This is not Homeland Security as I see it. And, you know, I decided as I hope, you know, other people do as much as I want good public servants in our civil service. Sometimes you just have to decide, you know, is this consistent with my values or not? And if it's not, then there's a different path out there. And it might be hard, but it's going to be okay. I think, Peter, I appreciate it for saying that. I think Jim understands we and I, I think he and I were in CIA for a career, and I think we dodged a bullet in certain ways because we didn't have political appointees. And for most of our career, there was pride in telling truth to power in the intelligence community. So essentially the community was set up to try to tell policymakers what's really happening in the world without fear of telling them something they didn't want to hear or didn't fit with their policy notices. So for us, that game, we sort of got out of it. Now, it seems to me that that's changing now. And that is very hard for us to see for what we took pride in the intelligence community. Peter if there any one thing that you would if you could go back in time and do differently what would you have done I think I probably wouldn have been so and it hard because you know you invest or at least I shouldn't say you, I will say I. I invest a lot of myself in my job. It becomes, you know, your career, my career became my identity. And so I think there were certainly times where I felt the pressure, both from, you know, staff who said, look, you need to basically you need to fight for this issue, for example. And then there's sort of the pressure of or even perceived pressure of, you know, what the political response was going to be. I can recall there was a memo I was working on on an immigration issue and I needed this was in the first Trump administration and I needed to send it to the deputy secretary at the time, who I think was Cuccinelli, probably. And, you know, it was a pretty out there, I mean, important, but, you know, not going to be well received position. And I really struggled with it. And, you know, I think I get it. I'm human, but at the same and we all are. But at the same time, that's that's why you take leadership positions. I mean, you have to be willing to sort of stick your neck out there. It's not just when it's easy, that it's when it's hard. And so if I could do it over again, maybe, you know, and certainly lessons learned from, you know, the present moment, just do it with more confidence. You know, you made a really great point, Peter. And I think that's something that a lot of our listeners might not realize. And that is that for the careers each of the four of us had, it wasn't a job. I mean, you said, I am this, I am an FBI agent, I work for the FBI. And And that sense of identification is so profound and it is very different. I worked in the corporate sector for a few years before the FBI. And there's such a profound difference in that. And I know, Jim, you and I have talked about sharing an experience, even though we didn't know each other at the time back in 2003. And maybe you could share your part and I'll share mine. But for everybody who's listening, it was amazing because just the other night we found out that Jim and I were in different places feeling the same unease about the same thing. And it just tells you how widespread it can be. I'll be happy to tell my story, although it's a shameful period in my life. It goes back 23 years ago in early 2003, a few weeks before we invaded Iraq. I was a very senior officer in the counterproliferation division of the CIA. And I had what I thought was access to all of the sensitive reporting on weapons of mass destruction all over the world, and especially in Iraq. And I searched all the databases, trying to find out where the smoking gun was that was justifying this impending invasion of Iraq. What was the casus belli, which is the cause for going to war? The United States does not just casually go to war without provocation, at least not in the last 50 or 60 or 70 years. It hasn't. But I looked through all the databases and I couldn't find it. So I went to a group chief's meeting that morning and I said, I thought I was read into all of the restricted handling and sensitive intelligence reporting. And I don't see the smoking gun as to why we're going into Iraq. Where is the casus belli? And the group chiefs looked at me, and the chief of the division said, Jim, there is none, but the train has left the station. So that afternoon, I had lunch with a very good friend of mine, the chief of Near Eastern Division. And thinking that perhaps this was a compartment that Near Eastern Division had not shared with the counterproliferation division, I asked my friend the same question. where was the smoking gun that was motivating us to invade Iraq? And my friend looked at me, and mind you, this is the chief of Near Eastern Division. He said, Jim, there's none, but the trains left the station. So three years later, our son is a Marine infantryman in Ramadi after we'd invaded Iraq, and he and his marine buddies would go up and down the Euphrates River interdicting arms caches and things like that that the insurgents were having. He was in combat four and five days a week. He was a 50 caliber machine gunner on these fast boats, and quite frequently the insurgents would lure the fast boats into shore and set off an IED. and try and blow the boats up. And one day, my son's squad was going down to Euphrates, and this happened. Fortunately, the IED didn't hurt the boat seriously, and nobody on the boat was injured. And so my son Austin and his Marine buddies, they all got off the boat and chased after the insurgents. They could see them fleeing. And Austin, who's very quick, He spotted the young spotter because they always would have a spotter on a high ground to basically not only tell the rest of the insurgents of the impending closeness of the Marines, but also when to trigger the IED. And Austin is running and running and running. And he gets within about 15 yards and he realizes it's like a 13-year-old boy. and Austin he told me this his voice broke he said daddy I couldn't shoot a kid in the back and I said well Austin you know you did the right thing and I think my son had more courage and integrity in many respects than maybe a certain secretary of defense that we have nowadays but I thought what a cosmic irony it would have been that I was working on weapons of mass destruction and bringing down the AQ Khan network with my team. And yet my son could be killed or injured in Iraq, as thousands of our young men and women were. And I didn't say anything. A colleague of mine said, Jim, well, you could have gone to the seventh floor, but they wouldn't have listened to you. I know, but at least my conscience would have been clean that I said something, that I couldn't find the casus belli why we were doing this. And shamefacedly, I'll tell you, I didn't, I said nothing. I didn't do anything. That's such an awful feeling. Just sickening. And when you and I talked about this and I was sitting running the FBI's office in Paris, I was going through the same thing. I was reading the intelligence. I was talking daily with the chief of station with whom I had a wonderful relationship. I'm like, it's not there. And what aggravated it more, and I think this is some of the amplification impact that can happen is I was then worried because the French government was so opposed to this decision. And I thought, oh my God, I've only been here 13 months and I'm going to lose all the relationships because we've gone to war where there wasn't real proof for something. And now the government, the nation that's hosting me, what if they don't want to cooperate anymore? I mean, what's that going to do to our visibility with terrorism and so much going on. And it was a frightening moment. I would say the silver lining in that is when I finally worked up the nerve because I thought, I can't let this just roll around and wonder what's going to happen. And I approached one of my counterparts that I had a closer relationship with. And I said, look, I'm really concerned that this is going to impact our relationship. We have so much going on in terrorism. We can't not speak to each other. And his response was, Lauren, that's politics. Let them go do what they have to do. We have a common mission and nothing will change between us. But it was a very real fear in that moment. Both of you guys, what I think is different now is, Jim, I think even if you did go to the seventh floor and explain what you believed, I don't think you would have been fired for that. Whereas now I see people who tell what they believe is truth to power and they're fired. I agree with you John I think that exactly what would happen today In fact we seen it People that made the wrong analytical judgment wrong politically analytical judgment and then have been fired We seen that both at the CIA and at the DNI. And we were seeing it at the FBI. I'm sure Lauren could tell us about some of these, you know, folks who are being singled out because they are not meeting what the administration wants. Well, and I think actually as somebody who now represents employees, you know, one of the things that I see is where do people go? I mean, I know we're all talking about going to supervisors, but all of the other kind of, you know, quote unquote outside entities that people might go to, whether it's the IG or the special counsel or even Congress, you know, those avenues really aren't there. Or if they are, they are just fraught with a whole lot more risk than there might've been even a few years ago. And senior officials in the government would often, as leaders, try to protect the people who work for them. So when I was in the CIA, the CIA was under fire for something politically. The director could be seen to sort of be protecting the workforce. But now you see almost the opposite. You see the leaders of these organizations on Twitter and these other places throwing the workforce under the bus. And so their job, as they see it, is to kiss up, to try to make the White House, you know, think that what they're saying follows along with what policy is. And it's less interested in actually leading the people who work for them. And there's long term repercussions with what's happening now. And I know we've all talked about this a little bit. You know, you mentioned the FBI and the shooting by the ICE agent of Renee Good in Minnesota. And while we don't want to make this episode about that per se, I think what's really important is, first of all, you had a secretary who go out and said she's a domestic terrorism within seconds of the shooting. Second, you know, Maine Justice then said, oh, we're going to go after Renee Cook's wife, which then resulted this week with six prosecutors, three in Minnesota, three in DOJ and Washington resigning. They said, we're not having any part of this. And then they said also that the FBI will not work with state and local officials in Minnesota, which flies in the face of how business is done routinely. And they are not appreciating that, one, it's going to cause long term damage to well established and healthy interagency relationships. Two, it's going to make everyone distrust whatever the FBI comes out with, even if it's the truth. I have deep confidence in the FBI agents and the analysts and the support staff in Minneapolis and everywhere else. But they're putting them in an incredibly impossible position. And how are they going to maneuver out? They're not thinking about the long term impact. Very frustrating. I mean, your stories are powerful. Mine really is not even about so much when I was in the government. You know, that was really a problem inside. We were very focused on telling truth to power. And, you know, I opened my mouth probably more than I should have inside. But what happened when I left government is something more recently in 2020. I signed a letter along with 51 other senior intelligence officials, including Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden and others in October 2020, warning that Rudy Giuliani's disclosure of a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden just three weeks before the election posed a potential risk of Russian interference in our electoral process. But when Trump lost the election, as you know, he and his supporters constructed this strawman argument by distorting our words and falsely attributing to us deceptive intentions of the letter. So on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order revoking our security clearances while everyone who signed the letter and then immediately right wing publications and politicians called us the spies who lied and lambasted us as the dirty 51. And Trump even said publicly that the people who signed that letter, us, were breaking the law on a, quote, colossal scale. And then, of course, Elon Musk and other people commented, you know, the hammer of justice is coming for these people that are pushing these foreign interference hoaxes. One of the senior officials was rumored to be the attorney general said, I want to drag their dead bodies through the streets, burn them and throw them off the wall. We were then put on a deep state target list, which the administration still has. And so from that time, there was a lot of doxing. There was a lot of public things where people talking about us that we were we were partisan. We had bad intent. When, of course, the point was for us to talk about was Russian interference, that Giuliani was interacting with known Russian intelligence officers in Ukraine and that they came out with this right before the election was something the Russians had done even in 2016. and we're doing it again. But instead of assuming that we were actually telling the truth, they assumed that there was partisan intent and then smeared us for that. So I found that I've had to do things like, and maybe this is useful for people who are inside or thinking about these things. I've had to go to the local police and warn them that, listen, you know, the president, I'm on a list of enemies for the president. There are people who are going to be coming after us. There's a chance I might get doxxed. You might get called to come out to my house saying there's a shooting or something, but I just want to let you know, put my name in the system that, you know, if you get that to just be aware that, you know, I'm one of these political enemies for. And so, yeah, that's something I would never have thought of, you know, for my time inside. But the ability of people to take information, spin it and change it for their own purposes, change the narrative to attack anyone who they think are enemies, even if we're not enemies, is very troubling. Well, that resonates with me. And I know you're talking about an experience outside of government, but I had that exact same experience kind of inside government. In October of 24, the Heritage Foundation had given a grant to another non-governmental organization whose name is escaping me, not that I want to necessarily give them airtime. um but they established um I know they did for DHS but I understand they did it for other um agencies around the federal government watch lists um and the whole purpose was to identify people they thought might be opposed to an incoming Trump administration and as you might suspect because I came from the I was working at the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties And I had served as the acting or the senior official that the head, the head of the office for a while. And I had the amazing opportunity to speak at the UN at their commission on the elimination of racial discrimination. So you can imagine everything I said there was, you know, tantamount to, you know, capital crime. And and then, of course, I had my pronouns on LinkedIn. So clearly I was an enemy of the state. Oh, but much like you, I mean, I had to call my local police department and ask them, you know, do you have an anti-swatting registry? And just for people who might not have heard that term before, that is, you know, as John was describing it, like, hey, there's a fire at, you know, Peter's house. You need to go deal with it. Or there's a robbery in progress when there actually isn't. And so I, you know, I had that conversation. And ultimately, thankfully, the folks at the department at the time were able to actually contact my local police department when I didn't get very far to place a, you know, some sort of note on, you know, on our address. And then I had a conversation with my kids school. You know, I talked to colleagues who, you know, both political and not who had actually had issues, you know, for their children. And so, you know, I said, Hey, look, I hope nothing ever happens. Just want you to know this is going on in case anyone says anything to either of my kids. And, you know, it's, it is scary. and you know i was a um you know a senior executive and a leader what really burns me is is that i mean they were gs12 gs13 so you're talking about for folks that might not know i mean that's your very like non-supervisory you know kind of not entry level but like your journey journey person and they getting targeted i like for what i mean at the end all these people were just doing their job Whether you politically disagree is a separate question altogether but people should never be punished for doing what they statutorily required to do You guys have both brought in another element that we're seeing now today that I don't believe any of us have ever experienced before, and that is the outsized influence of social influencers. So I never imagined we'd be looking at a government, which by the way, this is trickling down. I am mentoring a person somewhere in the United States who works at the county level. And that individual related to me that a sheriff in this particular location was retweeting things from Laura Loomer and then telling the community that things Laura Loomer was talking about were true and started creating chaos in the community. And that's just breathtaking to me that it's allowed that you have people like that who are influencing and having a direct impact. We know even some of the president's appointees have lost their jobs because certain outsized personalities and organizations have decreed they shouldn't be there. And I can't recall that sort of thing, at least like in the last 40 years. Maybe you guys have other examples. Well, so actually on the, you know, kind of the opposite end of the spectrum, um ironically enough in trump one i was the acting chief counsel for um for ice's office of the principal legal advisor out in seattle for a couple of months and so i um i was there when there was a lot of the you know abolish ice protests and you know there were people colleagues of mine who had their you know houses spray painted or you know getting all kinds of threats um and and also i've i'm also somebody who's been doxed um kind of around that same time frame you know when i was you know running the labor and employment law shop you know i you know you get to a point where you start um googling yourself just to see what's out there and you know inevitably like i saw like ice patrol which i guess is like wikileaks or something and like there was my name and you know and all and i obviously didn't click on it but like there's all kinds of information there. So yeah, it is very real. And I think it's only gotten worse as time has gone on. And to John's point, it's not just, oh, I'm going to broadcast information. Now there are very, very real physical safety threats in a much more prevalent way than even there was in 18 or 19. What do we think, what do you guys think of some ideas that we can share for people both in the government and outside who are concerned, who are in their communities, what sorts of suggestions can we give them about how they can contribute to this or contribute to the truth aspect of it? I know for me with people that I mentor, I say to them, keep records of everything, write everything down. As an FBI agent, you're taught that if it's not on paper, it doesn't exist. So when you're conducting an investigation, that's the way it goes. But I've encouraged them, which I did routinely in different environments, just keep a track of every phone, keep a log, every phone call, every meeting, things that were going on so you have contemporaneous notes and you're in a position to feel supported by yourself. So what kinds of ideas do you guys have for people who might be listening that might give them a measure of support or ideas or who in the community might be able to take some steps? Well, Lauren, I think you're a person after my own heart. You may be a closet employment lawyer because I tell my clients that all the time. Document, document, document. You know, the one thing I will caution and every federal agency is different, but, you know, some have actually had policies on recording conversations. So even in states where it might be a one party state. So, I mean, all four taking notes, you know, doesn't need to be verbatim. um but just be careful because that can just be a um kind of an end around way of coming after people for something that they you know don't really think is going to be an issue um in an effort to just sort of protect themselves uh which i can imagine more and more people feel like they need to but yeah i mean and do it because you know when people come to me sort of late in the game with a you know for example a whistleblower reprisal claim um and i ask them like well what you know what evidence do you have and they say like have you and i was like have you taken notes no should i start doing that like if that's the answer it's unfortunately it's probably too late um and so you know whenever your spidey sense tingles and you think that something's not right write it down uh you know again doesn't need to be every single conversation every day but um you want that record uh you want that contemporaneous evidence you know again not that people should feel like they, I mean, we shouldn't be in this position, but that's unfortunately a fortunate reality. And so of course you need to be prepared. I don't know if I have any good advice. I just, people should understand that there are, there's a large community of people out there who are supportive. There are law firms, there are groups that are looking to help former federal employees and federal employees. And that there's lots of groups like our own who are trying to do our best to make people understand that this is not normal and they shouldn't feel alone when they're being intimidated by political actors. And actually to that end, a couple for folks to keep an eye out for are organizations like the Government Accountability Project or Whistleblower Aid, you know, and also, I mean, there are folks on the Hill that will receive, you know, all kinds of allegations and including classified ones for people that are especially cleared. So there are there are options out there for folks. On that note, I think, you know, what we've got here, unfortunately, is, you know, kind of a new reality. And it's yet another, you know, unfortunately tall task, but a critically important one for, you know, federal employees, both in the national security space, and across the federal government. And I think, you know, for an organization like ours, it is critically important to give those folks the support they need, not just for the moment right now, but for the future of the American civil service and for our democracy. And so with that, I wanted to bring us to a close and say thank you to our listeners for enjoying this half hour with us. We've certainly enjoyed being a voice and a forum for you and your concerns and please keep those coming uh because this is this podcast is exactly for you um you know and if you have a chance uh share it with a friend go on google or your favorite podcast app and drop us a five-star review um if you think there's somebody we should be talking to that we're not uh let us know too we're always open to those kinds of ideas and so uh stay tuned for our next episode. And my name is Peter Mina. For Lauren Anderson, Jim Lawler, John Seifer, and the rest of the SteadyState team, thank you for joining us on the SteadyState Sentinel podcast, where we are still standing watch. at substack.com slash at SteadyState1 and follow our social media and join us right here next week for another exciting edition. The Steady State is a nonprofit organization working to sustain our democracy and national security. Join us and support our mission by visiting www.thesteadystate.org. Thank you.
