Former intelligence personnel angered by President Donald Trump’s dismantling of DEI programs are already looking toward a return to government once his administration is gone. The group gathered at a gay karaoke bar outside Washington for a party advertised with a tongue-in-cheek invitation to join a “Deep State plot against the regime.” The gathering honored trans former CIA analyst Julia Curlee and included LGBTQ intelligence officers who claim they were “silenced or purged” by the Trump administration. Intelligence reporter Sasha Ingber described a group that was angry, determined and waiting for another opportunity to enter government service.
Curlee spent approximately 25 years working in national security, including assignments in the Middle East and South Asia and a position in the CIA’s China Mission Center. Curlee also served as a National Security Council director under both former President Joe Biden and Trump and previously delivered the President’s Daily Brief to then-Vice President Mike Pence. Curlee was removed from the White House during Trump’s second term, returned to the CIA and later resigned from the agency.
Ingber attended the Friday-night event, which she described as her first “CIA resignation party.” The bar, located roughly a mile from the Pentagon, was decorated with streamers, mannequins and disco balls as Curlee stood surrounded by friends and supporters. Also present was Meredith Cavan, the former chief of the CIA’s Southeast Asia Department, who joined Ingber for a karaoke duet. Cavan previously told Ingber that she had used karaoke with foreign intelligence officials while conducting intelligence diplomacy.
The invitation urged guests to “Come join the Deep State plot against the regime,” according to the Daily Caller, which reported that the line was intended as a joke. Ingber’s account, however, described a genuine expectation among former intelligence personnel that they could return after Trump leaves office. She detected anger over the administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, along with determination to rebuild some form of the institutional support Trump eliminated.
In her account of the gathering, Ingber said the attendees were experiencing more than sadness over being pushed out of the intelligence community. She described “an anger at being reduced to ‘DEI’” and at losing the ability to continue using their experience inside government. Ingber detected what she called a “patient but razor-like resoluteness” among those in attendance. The former officials, she said, remained focused on “justice and the job.”
Ingber made the group’s plans for a possible return more explicit in a video accompanying her report. She said the former personnel believed that “once this administration is out,” conditions would change and they would “have a shot again.” Ingber acknowledged that the former LGBTQ employee resource group might not be rebuilt exactly as it was, but said attendees expected another structure to take its place. “There will be a way for them, if they want, to come back,” she said.
Curlee recently presented a detailed account of the dispute in an essay published by The Atlantic. Curlee said Trump officials knew about the former analyst’s transgender status from the beginning of the administration, but the situation changed after activist Laura Loomer posted about a transgender “Biden holdover” in the NSC intelligence office and asked readers to identify that person. “This hadn’t been an issue until it was public—and then nothing else I’d done mattered,” Curlee wrote. After being removed from the White House, Curlee said she spent three days helping the administration finish its budget and transfer the intelligence portfolio.
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Curlee returned to the CIA following the White House dismissal but eventually decided to resign. According to the essay, the agency had banned its LGBTQ employee group, and Pride flags that had flown for decades were gone. Curlee described drafting a two-sentence Pride Month message to colleagues before deleting it out of concern that somebody would report the email. That incident, Curlee said, convinced the former analyst that it was time to resign from the agency.
The event therefore amounted to more than a farewell party for former intelligence personnel. Ingber described attendees who remained angry about Trump’s DEI crackdown, expected a future administration to reverse course and believed they could eventually return to government. “It was an uncanny moment for me to realize that this fight, this DEI battle, if that’s what you want to reduce it to, is not over,” she said.