‘Our Heads Nearly Exploded’ Joy Reid Claims Trump, Elon Musk ‘Selling Out the Names’ of CIA Employees
MSNBC’s Joy Reid accused President Donald Trump and Elon Musk of “selling out” CIA employees after the White House requested an email with the names of CIA employees.
Critics have raised alarms about the White House ordering the CIA to send an unclassified email with the names of some employees hired in recent years. The New York Times reported that the list includes first names and initials of last names. The order is part of Trump’s larger plan to cut government spending, mainly through recommendations by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Musk.
Reid invited former CIA director John Brennan on Wednesday and said, “Our heads nearly exploded,” reading the Times report. Brennan claimed the move is part of Trump’s effort to eradicate the government of anyone hired during former President Joe Biden’s administration. He also argued it would not be difficult for a country like China to identify these CIA employees from that email.
Check out the exchange below:
JOY REID: “Director Brennan, I can tell you that when we saw this headline, our heads nearly exploded over here in ReidOut world. I can only imagine how shocked and outraged you are. But can you just break down for us what the danger of what they did is?”
JOHN BRENNAN: “Well, there is quite a bit of danger to what appears to have been a careless and reckless use of this information in passing on an unclassified system. Many individuals who join the CIA enter the agency undercover, and so therefore their employment is not known to others, including family and friends, and because they’re going to be engaged frequently in various activities around the globe that you want to not have any association with the CIA. Now, according to the press reports, all the hires in the last two years, I mean, this could include individuals, as pointed out, the sort of China experts that have very specific and uncommon ethnic names or unusual spelling of their names. And they have relocated to the Washington, D.C. area. And so the Chinese counterintelligence experts will go together and put put all the pieces that they can pick out from either this unclassified email as well as from other things that are available in a digital dust as a way to identify individuals who now may be working for the CIA. So again, it can compromise the identities and compromise the future professional capabilities of these individuals who have joined the CIA. And now it looks like since it’s focused on the last two years, this is part of, again, the Trump administration’s revenge activities against individuals that may have been hired during the Biden administration.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
