Exclusive – Cliff Sims: ‘Really Shocked’ to See the ‘DEI Office’ and ‘Politicization of the Intelligence Community’ in the CIA Building

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices should be “abolished” within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the intelligence community, Cliff Sims, who served as the deputy director of national intelligence under former President Donald Trump, said during an interview on Breitbart News Saturday, adding that he was surprised to see the DEI office in the CIA headquarters and by the “politicization” inside the intelligence community.

When asked the first time that Sims entered the CIA headquarters building and saw DEI and transgender-positive posters on the walls, an encounter that is described in his upcoming book, The Darkness Has Not Overcome, Sims revealed he was “shocked” by the “politicization of the intelligence community.”

“I was really shocked the first time that I walked in and I saw the presence of the DEI office, the politicization of the intelligence community in pushing the woke social agenda. And, one of the things I realized very quickly is that among a lot of my colleagues in the intelligence community, there’s a lot of really good people there, people trying to do the right thing, trying to protect the country that they eat, sleep, and breathe American national security and protect the U.S. interests and the American people,” Sims explained.

“But, even those people were scared, intimidated by the DEI office and the various DEI mandates that exist, and you know, the pressure to use people’s pronouns. There was even an internal opinion piece that was published in an internal intelligence community journal a few months ago where they had a current intelligence officer explaining how being a cross-dresser helped him be better at his job as an intelligence analyst. This is the kind of stuff that has to stop. I mean, the Biden administration in their national intelligence strategy, which is basically the playbook for how the U.S. intelligence community is going to prioritize different issues, they’ve made various diversity, equity, and inclusion benchmarks.”

Sims added that in the internal intelligence community journal there was also an opinion piece that talked about how people needed to use their words carefully, especially when talking about “the Chinese communist party” in order to not offend Asian Americans.

“In that same publication that I mentioned a minute ago, they also printed an op-ed about how, using words, you need to be very careful in the use of certain words when you’re talking about the Chinese communist party because we don’t want to offend Asian Americans, or you don’t need to use the word Jihadist or whatever it may be because we don’t want to offend anyone who is a Muslim in the intelligence community.”

“This is the kind of craziness that you’re seeing in there and the DEI office has become so powerful and such an intimidating factor that it is affecting the workplace culture there. So, the natural question is, what should we do? If Trump comes back into office, I think number one the intelligence community DEI offices should be abolished, and let’s take that money that they’ve been using for that stuff and divert it to further bolstering our capacity to front the real national security threat, which is a rising and adversarial China.”

“There’s also things like, no one should have to sacrifice their religious beliefs as a condition of employment. We’ve got to protect the First Amendment right of officers who do not want to participate in mandated DEI training or forced pronoun usage and these kinds of things. And, I think even more foundationally than that, some of the talent recruitment efforts for the intelligence community is historically focused on getting people out of Ivy League schools. That’s where a lot of intelligence officers come from.”

“We need to instead be out there attracting more students from you know, top students from state schools and HBCUs. These so-called elite institutions have become woke indoctrination factories, meaning that the intelligence community’s pipeline of talent is being disproportionately filled with individuals who are trained to prioritize ideological conformity over critical thinking, and in light of the alarming rise of antisemitism on these campuses, it is increasingly hard to argue that such institutions are the best places to train a truly diverse workforce in the intelligence community.”