Trans Ex-CIA Officer Says She Was Fired After Laura Loomer Exposed Her Identity

Former CIA officer Julia Curlee, who served at the agency for two decades, detailed on CNN Tuesday her firing under President Donald Trump’s administration after MAGA influencer Laura Loomer publicly threatened her identity as a transgender woman.

CNN’s Dana Bash spoke with Curlee, who served as former Vice President Mike Pence’s daily briefer and the National Security Council’s director for intelligence programs, on Tuesday’s edition of The Source, a day after the former CIA officer published an essay in The Atlantic titled “The Wrong Kind of American.”

She told Bash that while she had briefed Trump aboard Air Force One during his first term, by his second, she was barred from using the women’s bathroom in her building and had to leave the CIA campus just to relieve herself. Her passport was also reissued to read “male,” leading to travel issues abroad.

“I managed to serve until about 69 days in [to Trump’s second term],” Curlee explained. “Until I received a phone call, as I wrote, at a rib joint in Roanoke, Virginia, with my family, telling me that my tour was over… They couldn’t tell me why.”

Curlee went on to recall that moments later, she saw a post from Loomer that read, “A transgender, Biden holdover who hates President Trump is still working in the NSC intel office. I’m told there are several NSC staffers who have complained that this Trans Biden holdover hasn’t been fired yet, but nothing is being done about it.”

But the former CIA officer said her boss still asked her to report to work the following Monday, since she had been fired from her White House role, not from the CIA itself. She later resigned from the agency.

Despite her experience under Trump, Curlee made sure to praise Pence for treating her “with great dignity,” even recalling an invitation to a Christmas party thrown by the former vice president and a moment where he encouraged her mother, who had taken some issue with her daughter’s transition, to be proud of her.

In her Atlantic article, the former CIA officer provided more detail, writing, “Trump officials had known I was trans from day one. This hadn’t been an issue until it was public — and then nothing else I’d done mattered. Not my service, not my war-zone tours, not even which restroom I used.”

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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