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By M.D. Kittle. Media: Thefederalist
We’ve grown accustomed to corporate media lying to us. It’s the lazy lies that are perhaps most galling.
The Wall Street Journal’s recent overheated piece on the Trump administration’s public revocation of an “undercover” senior CIA officer is ridiculously lazy. The CIA spook in question is a very overt member of the intelligence community. Just Google the name Julia Gurganus.
‘Zero Concerns’
Wall Street Journal national security reporter Brett Forrest on Wednesday reported that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s naming of Gurganus on a list of 37 current and former officials stripped of their national security clearances has “alarmed people” inside the CIA.
“Gabbard didn’t know the CIA officer had been working undercover, according to a person familiar with the fallout from the list’s release,” Forrest wrote in the hit piece headlined, “Tulsi Gabbard Blindsided CIA Over Revoking Clearance of Undercover Officer.” He noted “three other people with knowledge of the situation” who claimed the DNI “didn’t meaningfully consult with the CIA before releasing the list.”
Wrong, multiple sources with knowledge of the situation say. A senior intelligence official tells The Federalist that there was indeed staff-level coordination between the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA, as well as other agencies involved, ahead of the distribution of the revocations letter.
A source familiar with the matter said there have been “zero concerns” expressed by any of the agencies involved regarding the revocation of Gurganus’ security clearance or any of the others.
The Wall Street Journal piece suggests CIA Director John Ratcliffe is not happy with the public revocation of Gurganus’ security clearance. Forrest does include a comment from a CIA official, who says nothing of the sort.
“Director Ratcliffe and the President’s entire elite national security team are committed to eradicating the politicization of intelligence and are focused on executing President Trump’s national security priorities, and keeping the American people safe,” CIA spokeswoman Liz Lyons told the Journal.
Julia Gurganus Is Everywhere
The piece doesn’t name the CIA official, whom Forrest describes as “a longtime Russia hand at the agency.” There was no need. Julia Gurganus, who has held “intelligence posts for more than 20 years and worked from 2014 to 2017 as an expert on Russia and Eurasia on the National Intelligence Council,” is very well known inside and outside the intelligence community.
For years, Gurganus has flaunted her intelligence community credentials to harvest speaking engagements, public articles, and positions with prestigious organizations.
“Julia Gurganus is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is on sabbatical from the CIA,” the left-wing Atlantic notes on its webpage.
She previously served as a nonresident scholar with the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, according to the organization, which notes Gurganus’ “decades working in the U.S. intelligence community on issues related to Eurasia.”
Her photo is included in a Women’s Foreign Policy Group report on Gurganus’ presentation at a 2018 “Beyond the Headlines discussion.”
She spoke at AFCEA’s 2025 Spring Intelligence Symposium, a fact once again promoted online. The nonprofit identified her as senior executive manager for Europe and Eurasia Mission Center, Central Intelligence Agency.
‘Willfully Weaponized’
So it’s curious that Larry Pfeiffer, whom Forrest softly identifies as a former chief of staff at the CIA while omitting his service in the Obama administration, chided Gabbard about outing Gurganus.
“‘A smart [director of national intelligence] would have consulted with CIA’ before identifying the undercover officer,” Pfeiffer told the news outlet. “It could potentially put CIA cover procedures at risk. It could put relations with foreign governments at risk.”
Larry, who boasts about running the Situation Room in the Obama administration, was one of 50-plus deep staters who signed the infamous 2020 letter claiming the Hunter Biden laptop story breaking in the weeks before the election was Russian disinformation. President Donald Trump stripped the former intelligence officials of their security clearances as one of his first acts in January.
“The signatories willfully weaponized the gravitas of the Intelligence Community to manipulate the political process and undermine our democratic institutions,” Trump wrote in his executive order.
For some reason, Forrest left that important bit of information out of his hit piece.
A Matter of Trust
Gurganus was deeply involved in the infamous and highly politicized Intelligence Community Assessment, the antecedent to the Russia Collusion hoax that the accomplice media played a leading role in. She actively oversaw the production of the politically driven ICA, a fact publicly known in 2020, well ahead of Gabbard’s unsealing of intelligence community records exposing the sham report.
She specialized in Russia and Eurasia intel, a go-to for the Obama deep state.
The reams of unsealed documents and a House Intelligence Committee report expose the 2017 intelligence assessment directed by President Barack Obama as a horribly flawed report, debunking its political suppositions that the Trump campaign was colluding with the Kremlin to win the 2016 election.
The documents “show how top intelligence and law enforcement officials — including former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former DNI James Clapper — conspired to fabricate a narrative that Russia meddled in the 2016 election in order to elect Trump,” The Federalist’s CEO Sean Davis wrote earlier this month.
“The declassified records showed that top intelligence experts objected to the narrative, highlighted myriad issues with the so-called intelligence used to support false claims about Trump, and even told Brennan that he was misrepresenting facts and ignoring counter-evidence as part of a push to attack Trump, cripple his transition, and even hijack his presidency,” Davis wrote.
The security clearance revocations were fully merited, ODNI officials say.
“Director of National Intelligence Gabbard directed the revocations to ensure individuals who have violated the trust placed in them by weaponizing, politicizing, manipulating, or leaking classified intelligence are no longer allowed to do so,” an agency official told The Federalist in an email.
‘False Stories’
Buried in the Wall Street Journal piece, Forrest acknowledges that the “CIA official whose clearance was revoked” is identified in her “publicly listed biography” and that earlier this year “the CIA officer spoke at a classified intelligence conference and was described as a senior executive manager in the CIA’s Europe and Eurasia mission center.”
Forrest did not return a request for comment. The Federalist asked the Wall Street Journal reporter about his representation of the story:
Julia Gurganus could hardly be considered “covert” or “undercover.” Her name shows up everywhere in the simplest online searches — as a CIA agent. You even note as much in your piece. So how do you explain the dubious headline and characterization of Gurganus’ undercover status? Have you considered that your sources with “knowledge of the situation” may not have all the information or may not be telling the truth?
The usual suspects in the accomplice media echoed the Wall Street Journal piece.
Alexa Henning, deputy chief of staff at the Office of Director of National Intelligence, called out National Review’s incurious Noah Rothman for “repeating false stories from @WSJ that I spent all day debunking and they printed anyway because they are just simple minded puppets for the Deep State (including Noah).”
Lazy puppets at that.
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