Politicalizing Intel Is Destroying US Politics and Helping Chinese and Russian Agendas: Ex-House Intelligence Committee Chairman

The American intelligence community is getting increasingly politicalized and this is destroying the nation while helping the anti-American agendas of Russia and communist China, former House Intelligence Committee Chairman and former ambassador to the Netherands, Amb. Pete Hoekstra said in an interview on Jan. 23 on China in Focus, a show on NTD TV, Epoch Times’ sister media.

“When you start politicizing intelligence, it’s decay, and it’s destroying America, is destroying our political process. It’s not coming from the Russians. It’s not coming from the Chinese. Or maybe it is coming from the Russians, the Chinese, but it’s also coming from within the United States,” said Hoekstra.

The former diplomat referred to the recent Twitter expos and said that the heads of various intelligence agencies like Office of Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI were meeting Twitter executives regularly to decide what would be real information and what would be dis-information—this, according to Hoekstra, was never the work of the intelligence agencies.

“That was never the responsibility of the intelligence community. There was always a wall between the intelligence community and domestic businesses, domestic policy and those types of things. But then you start going back and you say, Okay, now who’s actually telling Twitter what might be okay?” said Hoekstra.

In an op-ed published by Gatestone Institute on Jan. 15, Hoekstra alleged that “deceit and corruption” has seeped into the leadership of the U.S. Intelligence community. He pointed at reports about the FBI withholding “pertinent information” from Americans for the past months, until after last year’s Nov. 8 federal election.

“The combination of a politically weaponized Intelligence Community, operating hand-in-hand with organizations that are main gateways for information to millions of Americans, is a serious threat to American democracy and the integrity of our elections,” wrote the former diplomat.

He said in his op-ed that it’s important to investigate how the U.S. intelligence community has come to this point to determine speech in America. He demanded a significant investigation by an “outside, non-government group” to understand how this censorship of free speech and election manipulation happened in the country.

“Clearly the government has been influencing what we get to see and hear. It needs to stop—now—before our democracy is destroyed,” he wrote.

Serving Adversaries’ Causes

Hoekstra told China-in-Focus host, Tiffany Meier that this situation has sown “seeds of doubt” about the credibility of various American established departments. This in turn helps the anti-American agendas of China and Russia.

“It casts doubt! Can we really trust the FBI? Can we trust the Department of Homeland Security? Can we trust our own intelligence community? So you know, it actually divides Americans, it casts doubt about some of our premier institutions. And that then creates the opportunity for China and Russia,” he said.

Such situations are used by powers like the Chinese Communist Party that is already known globally for waging unrestricted warfare against the United States and its allies. The only way to defend American interests in today’s situation is to call for transparency, according to Hoekstra.

“We need a transparent society, we need to let bad ideas come out into the public. So we can shoot them down and dispel them. But we don’t need government doing that. So one is total transparency, more transparency, and openness,” he said.

“The second is to keep our government institutions out of those kinds of activities where they are censoring data, and deciding what the American people can and cannot see.”

In his op-ed, Hoekstra pointed at this month’s revelations about the Penn Biden Centre think tank at the University of Pennsylvania receiving donations worth $54.6 million from anonymous members of the Chinese Communist Party.

Influencing Political Debates

Hoekstra said that it’s very frightening to see how the U.S. intelligence community and the bureaucrats have played a role in influencing public opinion by colluding with platforms like Twitter. He termed their intentions to set the tenor of the American political discourse to determine the outcome of the U.S. elections as “frightening” and as a “decay of our republic, our democracy from within.”

“They’re setting the framework, you can talk about this, you can talk about the Russian hoax with Donald Trump, you can do that for 2, 3, 4 years. But you can’t talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop. So they’re creating the parameters by which we will have political debate and how our citizens will go out and determine who they will vote for,” he said adding that the bottom line is no one is being charged.

The former diplomat said that the American people should seek answers from their elected representatives and hold them accountable. They should also, according to him, not rely on one source of information but go to multiple sources to get information on various critical issues.

“Where is the outrage from the American people that in many cases, they were lied to? They were censored and censored by the government. In some cases for more than two years. It’s one of the things that really astounds me that the outrage is not there,” said Hoekstra.