In the latest episode of the Sentinel, Peter Mina interviews Ambassador Eric Rubin, a 38‑year Foreign Service veteran, former president of American Foreign Service Association and current Steady State board member. Rubin describes how the Trump administration has dismantled the nonpartisan career foreign service, destroyed employee associations and affinity groups, and replaced them with a loyalty‑based “spoils system.”

View the episode transcript.

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Guest info: Ambassador Eric Rubin is a senior fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and a member of the board of directors of The Steady State. A career Foreign Service officer for 38 years, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria (2016‑2019) and was elected president of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) from 2019 to 2023. He has held key assignments in Ukraine, Russia, Thailand, and Honduras. You can follow his writing and speaking engagements on LinkedIn and through the American Academy of Diplomacy, where he also serves on the board.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.

The U.S. intelligence system was built to deliver hard truths to presidents, not affirm their instincts. Donald Trump is eroding the very foundation that makes American intelligence effective—and trustworthy.

Speaking truth to power, providing U.S. presidents with non-partisan, deeply researched intelligence analyses, is America’s original contribution to intelligence. As former CIA historian Donald Steury noted in a 1994 tribute to a man who was there at the onset, Sherman Kent was “perhaps the foremost practitioner of the craft of analysis in American intelligence history.”

Kent, a Yale University history professor, was one of the distinguished scholars who were recruited by the legendary William Donovan to conduct “research and analysis” for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Until his retirement in 1967, Kent played a leading role in developing the culture of intellectual rigor that marks the Central Intelligence Agency’s analytic directorate to this day. In 2000, the CIA established the Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis, where incoming CIA analysts are schooled in the critical importance of continuing the tradition of intellectual honesty, no matter which political party controls the White House. Honoring this tradition has become a very dicey proposition, to put it mildly, given the politicization that has afflicted the Executive Branch, including the U.S. intelligence enterprise, since Donald J. Trump first sought the White House in 2016.

Early in Donald Trump’s second term, May 13, 2025 to be exact, two very senior American intelligence analysts, the Acting Chair of the National Intelligence Council and his deputy, were fired because they were in charge of the NIC when a report about the Venezuelan Group Tren de Aragua upset the president. Trump had asserted that Tren de Aragua was working directly for the Venezuelan government, and the NIC report, correctly, contradicted Trump’s assertion. Because the NIC report directly refuted Trump’s claim, the NIC leadership was perceived as somehow politically disloyal to Trump.

Even worse, other officials from the intelligence community are being threatened with criminal prosecution for their diligence in uncovering the many ways that Russia’s Vladimir Putin, himself a former intelligence operative, has played Donald Trump over the past decade.

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, came to her job with a reputation for obsequiousness towards Putin. Gabbard, like Trump, has even inferred that former President Barack Obama is a traitor. Pressed during her Senate confirmation hearings last year, she promised not to favor Russia if confirmed. But in March, Gabbard’s office, releasing its unclassified 2026 Annual Threat Assessment, dropped the ODNI’s previous mentions of Russia’s continuing intelligence operations aimed at dividing the American electorate, while helping Trump. None of the Senate Republicans who voted to confirm Gabbard has expressed any chagrin.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe talks a better game. Writing last December in the CIA’s online publication, Studies in Intelligence, first nurtured in the 1950s by Sherman Kent, Ratcliff penned a glowing tribute to William Webster. The only man to have led the CIA and the FBI, Webster had recently died at age 101. Ratcliff rightly noted that Webster personified integrity and loyalty to our Constitution.

Although he denies it, Ratcliffe has a record of politicizing intelligence that dates to 2020-2021, when he was Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. Ratcliffe raised concerns when he privately shared cherry-picked intelligence files with congressional Republicans who were supporting Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. As John Sipher, a former CIA station chief in Moscow (and a member of The Steady State), observed in a New York Times Op-Ed, such moves had raised concerns about Trump’s aim to create “a politicized national security apparatus that can serve as a personal weapon for the president.”

More recently, as Trump’s current CIA chief, Ratcliffe has released selective intelligence documents aimed (unconvincingly) at portraying former CIA Director John Brennan and former director of the FBI James Comey as having presided over a “corrupt” and “politically charged” process involving their investigations of how Russia’s leader had favored Trump in his 2016 presidential race against Hilary Clinton. One revealing example: Ratcliffe went on Fox News last August, smiling broadly as he told host Maria Bartiromo that US intelligence had long known of a “Hillary Clinton plan to falsely accuse Donald Trump of Russia collusion, to vilify and smear him.” Imagine how Putin must have enjoyed seeing the head of America’s CIA infer that Hillary Clinton, not him, had interfered in an American election!

One can easily imagine the choice words that Sherman Kent, who, despite his Ivy League credentials, was known to have a salty tongue, would have had for Ratcliffe’s and Gabbard’s political posturing. And Kent surely would have recognized the difficulties in trying to speak truth to a narcissistic president like Trump, who boasts that he trusts his gut more than expert analyses.

Kent would surely have been deeply shocked at Gabbard’s response when asked by lawmakers whether American intelligence had warned Trump that Tehran posed an “imminent threat” to our country. “The only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the President.”

Kent had warned in his 1949 seminal Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy: “When intelligence producers realize that there is no sense in forwarding to a consumer knowledge which does not correspond to his preconceptions, then intelligence is through.”

Greg Rushford is a former senior congressional aide (defense & intelligence) and a former Washington-based journalist who specialized in the nexus between national security and global trade politics. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.

In this podcast episode of “What is Engaged Pluralism Podcast,” Kimberly Williams Brown of Vassar College Executive Director of The Steady State, Steven Cash, as he discusses an earlier disrupted talk at the college. Cash urges civic engagement, dialogue, and constitutional literacy as he warns that rising political polarization and attempts to control speech, whether by protesters or government, reflect broader risks to pluralism and democratic norms.

Please also see a timestamped, AI-generated conversational transcript of this episode here.

Steven A. Cash served as a prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office before joining the CIA in 1994 as Assistant General counsel and subsequently serving as an intelligence officer in the Directorate of Operations. In 2001 he joined the Senate Select committee on Intelligence as Counsel and designee-staffer to Senator Diane Feinstein). He later served as a senior staffer in the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security and the Department of Energy. In the private sector he has advised on national security, counterintelligence, and technology policy and served on the Biological Sciences Experts Group under the Director of National Intelligence. Mr. Cash is currently the Executive Director of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.

An abridged version of the author’s “Emergency Planning: The president is Preparing to Challenge 2026 Midterms. The Country Can Still Act to Protect Them,.” Published by The Washington Spectator

You don’t need certainty about how a crisis unfolds to know preparation is essential.

Most Americans have never heard of Presidential Emergency Action Documents.

Known as PEADs, they are secret directives prepared by presidents for catastrophic national emergencies: war, cyberattack, mass unrest, infrastructure collapse, or threats to continuity of government. Their contents remain classified. But declassified materials and historical records show that emergency planning has long contemplated extraordinary executive powers: detention outside ordinary criminal process, control of transportation and communications, seizure of facilities, deployment of federal personnel inside the United States, and temporary concentration of power in the executive branch during periods of declared crisis.

Under normal circumstances, these authorities are contingency planning.

Under abnormal political circumstances, they could become something else.

President Trump enters the 2026 midterms facing the real possibility of losing one or both houses of Congress. A Democratic victory would likely bring investigations, subpoenas, aggressive oversight, and perhaps impeachment proceedings. Trump’s conduct after losing in 2020—pressuring state officials, refusing to concede, seeking to block certification, and continuing to claim elections he loses are rigged—suggests he does not necessarily regard adverse electoral outcomes as politically final if other instruments of power remain available.

Now imagine a plausible post-election scenario.

Democrats appear to win the House, maybe the Senate too. Trump declares the results fraudulent in selected jurisdictions and refuses to recognize key outcomes while federal investigations proceed. Republican allies in Congress insist disputed seats cannot be recognized until allegations of fraud, foreign interference, cyber manipulation, or domestic disorder are fully reviewed.

Millions of Americans would understand what was happening. They would protest.

That is where emergency powers could become decisive.

If protests spread—and if some become violent, or were portrayed as violent—the White House would declare a national emergency. Federal agencies would move not simply against protesters, but against organizers, donors, lawyers, labor networks, nonprofits, digital platforms, and elected allies accused of supporting disorder, insurrection, or interference with constitutional order. Arrests would begin. Funding would be frozen. Communications would be disrupted. Leaders could be detained, potentially in the new ICE detention infrastructure, while courts struggle to react and facts are created on the ground.

The theory would be temporary emergency action. The effect could be permanent constitutional damage.

The opposition would be forcibly repressed. Congress would organize under conditions shaped not by the voters’ will alone, but by fear, detention, and coercion. A new Congress would formally exist, but not as an independent branch capable of checking presidential power.

The president would have overturned the election through refusing to seat a Congress he finds contrary to his preferences, and then engineering a sequence of events that transforms his adversaries into what he already refers to as “domestic enemies,” and preventing them from taking power, including, as needed, arresting and imprisoning those who resist.

Could events unfold exactly this way? Scenarios are just scenarios. We cannot know ahead of time exactly which ones will play out in practice, and how. Could some version of it happen? Yes.

Even outside the context of an election crisis, we have already seen the Trump Administration investigate and in some cases actually bring criminal cases against former national security and intelligence officials, former federal law enforcement officials, sitting senators and representatives, state attorneys general, federal financial regulators, military leadership, and at least one sitting judge. The threat of the Trump Administration further criminalizing the opposition in the context of adverse elections, aided by the extraordinary powers of the PEADs, is profound.

Which is why preparation cannot begin in November 2026. It must begin now.

Governors, attorneys general, secretaries of state, legislative leaders, university presidents, labor organizations, business leaders, philanthropies, media organizations, and civic institutions should already be preparing for what happens if emergency powers are invoked after a contested election. That means pre-positioning legal teams in multiple jurisdictions, building communications systems that cannot be easily disrupted, identifying emergency funding for legal defense and civic mobilization, coordinating across state lines, and making public commitments in advance to honor lawfully certified election results.

Emergency planning is not alarmism. It is how democracies make power grabs less likely to succeed.

Jonathan M. Winer is the former Special Envoy for Libya and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Law Enforcement and a Distinguished Diplomatic Fellow at MEI. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.

What happens when the executive branch starts stripping security clearances from private attorneys who represent whistleblowers? Mark Zaid knows firsthand, because Donald Trump put him on a list with Kamala Harris, Liz Cheney, and Joe Biden (among others). In this episode, two former intelligence officers sit down with one of Washington’s most fearless national security lawyers to talk about government secrecy, the difference between a whistleblower and a leaker, and why the judiciary is now the last line of defense.

In this edition of The Steady State Sentinel, co‑hosts Jim Lawler (former CIA officer) and Lauren Anderson (former FBI special agent) welcome Mark S. Zaid, a Washington, D.C. attorney who has spent three decades representing federal employees, intelligence officers, and whistleblowers in some of the country’s most sensitive national security cases.

Zaid founded the James Madison Project in 1998 to reduce government secrecy and promote the Freedom of Information Act. He co‑founded Whistleblower Aid in 2017 to give government employees a lawful path to report wrongdoing without leaking classified information. He was a member of the legal team for the whistleblower whose complaint triggered Donald Trump’s first impeachment. He sued Libya on behalf of Pan Am Flight 103 victims (winning a $2.7 billion settlement) and represented victims of anomalous health incidents, better known as Havana syndrome.

Here is what you need to know from a conversation about trust, retaliation, and the fragility of American democracy;

FOIA Then and Now: More Information, But Slower Than Ever

Zaid has been filing FOIA requests since before the internet. He says technology has been a double‑edged sword.

On one hand, emails and text messages can now be searched and preserved. On the other hand, the sheer volume of electronic records has overwhelmed agencies. Government officials using personal devices for work, whether Hillary Clinton’s email server or Trump aides using private phones, has created a nightmare for transparency.

“The biggest problem is lack of resources,” Zaid says. “There’s not enough money put into an agency’s FOIA program to hire proper staff or purchase proper equipment. The time frame for accessing information has lengthened significantly. I used to tell people we’d resolve a FOIA lawsuit within a year. Now it could be years and years and years.”

Whistleblower vs. Leaker: The Line That Matters

Zaid draws a sharp distinction that the public often blurs.

A leaker, in Washington shorthand, is someone who discloses classified information , what the Espionage Act calls “national defense information.” A whistleblower follows lawful procedures to report wrongdoing to appropriate oversight authorities without breaking the law.

“Ed Snowden to many would be viewed as a whistleblower. But by revealing classified information, under law he’s not a whistleblower. He has no protection whatsoever.”

Zaid helped create Whistleblower Aid to prevent another Snowden. If a government employee comes to him with concerns, he navigates the system to bring those concerns to the right authorities, up to the line, but never across it.

“We don’t want a 29‑year‑old who has barely worked in the federal government to use his own ideological view to just decide, ‘This is what I’m going to do.’”

Snowden took millions of documents, far more than he could have read. He leaked lawful programs, including surveillance of Angela Merkel, which damaged national security and relationships with allies. That, Zaid says, is not whistleblowing.

“I Found Out from the New York Post That the President Was Revoking My Clearance”

In February 2025, Zaid learned from a newspaper that Donald Trump was revoking his security clearance. It took weeks for the government to figure out how to do it. He sued in May. A judge ruled in his favor in December 2025, and he got his clearance back in January 2026. The government has appealed; oral arguments are scheduled for May.

For nine months, Zaid could not represent clients on any classified matter, including two to three dozen victims of Havana syndrome, most of whom are CIA personnel.

“I was being punished like everyone else.” But the public knows who Kamala Harris is, who Joe Biden is, who Liz Cheney is. They get to my name and say, ‘Who the hell is Zaid?’”

The administration’s executive order had stripped clearances from the 51 signatories of the Hunter Biden letter – many of whom had already retired and didn’t even have clearances anymore. Zaid was added weeks later. Why? He was the lawyer for the first impeachment whistleblower.

“Shakespeare wrote ‘let’s kill all the lawyers’, that’s actually a compliment. The lawyers needed to die because they stood in the way of the opponent who wanted to overthrow the king. They need to get rid of us because we uphold the rule of law.”

The Erosion of Norms – and the Fragility of Trust

Zaid distinguishes the second Trump administration from the first. In the first, career professionals like James Mattis would “put the kibosh” on extreme measures. In the second, those guardrails are gone.

“We have really seen how fragile our democracy is. The glue that holds the rule of law together is a water‑erasable marker. It is easy to erase.”

Congress has largely disappeared as a check. The executive branch has made retaliation personal. But the judiciary, including Trump‑appointed judges, has consistently ruled against the administration on due process issues.

That is where Zaid places his hope.

Is It Dangerous to Represent Clients Who Challenge the Executive Branch?

During the first Trump impeachment, Zaid received death threats. The FBI, which he sues all the time, investigated and prosecuted a man who threatened his life. Rush Limbaugh mentioning his name would spike the threats.

In the second administration, the volume of threats has dropped. Zaid thinks it’s because the administration feels it has won and doesn’t need to rally the base against him anymore.

But he is more concerned about his clients.

“I’ve had cases where we kept my involvement hidden because we were worried the client would be retaliated against just because I was the lawyer. I’ve actually told prospective clients: maybe you don’t want to hire me.”

He represents FBI agents who have been fired, and also current employees still working inside the government, watching and documenting, waiting for their line to be crossed.

What He Tells His Students

Zaid teaches at Johns Hopkins University. His students are entering a profession where political retaliation is now a real risk.

“This is a great time to be in law school, to watch how the Constitution actually works or doesn’t work. You can strengthen the system later.”

He advises government employees to decide where their line is – the legal line and the ethical line. Some choose to stay inside to be a voice of reason. Others are documenting everything, waiting for a Democratic Congress in 2027 that might have the power to act.

“I have quite a number of whistleblower clients inside the administration that no one knows about. They haven’t gotten to their line yet.”

What Gives Him Hope

Lauren Anderson asks the episode question: what gives you hope?

Zaid’s answer is immediate and clear.

“The judiciary. The Supreme Court has upheld the rule of law, especially on due process issues. To see judges appointed by President Trump rule against him, that gives me hope. The rule of law still holds.”

Without that, he says, he would be powerless.

“What else am I going to do if I couldn’t count on that? When I see the executive branch do things wrong, illegal, or unethical, I can go to the courts. That is really hopeful.”

Listen and Watch the full Podcast Here:

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.