A former Trump administration figure has come forward to blow the whistle on serious mismanagement at the CIA.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, the daughter-in-law of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is alleging that there was no control over how taxpayer money was being spent at the premier U.S. intelligence service.
Kennedy, who resigned from her post last month, "had broad oversight across the sprawling U.S. intelligence apparatus" and "she served as a deputy director of national intelligence and sat on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board." She also held a position in the Office of Management and Budget, reviewing the financial side of the intelligence community.
And what she says she saw alarmed her.
The intelligence agencies, she argued, “are broken and corrupt and result in domestic political activities that no American would condone.” She cited as an example the recent arrest of a former CIA officer who is accused of stealing 300 gold bars — an incident she says only scratches the surface of the misconduct and mismanagement behind the scenes being kept hidden from the members of Congress allocating money to these agencies.
Previous reporting indicated that Kennedy resigned as a result of disagreements with President Donald Trump over the direction of the Iran war, but she says this is false: on the contrary, she "contended in the Journal interview that Trump was 'future-proofing' against a more protracted conflict with Iran," and credited him with containing the war before it got worse.
The CIA disputes Kennedy's allegations, with a spokesperson saying the agency "keeps its oversight committees fully and currently informed regarding agency resources and expenditures,” and any insinuation to the contrary is "totally false."
