Former FBI Agent Jonathan Gilliam: Bureau’s Top Brass Climb Ladder by Ideology, Not Merit

The FBI headquarters is seen on February 2, 2018 in Washington, DC. President Donald Trump
Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

“Go in and think like a liberal” was the advice two FBI agents gave Jonathan Gilliam prior to his taking an FBI entrance exam. Gilliam shared his anecdote during a Wednesday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with co-hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.

Gilliam, a retired Navy SEAL and former FBI special agent, spoke of left-wing political corruption across the federal government, specifically identifying the CIA and FBI.

Gilliam recalled that two FBI agents advised him to “think like a liberal” during his FBI entrance exam. “I was told by two FBI agents that did not know each other –  I was told, ‘Do not go in and take that test as though you are thinking like a SEAL.’ In other words, ‘If this happened, this is the way it should be done because this is the way a team works, and this is the way an investigation should be carried out.’ They said, ‘Don’t do that, you’ll fail. Go in and think like a liberal.’ And that’s what I did, and I passed.”

The FBI’s entrance exam illustrated how leftists use ideological filtering tools preferencing ideological fellow travelers, said Gilliam.

“These tests are written to recruit a certain type of person,” said Gilliam. “So what you end up having when you do that is, you’re gonna have – the CIA has the same problem,  where it’s not that they have individuals bringing a skill set to the table; it’s that they’re bringing an ideology to the table that those that wrote the test want them to have.”

“The people who are like-minded, the people that get along are going to be the ones that stay there,” added Gilliam. “They’re not going to recruit people who don’t do what they do, who don’t think like they do.”

The “deep state” network of leftists, said Gilliam, extends across various federal bureaucracies. He advised President Donald Trump to cleanse federal bureaucracies of politically corrupt leftists.

“If you want to see the deep state, this is what you’re looking at,” said Gilliam. “It’s not just the FBI. It’s not just the DOJ. It’s also the State Department. It’s the IRS. It’s the DOD. It’s the VA. You want to look across the board and look and all of these.”

“I don’t think that what we’re seeing in the FBI is just about the FBI,” said Gilliam. “What we’re seeing … is that this is a slice of the bigger picture. Right now, the president has the greatest time that he’s probably going to have in his presidency to pull back and unleash either another special counsel or a team of investigators to go in and clean up these upper echelons [of federal bureaucracies].”

“You can call them deep state. You can call them globalists. I often call them communists,” said Gilliam of left-wing federal bureaucrat careerists.

Both the FBI and CIA reward left-wing ideological alignment over meritorious service in determining internal promotions, said Gilliam.

“I’ve worked in four different federal agencies, and in every single one, you have your workers, and then, you have your people that climb the ladder to get to the top,” said Gilliam. “I think that process should be eliminated. I think you should work your way to the top, not that you should climb your way to the top. … It’s not the people who are the best; it’s the people who check the boxes and identify with the ideology of the people at the top.”

Ideological alignment allows otherwise disconnected people across federal bureaucracies to cooperate absent conspiracy, said Gilliam, using terrorist networks as an illustration of this phenomenon.

“You know how terrorist cells work. They have a financial group that raises money, you have planners, you have people who build the bombs, and you have people that carry the operation out,” said Gilliam. “They may never meet those people, but they belong to the same ideology.”

“These behaviors are not something that is just simply at the FBI,” concluded Gilliam. This is a problem across the board.”

Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).

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Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.

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