Lawfare Daily: Censorship Incentives with Julia Curlee and Mike Feinberg

[Intro]

Michael Feinberg: They're the ones who actually have the most they can say and can shine the brightest light on what's happening, but they're working for companies that have explicitly told them or implicitly suggested that under no circumstances are they to do so.

Benjamin Wittes: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare, with public service fellow Julia Curlee and senior editor Mike Feinberg.

Julia Curlee: But at the end of the day, you know, people have families, they have mortgages, they've got to send their kids to college. No one else is gonna do that for them, and so it is fully understandable why people would not speak, and, and that's what we're trying to describe, this incentive system and the punishment system on the other side of that.

Benjamin Wittes: We're talking censorship, not the kind where the government tells you that you're not allowed to say something, just the kind where you already know you're not allowed to say it. Why aren't more former intelligence community figures and FBI agents speaking out? We're gonna tell you why.

[Main Podcast]

So Julia, I want to start with just having you articulate the issue that led you to write this piece. We're gonna get into all the details and all, all the things that you argue in it, but why, why did you sit down to write this piece in the first place?

Julia Curlee: So the, there's this idea that everyone knows but no one is speaking, and it's a phenomena that I spent a career studying at the CIA about foreign countries that I suddenly found applied to my own life, where the things I overheard at the Langley Starbucks that everyone took as a matter of faith, God, everyone knows, no one was saying out loud in public. And having gotten to, to, to experience it firsthand, where having been purged from the White House, looking for work on the outside, I went through all of the categories that you'll find in this, in this piece of attempting to land on my feet and move on with my life and finding that, that all the doors were sealed unless one condition was met, which was that I kept my mouth shut.

And so, I wanted to find a way of articulating that, and of course, having landed in one of the few places where it is possible to write in public, and, and the latest in a storied line of individuals that are similar to me, I felt like it was important to put this down and to get the word out on this, on this point, and then to point toward things that we might do to make dissent, to make speaking more survivable for people like us.

Benjamin Wittes: All right. So we're gonna talk about the Public Service Fellowship, which you talk about in the piece, a little bit later. But let's start with some basic numbers. How many people, first Julia and then Mike, who had jobs in the general vicinity of yours are in a position to speak publicly now and have done it?

Julia Curlee: I think there's a time element. So there are people in the intelligence community from many years ago who have spoken, and I've, I've, I've been with them on podcasts.

Benjamin Wittes: Right. But I don't mean people, I don't mean the world of formers.

Julia Curlee: Right. Right.

Benjamin Wittes: I mean people who come out of government under some form of duress, whether it's because they've been fired or because they've been, it's been made clear to them that there's no future for their careers, or because, like in Mike's case, you know, he has the wrong friends and they've found out about it and they've made clear that either you're gonna resign or you're gonna go through an internal hell. I, I mean, there's some-

Julia Curlee: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: Kind of duress in the last two years and who've come out and have spoken publicly about it.

Julia Curlee: Yeah. So if you just look at, in the intelligence community for CIA, DNI, DIA, as far as I'm aware of the people who've left in the second Trump administration it's me. And I don't know if that's true. I would love to believe it's not true, but I have not found anyone who was in a similar position as myself and who has been able to both land on the outside and speak publicly about their experience.

Benjamin Wittes: And Mike, what about you? How many, we have a, there's a sense that lots of FBI people have spoken, but that's partly because Jim Comey is a famous public figure, and because Andy McCabe has, right? There's this whole line of people over the last 10 years who've come out and who have spoken. But what about the, in the universe of people who, like you, have, you know, lost their jobs and careers either directly or indirectly in the second Trump administration, how many have spoken publicly?

Michael Feinberg: In terms of specific individuals who have spoken in the way to which you're referring, interviews, podcasts, specifically about their own situation, I can think of offhand four, not including myself. Then there is one more individual who spoke about it in, two individuals who spoke about it in the context of political campaigns when they were running for Congress in primaries. And then there's a group of individuals that spoke out in a New York Times narrative history piece and a group of individuals who spoke out in a Justice Connection video announcement. Now, those last two groups probably share 75, if not more, percent of the same membership. But when you consider that we are well into the dozens, if not hundreds, of individuals who have either been fired, voluntarily prematurely curtailed their careers under threat of being fired, or left earlier than they had ever planned to simply because of the overall environment, it's not a high percentage.

Benjamin Wittes: And Julia, what would you estimate? M- Mike estimates the number is, for the FBI, between dozens and hundreds. What would you estimate in the larger, in the larger intelligence community, how many people are we talking about?

Julia Curlee: If we're talking about people that were, like, by name fired because of their association or, or purged because of who they are, it's, it's a really small number actually. But if we're ta- if you, if you open the aperture a little bit about the, the broader workplace cuts, whether we're talking about, like, State Department INR people or DNI, where hundreds of people have been laid off for, for no reason other than just a, a vague sense that there's a deep state enemy within in these performative cuts for the White House. I mean, I think it's in the hundreds, but, but it's kind of a different, it depends on what you're talking about.

But even among those people who were not by name fired for their imagined offenses, precious few of them have also not spoken out because of the same dynamic that we describe in the piece about the extreme difficulty of finding work in the Washington area, in a company town, with an administration that is willing to jerk your clearance with a phone call and render you unemployable in your own profession.

Benjamin Wittes: All right, so let's, with that as a setup, and you've now given away what the subject of this conversation is, Julia, let's talk about the atmosphere and let's talk about why people aren't talking. So sketch it out for us. You have “Person X” who's been either individually targeted, maybe named in an executive order as having their security clearance stripped, or just is part of this large DOGE’d community or rift community that Bill Pulte is cheerfully creating. And is angry about it, and knows it's wrong, and feels targeted by it, and yet there is an incentive structure that is making you guys unusual in being willing to sit in front of a camera and have a conversation with me. Describe what is creating that dynamic.

Julia Curlee: So, I think it is a, a few things. You know, one, and, and maybe chronologically dealing with the phenomenon is right. So the administration is, is led by people who during the, the Biden administration, nursing their wounds from the first Trump administration, became convinced that there was a deep state enemy within that had a lot, you know, lay in wait for the president, and had a plan, if they got back into office, to go after their political enemies. And so from day one alone, they, they discovered that among other things, the clearance is an, an, a powerful weapon to personally target individuals you deem to be opponents of the administration, and materially damage their lives.

And so I, I was sitting in the White House as a in- a director for intelligence programs on the first day of the administration when I find out in the press the dozens of names of people who have now lost their security clearances via executive order and, and announced via tweet. No review, no process. They clearly came in with a list of names that they were gonna go after. And that was the first thing that sent shock waves through the federal workforce, sending notice that we will reach back in time. These were, these were alleged offenses that either had something to do with the 2020 election or the 2016 election. We will go back almost a decade, find your alleged crimes, and then we will strip you of your key fact ability to earn a living. And everybody saw it. There was no appeal, certainly not at the time.

And lots of people who had their clearances stripped had other material reasons to not contest what had happened to them in public. What remained of their employability, and I, I know many of these people personally, and I won't, I won't talk about their individual circumstances, they're still, even if they lost their clearance, they're still working in a company town where ultimately the largest employer is the federal government, the largest source of contract money is the federal government, and if you're now relying on that income stream, even if it isn't classified, to pay your mortgage, send your kids to college, or, or in some cases you might have your own family members still left in the government who could be punished, you're going to be quiet. And they did.

And so the phenomenon has been that there were a series of retaliatory moves early in the administration and, and they've continued occasionally. But for the most part, the message was sent and what we're describing in the piece is self-censorship. And it's what you're not seeing. It's the piece that never gets written rather than the, you know, the individual who's, you know, voice just, you know, who, who, it's self-censorship is what I'm trying to say.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, so Mike, how, how much of it in the FBI is a security clearance thing?

Michael Feinberg: So this is where it gets a little bit interesting specifically for the FBI. This was a trend I noticed actually in the waning days of the Biden administration in that when individuals would get what we called “OPR'd,” which is you become the subject of an internal violation of some sort of rule or law. And when they'd get investigated and the administrative penalty was not as stringent as it seemed the seventh floor, the leadership of the FBI, would've liked, we started to see a lot of times them taking a second bite at the apple by, once the OPR was finished, having the security division do an entirely separate review of whether it was appropriate for the person to hold onto their clearance.

And what happened to, I'm not gonna say a lot of people, but to at least some, is individuals who thought they had cleared the barrier of the internal investigation and while they got some form of punishment, they knew they would keep their jobs, would find all of a sudden that they were in some form of double jeopardy.

Benjamin Wittes: Because what hadn't been done in the OPR investigation was being done in the context of their clearances.

Michael Feinberg: Correct. And I think this was really shortsighted by Bureau leadership because it was the very sort of thing that a less principled administration could leverage to its advantage going forward. And where it might have been a rarity under Wray and Biden, I suspect it's becoming much more something regularly happening at the Bureau now.

Julia Curlee: I would add in this administration we also had the, the new phenomena of the DNI getting involved in other department and agency's personnel decisions in a way that, that seemed very unprecedented. And whether that was the purging of CIA officers on rotation to the DNI, as in the case of the National Intelligence Council and the Tren de Aragua assessment, or whether that is CIA officers who had been participating in assessments 10 years before in the, the Russia 2016 assessment. The DNI not only reaching, you know, in to, to strip people of their clearances, but the CIA leadership itself not standing up to block the DNI from interfering and, from a CIA's perspective, in basic personnel decisions in the agency.

And so instead of, if there was an issue with these individuals and their analytic work in the past, which there was not, but if there had been, there would've been some review process. They would've been parked in some administrative location for, for further adjudication and, and then they would've gone through some sort of basic process. And none of that happened. Instead, the, the people I'm referring to were walked out of the building in a way that everyone else could see in, in a, in a public act of retribution.

And because these people were, were some of our best officers who had been deeply admired and, and were close enough to the rest of the workforce, the people knew their names, you really sent a chilling message through the workforce that no one was safe and the leadership of the organization would do nothing to help you.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah, if I could add something to Julia's statement just now. There's two interesting dynamics at play here. The first is the DNI is able to do this because, for really the first time in U.S. history that I'm aware of, department heads are not what I would term as dual-hatted in terms of loyalty. Previous cabinet officials and agency heads, at least in the post-war modern era, have always had a certain amount of fealty to the president who appoints them, but at the same time, they realize they have to thread the needle and defend the turf and personnel of their own fiefdom. Otherwise, they're not gonna be effective there. It's not necessarily because they're altruistic or good leaders. It's self-interest to protect your people, 'cause ultimately you need them to make you look good. That's gone. The current leadership of the IC does not care one whit what the workforce thinks of them, and as a result, they're solely looking out for the administration writ large.

And Julia's comments about the DNI pulling clearances explains what I think is a very clear difference between the FBI and the rest of the IC. The FBI has to still operate in public to a degree that other intel agencies do not, and as a result Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, Andrew Bailey, Chris Wray, whoever's making the decisions at any given time, they can come up with a public justification and say it's for investigative deficiency on matters X, Y, and Z, with X, Y, and Z coincidentally always relating to some previous investigation of Trump.

You can't out a case officer by talking about a recruitment in place they ran in a hostile territory. If you're gonna get rid of them and you want to do it in a way that sends a message, it has to be based on something that does not implicate their still-secret work. So that's where I think the security clearance process becomes a very handy tool to enact a purge of the workforce.

Julia Curlee: There were a couple other, so w- w- basically what Mike and I have been mostly describing is the direct purge or the, the shock that's sent to the workforce within the current workforce so that the, th- that workforce doesn't speak or doesn't go j- use its whs- whistleblower channels.

So there's a couple other in this category that are probably worth mentioning quickly. Not as much to the intelligence community, but the overwhelming of what few appeal places th- there are for federal employees with th- tens of thousands of, of, of people appealing in offices that have themselves been DOGEd and really no recourse being allowed to them, and the targeting of, of probationary officers who really have even fewer sources of recourse, and then last, this Schedule F-ing of the workforce. And so not as much at CIA, at least yet, but in other parts of the government, especially in DOD, you have individuals who have now had their positions been converted into this Schedule F, where they will be evaluated against, frankly, political criteria of whether they're implementing the president's policy agenda, which i- in an intelligence agency is, is really not what they should be doing.

But what it means for your workers beneath the GS-15 level is they may now have a boss or a boss's boss who is, in effect, a political appointee who had never been that way in the past. And the broader effect in chilling workplace speech or, or providing ideas that, that you know might not be welcomed by the administration, it is now penetrating much deeper into the workforce, which again adds to that censorship of people not willing to talk.

Benjamin Wittes: All right. Most people don't have much sense of the normal career path post-government of a CIA officer or an FBI agent. But the normal career path actually matters here because it sets the bounds of expectations. If you're, you have a mortgage, you're planning to send your kid to college at some point You know, up until January 2025, what is the normal expectation of somebody like you, Julia, and somebody like you, Mike, about what their career involves at the 20-year mark or 25-year mark? What is it that people are trying to protect when they keep their mouths shut and don't talk about their experiences and what they've seen?

Michael Feinberg: Could I push back against one of the assumptions baked into that question?

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Feinberg: Because at least for the FBI alumni, there are a lot who want to speak out, and this gets at a lot of what Julia was implying in her earlier answers. There are a lot who want to speak out, but a condition of their private sector employment is that they do not.

Benjamin Wittes: Well, th- th- that's what I'm trying to get to. And, yeah, so, so what, what is this private sector employment that you work in the government for 20 years, you retire, and then you go work in the private sector where you're not allowed to speak?

Michael Feinberg: So within the FBI, I would basically say there are really three categories of post-Bureau paths. And I'm just gonna talk about special agents here, because otherwise we're gonna go down a lot of rabbit holes. So the first is, a lot of agents, if they are in an area of the country with a relatively manageable cost of living, do just retire. The pension can be enough, depending on your life circumstances, to give you what you need for the rest of your life.

There are other agents who want to continue working, who go on to do some sort of security consulting or investigative consulting in the private sector at a sort of worker bee level, or go work for another government agency. And I'm not using OGA as its usual obfuscating meaning for referring to CIA or the IC. What I mean is that, you know, the Department of Energy, for example, has a really robust counterintelligence portfolio. Health and Human Services or Housing and Urban Development have investigator roles. So people might just go work for another government agency as a contractor or as an employee and do what's called double-dipping, getting your pension while also continuing to work for the government at or remove as a contractor.

Then the third category, and I think this is what we're gonna have to end up focusing on for this question, are the senior executives who go on to do that sort of security consulting in the private sector but do so at something closer to the C-suite level.

Benjamin Wittes: Being the head of security at some private Fortune 500 company or a-

Michael Feinberg: Exactly. Yes.

Benjamin Wittes: Or some other company that has some kind of specialized, often international security needs.

Michael Feinberg: Exactly. Or you're a tech company and you have an insider threat program to prevent industrial espionage. And those companies, those Fortune 500 companies, inevitably do some degree of business with the government, and they are incredibly loathe to have any of their employees say anything that may get in the way of that relationship, particularly when you're dealing with as petty and vindictive an administration as this one.

So, the overwhelming majority of the senior executives who have been ousted from the FBI over the past year and a half, two years, are in that position. They're the ones who actually have the most they can say and can shine the brightest light on what's happening, but they're working for companies that have explicitly told them or implicitly suggested that under no circumstances are they to do so.

Benjamin Wittes: And they're making salaries that make that accommodation, it's a, it's a binary thing, right? You're getting 400, $500,000 a year.

Michael Feinberg: Maybe, or even, I mean, it could be even less, but you're getting something that is making your life more comfortable. There's different ways to characterize this, some neutrally, some flattering, and some critical.

Benjamin Wittes: No, just let, I, I don't, I just wanna characterize it factually. Yeah. There's an enormous incentive structure not to talk.

Michael Feinberg: Correct. And for the people who have actually retired and can talk, a lot of those people, if they weren't senior executives, don't have the training or the know-how to enable them to do so. In other words, they've never gotten media training, they've never interacted with the press, they haven't done any sort of public writing. So even if they wanted to speak out, it's not like they have the intuitive know-how or tools to do so.

Benjamin Wittes: And I would just add to that as somebody who has tried to help a number of such people communicate what they know, they don't always know what they know. You know?

Michael Feinberg: Correct.

Benjamin Wittes: There, there, there's an enormous amount that happens in a bureaucracy that the people who are directly involved with don't always know what part of it is highly salient to the public debate. And often what they think is highly salient is the gross manner in which they were treated, which sounds a lot like the gross manner in which 30 other people were treated. But the policy discussion that they were involved in is a really big deal, right? And they may not recognize that as readily as, say, somebody who's in the news business does.

Julia, how about you? What, what is your sense of, like, what does the median CIA officer have to protect in this conversation other than, you know, their dignity and whatnot.

Julia Curlee: Yeah, very similar to the story Mike was saying. You know, there are very few employers left, I think, in America where a person could actually imagine spending 40 or 50 years working for the same employer, and CIA is one of them, where you could join in, in, in your early 20s and you could do 15 different things, but at the end of the day, you're still a CIA officer until you reach retirement age. And that's, that's not common, but it it's, it's, it's, it happens more often than you think.

And so a person will usually do a full career at, at, in- into their prime at CIA that, that you know, it's, it's quite common to see folks leaving at, the early ones leaving with 20 years of experience, 30 years of experience, and then moving on in that prime of their life to a, a, a different lifestyle, you know, where they've traveled overseas quite a bit, they want to spend more time at home with their family, and so they'll take a position that leverages whether it's their security clearance or their, you know, foreign languages or their unique travel or contacts. If they're a Directorate of Analysis officer, they might find a position at a political risk firm working for a big defense company. If they're a case officer with extensive experience overseas, they might help a foreign government in many cases, or they'll work on international business. If they're a Science and Technology officer, they may have incredible technical skills that they can parlay to a tech company. And so it is quite normal for people to spend decades, but then also to look for a government adjacent position on the outside. And that, that has continued to be the natural place, even under this administration for, for folks to go.

But it's also happening in this environment where thousands of people like you have now also been dumped onto the job market, exacerbating the few positions that, that might be there, and this, exactly what Mike said, that the, the willingness of private firms to tolerate political speech by their employees, even going out under a separate banner. I mean, I, I know folks that have joined private companies but also have a non-resident fellowship at a, at a, at, at a think tank or some other o- outlet where they have been basically forbidden from publishing anything in their own names through those outlets. And so there is great deal of fear that speaking or doing anything like what, what Mike and I are doing now will cut off the, the, the primary normal exit plan for a person like us.

Benjamin Wittes: And they're right.

Julia Curlee: Right. Right? They're absolutely right.

Benjamin Wittes: I mean, the, the point here is not that they're wrong and all these people are just gutless. The point is that they're actually correct and that what we're talking about is a massive bureaucracy-wide incentive structure.

Julia Curlee: Right, and I would, I would contrast that, but we end up in the same place. But, you know, in my case, I've talked about it with you that, you know, I, when, when I was “Loomered,” if you, if you knew I was Loomered, you didn't wanna hire me because you didn't wanna be associated with that. If you didn't know I was Loomered, you, you didn't know, you, you didn't know enough about me to hire me.

Most people are not in that position. Most people, it's just simply the work has become intolerable. There are other opportunities on the outside they would prefer to take, but the same censorship would apply to them with their, with their onward employer not being willing to let them speak what they know or express their views.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah, Ben, I think you and I discussed this in the first podcast we ever did together, after I published the story with Lawfare of my resignation, 'cause I made the remark, just that one article, those five pages pretty much precluded me from ever getting a private sector security consulting job. And normally, y- you know, I'm not saying this to puff myself up, I'd be a good candidate. I have-

Benjamin Wittes: Well, no, no, let me, let me-

Michael Feinberg: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: Let me amplify that a little bit.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: You are the prototype of a highly specialized type of expertise. You have a background in counterintelligence. You speak Mandarin. You have hands-on involvement in a whole bunch of, I'm not saying anything that isn't public-

Michael Feinberg: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: Investigations of companies like Huawei. I, I, you know, y- you're the, you're the sort of picture of the kind of person who can leave government and have a lucrative career in saying, and whene- whenever you're asked what you do, you say something like, "I do some consulting." And-

Michael Feinberg: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: What that means is people drawing on that precise certain skill set.

Michael Feinberg: But, you know, there, there's a cost, and I, I think when I first took the public fellowship, we talked about this. Like, going down this route meant that that world is now closed off to me. And not just for the length of this administration, because there's always gonna be the concern in four or eight or 12 years, does a similarly minded administration comes back?

Benjamin Wittes: And also, is Mike, Mike Feinberg's the kinda guy who talks, right? There's a, there's a, there's another side of that which is, has more to do with a culture that does not value being public.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah, I don't think that Facebook would want to hire as a security consultant somebody who they think might write the spiritual sequel to “Careless People.” So, once you go out in the world and do this, you are not just foreclosing an immediate opportunity for this administration, you are foreclosing opportunities for frankly the rest of your life. And that's, you know, I'm usually very harshly critical of people who don't speak out, but, I under- that's something a lot of people cannot afford to give away, literally or figuratively.

Julia Curlee: Yeah, I think that I want to also jump in on this point that, you know, it could be perceived that what we're talking about is a criticism of, of people, and I wish more people did speak out. But at the end of the day, you know, people have families, they have mortgages, they've got to send their kids to college. No one else is going to do that for them. And so, it is fully understandable why people would not speak, and, and that's what we're trying to describe, this incentive system and the punishment system on the other side of that.

And in, in my case, and I think probably a bit in, in Michael, I don't want to speak for you, they've already taken away most of what I had to lose. And so, they, they in some ways have made it easier for a person like me to, to make that decision. In the, in the unique case of a transgender person, I can't use the bathroom in federal office buildings. My passport would be, would, was revoked and, and would be turned male. Like my CIA career was over and my ability to then work back with the agency in a classified position where I'd be in the same restrictions that I face on the outside, it was done.

And so having lost already the most important thing that they could have taken, they, they made it a bit easier for me in that, in that way. And if you are not a person who's been individually targeted and you do have a family you have to take care of, it's understandable how people end up where they are. It's just this collective action problem where everyone is making that same decision, and then you end up with just a handful of us who are able or willing to speak.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah. So in the article, you identify three exit paths that are significant here. We've talked about two of them, which is, you know, if you talk, you can't stay in government, and if you talk, you can't go to the private sector, at least not in a capacity that could draw attention about what you talked about to the company in question.

But let's talk about the third, which is, in some ways, the highest profile of them, which is, you know, you go to some do-goody civil society organization. You know, and of course, there are famous examples of this, including, I don't know, Erez Reuveni, the whistleblower on Emil Bove's misconduct, is now working for one of the litigating groups that challenges administration policy. So are, so are several of the w- at least one of the Jack Smith prosecutors. So some of, this, this, this option solves some problems for some people. Why is it not a bigger part of the solution to the larger and problem that you've identified?

Julia Curlee: A lot of it is the funding base. I had had quite a naive conception that think tanks were places that people went to think between administrations, and they, they believed in speaking truth to power and, and following the ideas where they took them. But what I quickly disc- I know, I know it sounds so naive now.

Benjamin Wittes: Ha, ha, ha. How silly of you, Julia.

Julia Curlee: Silly of me now. I, I discovered very quickly this phenomena that, that perhaps they were even more risk-averse than, than private companies because of how razor thin their operating budgets are, and that many D.C. area think tanks operate on federal grants or, or they have federal officers who are seconded to them, military people that, that do fellowships that are very well, you know, that are paid for and help subsidize the rest of the organization. And if you get on the list that your organization is, is sponsoring the wrong kind of speech, you could, you could find yourself stripped of, of your people that have been paid for, that, that are paying the bills. You, you could have your funding base taken care of.

And also the funders themselves are scared because of, for, for a number of reasons. One, the administration, in its early days, directed the IRS to do investigations of, of ensuring that, that no tax-exempt entity would indirectly or directly finance, and then they named the kinds of speech that they didn't want financed, and that had a chilling effect. My understanding is that not a lot of that has actually materialized, but it did deter the donors, who then deter the, then prevent the, the fellowships that those of us who would want to speak would land in, and it made them very, very risk-averse.

And so I had this experience as, as you and I have talked about of, of looking for work, first in the private sector and also in the, in the think tank world for, for-

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, so give us the numbers on that.

Julia Curlee: Yeah. Sure.

Benjamin Wittes: You were sitting for the better part of a year applying for jobs You were the freaking senior director for intelligence at the NSC. You're, that's, like, for Washington, th- that's a big deal job. What did your job search look like?

Julia Curlee: Well, in, in nine months of applying for probably over 100 jobs, I did not get a single interview. Not one. Me, it just, whether that was based on,

Benjamin Wittes: Are you sure it's because you don't know how to write a good resume, Julia?

Julia Curlee: It's probably not that.

Benjamin Wittes: Just checking,  'cause I, I just, I wonder if there's something wrong with your resume, or maybe your cover letter n- needs fewer commas in it.

Michael Feinberg: It's, it's not that. She types in Comic Sans.

Julia Curlee: It's true.

Michael Feinberg: Yeah.

Julia Curlee: I mean, in, in fairness, I w- I, I was not advertising the the fact that I wanted to be able to speak publicly, but that was always going to be something that I was going to do, and that eventually would've circumscribed my ability to, to take jobs or, or deterred employers, but we didn't even get that far. I didn't get, I didn't get called for an interview based on what I understood to be just widespread knowledge of the fact of what happened to me and that a person like me would also draw fire or just risk raising the ire-

Benjamin Wittes: And by a person like you-

Julia Curlee: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: Do you mean a trans person, or do you mean a person who was subject to the purge?

Julia Curlee: Both.

Benjamin Wittes: Or both?

Julia Curlee: Yeah, both. Both. And, and many of these, these places were themselves rolling back DEI programs, which, in effect, were rolling back programs to ensure they had a workforce that, that looked like America or recruited people in, in diverse areas of the country. And, and so adding a recently purged trans person to their, to their numbers probably was not a high priority for most D.C. area think tanks or, or private businesses.

Benjamin Wittes: So Mike, you did not have a similar experience because your departure was very sudden and you came directly to us. But is your perception that Julia's experience is relatively typical in the sense that you have these, a large number of former FBI special agents or, or senior executives who are suddenly on the market and are flooding the world with unreciprocated resumes?

Michael Feinberg: Most of the FBI executives I know who've been pushed out and wanted to get something have found something, but it has been entirely dependent upon personal connections they built during what was an almost full career. So, you know, I'm not gonna name specific employers, but there are Fortune 500 companies that, by necessity, deal with the FBI or DOJ on a regular basis. Inevitably, sometimes people from each organization hit it off with each other, and you might be able to leverage that into a job after you finish.

But let's be clear, the corporations are almost all explicit to the people they hire that like, "We understand you have strong feelings. You're not gonna speak about them. You are a private citizen. You have nothing to offer the world of discourse from our perspective, and one of the conditions of this job is that you don't vent your spleen." And I know this because I've been explicitly told it. I've taken part in a number of public accountings of what has been going on at the Bureau for the past two years, and for every person I convince to take part, there are a half dozen who refuse explicitly for the reason they don't wanna offend their employer.

And I'm gonna be a little bit harsher than Julia was just now in one regard. She referred to corporate risk aversion. There's another word for risk aversion, and, and, and that word is cowardice. You know, there is not a single Fortune 500 company whose prosperity has not been made possible except for the rule of law in this country and the free market and discourse of ideas that we have. To now turn a blind eye to the shifts that are undermining that environment is fundamentally to pull up the bridge behind you so future generations don't have the same opportunity solely so you can maximize your immediate profits.

Benjamin Wittes: So I will just add to that with respect to the think tank culture that Julia refers to. There's an additional factor that is not the administration, but is the congressional atmosphere. You know, I think if it were just the administration thinking about people's, organizations' tax-exempt status, that would be one thing. But it is also the possibility that, I mean, there was a think tank based at Stanford that did, that our colleague Renee DiResta was one of the principals of, you know, the internet re- the Stanford Internet Observatory. And, you know, that was destroyed by a series of state AGs and congressional investigations that concocted a bullshit theory about them and has pressed it against the entity and the individuals ever since.

And so, I, I mean, the think tanks are not wrong to think about their risk profile in this environment, and yet unlike the for-profit organizations, they have on a supposed public service mission. And so, you know, I'm a little bit more forgiving of the people whose, frankly, whose duties are to their shareholders and who, you know, who have fiduciary obligations to maximize shareholder value than I am to organizations that supposedly stand for truth and justice and the American way and, you know, are too afraid of, you know, the Devin Nunes-s and Jim Jordan-s of the world.

Michael Feinberg: I mean, it is interesting that you're positing there is a difference between the executive and congressional branches. I'm just fascinated by this idea that they're not working in concert and have their own interests.

Benjamin Wittes: Well, I, I assume they are working in concert.

Michael Feinberg: Yes, I was being sarcastic about the fact that Congress no longer exists-

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, but, but-

Michael Feinberg: As an independent institution.

Benjamin Wittes: But I think the, you know, w- when you're thinking about which Eye of Sauron can wreak greater hell on you as a research organization-

Michael Feinberg: It's Congress.

Benjamin Wittes: It's not necessarily the FBI, right? And because the FBI does, is answerable to courts in some ultimate sense, they do ultimately have to produce the goods And, you know, when they indict you for an Instagram post about seashells, they make themselves a laughing stock. Whereas when Jim Jordan does the equivalent thing, he doesn't make himself a laughing stock, actually. He just gets to throw out subpoenas. And so I, I, I do think Congress actually poses some independent dangers here.

Julia, you were very kind in your piece to talk about the Lawfare Public Service Fellowship. As you know, this is an issue that, like, we created the fellowship in order, in a very small way, to address. And it has been a kind of obsession of mine to try to get other organizations to create similar, not necessarily fellowships, but similar, like, counter-incentive structures that allow people who are coming out of government with things to say actually to have opportunities to say those things, and then while transitioning to other lines of work. I'm always hesitant to solicit praise for Lawfare on our own shows and I don't wanna do that here. I do want to ask you about the general absence of such programs and what could be done to create more of them.

Julia Curlee: Yeah. Well, you're not gonna, I don't need much provocation to sing the praises of the Public Service Fellowship for having given me a critical life raft in, in all of the work I've done in public, whether it's for Lawfare or The Atlantic article. I needed to be able to pay my bills and my mortgage while doing it. And without one place that, that let me get established on the outside so that I could, could have a track record of, of publications to then hopefully land future employment, it would've been nearly impossible, and my choices probably would've been to stay in place until someone hopefully someday hired me and then accept censorship, because I also have a family, too to take care of.

And I, I, before I get to that point in just a second, I wanted to, to just note there's a similarity in my experience, in my mind, between what the, the Public Service Fellowship is trying to do and what historically the CIA and other intelligence agencies tried to do in order to create a structure in which it should not take an act of, of, you know, individual self-immolation or courage to have a GS-13, mid-level officer tell a cabinet secretary that they're wrong. We create incentive systems, protections, the, that you'll be promoted at your next panel because you spoke up and you, and you did the, you performed the values that, that, that we value. And so it, it was a structural feature of the intelligence community that they did what we needed them to do despite possible personal incentives.

And what I think that what we're kind of doing on the outside here with the Public Service Fellowship is to kind of create one of these structural incentive systems where you have a place, you have an outlet that you can publish, you, you have a salary that can, that can pay your mortgage, and in fact, you're incentivized to speak up and tell the, the public what you know.

And so it's a very unique entity as far as I can tell in the broader media and, and, and think tank world, and there, there are just a few places that I could name that are similar, which we, we list in the piece. There's the Democracy Forward effort to hire people to work on Civil Service and Innovation Fellowship, and I know some of them they're talking about documenting the damage that has occurred under this administration and then charting the way forward into the next administration. And there are entities like the Public Service Alliance which I personally have been benefiting from, which provides discounted services to former federal employees and helps you with, with basics like defending yourself against the online mob that, that could come for you if you speak out publicly.

Benjamin Wittes: And the Public Service Alliance, it's worth noting, is an organization that was stood up entirely in response to the current situation. It's not like Lawfare, which, you know, like we preexisted this and created a program. This is actually an organization that didn't exist three years ago and was stood up to do this thing. And they've done remarkable work.

Julia Curlee: And so just looking, and I, and I know you, I'm sure Mike could talk more about on the FBI side of the house, and there have been a few other nascent efforts through, you know, communities of formers in like the Foreign Service. It's just not at the scale to, to really support active scholarship. There's no reason why this couldn't be more common if there was a funding base and if, and if D.C. area think tanks were able to carve this out except for, you know, the, the retaliation that they would face if, if, if they were-

Benjamin Wittes: Fear of the Eye of Sauron.

Julia Curlee: Right. Right. And, and I, so, and before we go forward, I just wanted to, to, to, to state that there are enormous rewards in speaking positively of the administration, both in, in your, in your think tank world, whether you're, you're doing scholarship related to, you know, defense work that the administration is championing, and then if you're in the private sector world, businesses that are encouraging their investors to make certain investments close to the president's personal family are being rewarded with contracts.

And, and when this is all over, I, I, I don't doubt that investigations will find that prominent D.C. firms and consulting businesses have been giving people advice that borders on certainly the unethical, but it'll, it'll, it, it will raise serious questions over whether there was an effort to personally enrich members of the president's family in, in steering contracts in such a way that, that it would, that it would benefit these individuals, and those companies have then been, been privately rewarded. So that's on the other side. So let alone taking risks by bringing in a, a person that's been fired. They've been actively encouraging people to engage in behavior on the other side of it, of, of personally enriching the president and his family.

Benjamin Wittes: Mike, do you have thoughts on this?

Michael Feinberg: Look, we're not at the point where we are living under an authoritarian jackboot yet. There are places like Minneapolis during Metro Surge or Chicago during Midway Blitz where it may very much feel like that and in fact be that for discrete populations, but that doesn't mean we're not backsliding either. And, you know, when I was a student in school studying history, you would look at all these different oppressive eras, and you would think, "How would I have reacted?" And I don't know a single human being who says to themselves, "I wouldn't-"

Benjamin Wittes: I would've been on the S- I would've signed up with the SA and been, been one of those-

Michael Feinberg: Yeah, I would've signed up with the SA, foreign troops. Yeah Yeah. A- and, you know, I, I would just implore the people who have an opportunity to help people like me or Julia, or give one of their employees the breathing space to talk publicly, I would implore them to think on the fact that you're not asking yourself what would you do anymore in a hypothetical manner. You're in the thick of it, and you might have kids, you might have grandkids. You might wanna ask how you're gonna explain your behavior and your individual choices, however small and non-consequential to the country at large they may seem, when this is all over.

Julia Curlee: And, you know, there, I am contacted constantly now since I've been writing publicly, by people still on the inside. I've lost track at this point, but it's gotta be at least 100 of people who send me an individual message that says, "Thank you so much for speaking. I wish I could. I can't because kids, mortgage, house, job. I'll be fired." I mean, it's just like, it's like a form letter at this point, and I really appreciate when people reach out.

But, like, you know, this, this is the moment when, when you can really have an impact before the consolidation of a censorship regime and autocratic behavior becomes irreversible. And I wish that more people would do it, and I think that one of the things that the Public Service Fellowship does is that, you know, it's not a permanent thing, right? We're, we're supposed to find onward effort onward employment so we can con- continue to do this. And when you do that, and when you land on your feet and speak for, for months at a time in a manner that's critical of the administration, and you survive, you show people, not just tell them, that it is survivable to exercise your First Amendment rights if it's critical against the administration, and that's hopefully what we're doing through this program. And, and again, I've been really grateful for it, and I hope other people will get the chance to do it in the future.

Benjamin Wittes: As Nietzsche put it, "What does not kill me makes me stronger." We're gonna leave it there. Julia Curlee, Mike Feinberg, thank you for joining us today. Julia's piece on the censorship incentive structure is live on Lawfare today.

[Outro]

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