Former CIA Director John O. Brennan, who led the agency from 2013 to 2017 under President Barack Obama and has faced threats of imprisonment and prosecution for criticizing President Donald Trump, is warning that the United States is at risk due to the politicization of its intelligence apparatus.

In an interview with Michael Steele on MS NOW on Thursday, Brennan said the Trump administration is diverting counterterrorism resources away from genuine threats and toward political targets. The U.S. intelligence community, comprising 18 agencies, has traditionally operated under a norm of providing objective, nonpartisan analysis to policymakers regardless of which party holds the White House.

"This administration is redirecting counterterrorism professionals not to go against those terrorist groups and the ones that really worry us, but to go against undocumented workers," Brennan said. "The government sees these phantom violent groups on the left, like Antifa, whatever. And so there's a neutering of capability, but also a misdirecting of a lot of the capabilities that still exist, not against the threats and the areas that we really need to be concerned about, but toward other politically motivated directions."

Steele noted that the United States has long failed to address homegrown domestic terrorism, a problem he said has plagued the country since the Civil War. He pointed to findings that the Trump administration broadened the designation of terrorist organizations to include gangs and cartels and designated Antifa — which Steele described as not a structured organization but an idea, noting its adherents are anti-fascists — as a domestic terrorism organization.

"Because you're going again after political opponents, as opposed to going after real domestic homegrown terrorism, which we've experienced here in the United States," Brennan said in response, characterizing the approach as undermining national security in service of the administration's political goals.

Brennan further noted that neo-Nazi groups exist in the United States and other countries such as Germany, and that Trump refuses to confront them even as he targets left-wing groups and undocumented immigrants. By prioritizing the prosecution of political adversaries, Brennan argued, the administration is ignoring terrorists — both right-wing and others — who pose genuine danger to American lives. FBI assessments have repeatedly identified racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism, particularly white supremacist violence, as among the most lethal domestic terrorism threats facing the country.

"We want to stop these terrorist activities upstream, not when somebody is ready to set off a bomb, but to see them when they're starting to gain the financing and put together the capabilities, to make the contacts and relationships, to start to plot and plan," Brennan told Steele. "These are the things that, again, federal, state and local officials are supposed to be doing, as opposed to going after these politically motivated objectives that really make this country less safe."

Brennan is not the only CIA veteran raising alarms about the politicization of intelligence under the current administration. Former CIA analyst Julia Curlee echoed similar concerns in an article published Monday by Lawfare.

"In 2025, I watched from inside the White House and at the CIA as the intelligence community came under assault: senior officers fired in public, clearances revoked for dissent, decade-old assessments denounced by the CIA director in the press," Curlee wrote. "Earlier this month, the campaign reached the raw intelligence itself, as the White House declassified selected reporting to sustain election interference claims that the intelligence community's own finished analysis would not support."

Source: YouTube