The CIA Sisterhood of Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin
How Rising New Stars of the 'Centrist Democrat' Wing are Pushing a Deep State Agenda
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.
Abigail Spanberger is a centrist Democrat and former U.S. representative from Virginia’s 7th District who seems to be gliding to an easy victory in November against Republican Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears. In its reports on Spanberger, Restoration News has showed that Spanberger’s vaunted “centrism” is really a close alliance with corporate monopolist money, which, as two other recent Restoration News reports revealed, is a feature not a bug of the party’s post-2024 political “re-set.”
But Spanberger’s links to entities tied to government largesse go deeper than corporations. What remains oddly unnoticed by mainstream media, even as it is constantly discussed, are Spanberger’s links, and the links of her fellow rising Democratic star and newly elected Sen. Elissa Slotkin (MI), to the national security state.
There’s nothing secret or even indirect about Spanberger’s and Slotkin’s links. They’re both, unprecedentedly, former CIA officers who entered politics. They’ve been endorsed based on their service by members of the intelligence community; they advertise their service as proof of their governing bona fides; and their service has been a staple of their media coverage. But this media coverage is, incredibly, both omnipresent and superficial: Reporters are regurgitating the same triangle of facts at the expense of digging deeper or wider.
What actually doing this digging reveals is a disturbing truth hidden in plain sight. Spanberger and Slotkin are bringing discredited methods, practitioners, and policies, for the first time, directly from the intelligence world into the political arena. They are doing this with the direct and indirect support of intelligence operators and in the service of maintaining the national security state against the pressures of popular politics and public opinion.
The Political Debut of Intelligence Operatives…
From the start of their political careers, Spanberger’s and Slotkin’s images have been garlanded with their intelligence service. Both entered politics in 2018, the first national election after President Trump’s surprise presidential win, as part of what NBC called a “new mission” among intelligence officers to combat President Trump’s “refusal to embrace fully the conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election” and to “restor[e] respect for the agencies they gave so much of themselves to.”
In January, 2019, when both women were sworn in, the Washington Post ran in its “Local” section a piece on Spanberger and Slotkin headlined “When ex-spies go rogue by becoming lawmakers,” then adapted the story for its “Gender and Identity” section with the headline “She used to be a spy. Now she’s a lawmaker.” In May 2019, the New York Times reported that Spanberger and Slotkin had joined two newly elected Democratic representatives, women veterans of the Navy and Army, to form “‘the Service First Women’s Victory Fund.’” The Fund, the Times reported, “will raise money for new female Democratic candidates with national security backgrounds” in partnership with “New Politics, a bipartisan organization that recruits candidates from the military and intelligence communities.”
Spanberger’s and Slotkin’s identification with intelligence and national security issues has continued over the years. When Spanberger ran in (and won) her last election, in 2022, she received the endorsement of “more than 200 retired military leaders and national security officials” from “National Security Leaders for America (NSL4A)” including “Republicans, Independents, and Democrats.” When Slotkin won the election for Senate in 2024, a prominent intelligence analyst named Larry Pfeiffer posted on X:
And to think I knew her as that bright young woman helping [Director] John Negroponte in those heady early days of the [Office of the Director of National Intelligence]! Hard fought and well-deserved win. Do us intel types proud in the US Senate.
Interviewed this past spring in The New Yorker, Slotkin made clear that being an “intel type,” first at the CIA and then the Pentagon, was part of her centrist brand:
…I ran a big office at the Pentagon. If you had said to me, “Hey, we’ve got to make an eight-per-cent cut”—I know exactly where I’d cut. This idea that there’s no fat on the bone is not accurate. But what I cannot subscribe to is the completely reckless way they’re going about this.
Spanberger, for her part, recently received a $500,000 donation for her gubernatorial run from the left-leaning veterans’ group VoteVets, the largest in the group’s history, based on her CIA service. This earned Spanberger an article in the New York Times, which noted per an interview with VoteVets that “600,000 veterans and 120,000 active-duty service members live in Virginia.”
…and What the Coverage Obscures
What this coverage conflates is more instructive than what it includes.
What it conflates is military veterans, who carried out commands in places like Iraq and Libya, with those with whom the commands originate: Intelligence operators. These are people like Elissa Slotkin or Abigail Spanberger, sitting in rooms sifting through intelligence then making recommendations to the White House. Slotkin and Spanberger have said as much themselves, when they were interviewed together by the establishment-friendly podcast “Lawfare” (in a segment titled “Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin from CIA to Congress”). According to Slotkin, whose CIA focus was Iraq, “a lot of CIA analysis helped President Bush” decide on his strategy, sometimes with direct briefs from Slotkin and other analysts to the President.
For many Americans, including those who voted for President Trump’s non-interventionist policies, this record would open a candidate up to skepticism. But, in Slotkin’s and Spanberger’s eyes, it equips them with special skills for governing. Slotkin tells interviewers that she “still thinks the same way about solving problems as she did when she worked for the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Defense Department”: “My job is to identify real threats and go after threats” and “‘I’m not going to spend a ton of time on things that I believe are exaggerated threats.”
Spanberger’s television spots begin with references to her service: “At CIA we had one mission, to serve and protect America . . . taking on personal risk to keep our country safe. In Congress, I have the same mission.” Her website discusses how she moved from a job “understand[ing] the threats facing the United States” to addressing the “division in our communities” she saw at home.
Spanberger’s and Slotkin’s colleagues share their self-assessment. Last year, when Spanberger went to Quantico for a public sit-down with the director of the Defense Counterintelligence and Surveillance Agency, the Agency’s website reported that:
Director David Cattler…emphasiz[ed] the significance of having a member of congress with firsthand experience in the intelligence community. “It’s great to speak to someone on the Hill, especially a congressperson who has that personal experience with our business,” Cattler said. “It helps the conversation and gets our message across a bit better.”
Politicians “getting the message out” on behalf of defense and intelligence operators is not what the founders intended—in fact it’s pretty much the opposite. But even more concerning is the reality of this representation, because representing these operators means empowering the system that’s empowering them: national security agencies and weapons and intelligence contractors.
Dependents of the Intelligence State
The most obvious cases in point, astonishingly, are Spanberger’s and Slotkin’s husbands (in Slotkin’s case her ex), as well as Slotkin’s top donor.
When he is not actively involved in his wife’s campaigns, Adam Spanberger is lead software engineer at L3 Harris Technologies. L3 Harris is a 130-year old defense contracting company operating out of Northern Virginia and a heavy political donor to a bipartisan roster of incumbent, establishment-friendly politicians, including top contributions in 2022 and 2024 to Elissa Slotkin.
Dave Moore, whom Slotkin recently divorced, is on the payroll of Emissary LLC, a management consulting company through which he works for the Department of Defense. Tellingly, this information was not included in his tax returns after 2020 until reporters unearthed it, at which point he amended the returns.
Then there is Jerry Hollister, a top donor to Slotkin’s campaign and, in the immediate aftermath of her divorce, her landlord. Hollister is the chief operating officer and director of government relations at Niowave, Inc., a Lansing-based pharmaceutical company with contracts with the federal government. This included contracts with weapons providers including Boeing to deliver products to the Pentagon.
But these are not the only players heavily invested in Spanberger’s and Slotkin’s rise.
Among the corporate donors that Restoration News revealed to be funding Spanberger’s gubernatorial campaign is David C. Frederick. Frederick works at the elite boutique law firm Keller, Hansen, Todd, Fiegel, Frederick. Keller Hansen is the former employer, as Restoration News has reported, of James Boasberg: the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court whose rulings have discouraged government transparency in deference to the CIA. What’s more, Keller Hansen is currently arguing in front of Boasberg in federal court on behalf of Meta, which has Pentagon and CIA contracts. And Keller Hansen has fed the CIA its chief legal counsel.
Equally connected to the national security apparatus is New Politics, the fund the New York Times reported is backing Spanberger and Slotkin. One of New Politics’ top donors is the hedge fund Baupost Group, whose founder and CEO funds nonprofits which encourage intervention abroad. Another is Amos B. Hostetter, the founder of Continental Cablevision, who has also donated extensively to the Lincoln Project, the “moderate Republican” anti-Trump group which supports interventionist policies abroad. Hostetter is also a donor to VoteVets, the other organization the Times reported backing Spanberger; and so is David desJardins, the founder DJ Ventures, an influential consulting and development firm, who made his name and career as one of the first 20 engineers at Google, which has contracts with the CIA and Pentagon.
Then, finally, there are the national security links of two top Slotkin donors. One is the elite law firm WilmerHale, which, as Restoration News has reported in the past, is a top haven for Democratic national security officials. The other, the University of Michigan, is from Slotkin’s state of Michigan but also has heavy ties to the defense industry: indeed, since the 1960s, it has been a hub of national security, a “Pentagon Midwest,” thanks to heavy funding for defense and intelligence research.
The Wider Defense-Intelligence Play…
These mutually beneficial relationships exist in a wider context of defense-and-intelligence players, most of whom are connected to each other. Instructive in this regard is Slotkin’s election night intelligence cheerleader Larry Pfeiffer, one of the 51 signatories of the now-famous “Spies Who Lie” letter in 2020 casting unwarranted doubt on the veracity of linking the Biden Family to suspect private deals with Ukraine and China. Pfeiffer is a national security lifer, and his career is a literal roadmap of how the military-industrial-intelligence complex works.
Before serving as Chief of Staff at the CIA, Pfeiffer worked at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under longtime intelligence operative (and Elissa Slotkin’s former superior) John Negroponte. He then went to work for the ex-Department of Homeland Security Director , Michael Chertoff, at the private security contracting firm the Chertoff Group, whose clients include the Supreme Court and the Defense Department. Based on this resume, Pfeiffer joined the boards of two weapons and security contractors, ZP and Valiant. He also became the director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and National Security at George Mason University—a center named for and founded by former head of the NSA and CIA and another signatory on the “Spies who Lie” letter, Michael Hayden.
Additionally, Pfeiffer contributes to Lawfare, the national security-focused media nonprofit where Spanberger and Slotkin were interviewed in an event cosponsored with the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and National Security. Lawfare, in turn, was founded by Benjamin Wittes, who has been called “the bard of the deep state” thanks to his Washington connections, and has come to Spanberger’s political defense in the past—investigating what it called government involvement in a Republican information campaign run against her in 2018.
This is a small world, the smallness of which is illustrated by a single, not-unusual evening in 2019 when its denizens came together, creating a microcosm of their connections and dependencies. Michael Hayden, Pfeiffer’s current employer and a principal at the Chertoff Group, where Pfeiffer worked, received 2019’s William H. Webster Award, named after the former FBI and CIA director, at the Spy Museum of Washington, D.C, which often partners on events with Benjamin Wittes’ Lawfare. This awards ceremony was attended by, among others, Abigail Spanberger, who served in the CIA when Hayden directed it; Michael Chertoff; Elissa Slotkin’s former DHS superior John Negroponte; and the evening’s emcee, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. The evening’s sponsors included Beacon Global Strategies, an influential Washington intelligence consultancy; and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s technological investment arm which has made a fortune in Ukraine on drones during the conflict there.
In one light, this is a stodgy commemorative affair. On the other, it’s a roadmap of how Washington works: from Hayden and Negroponte, who seeded the careers of Pfeiffer and Slotkin and Spanberger; to their media supporter CNN’s Blitzer, who publicized the “Spies who Lie” letter; to their ultimate backers, Beacon and In-Q-Tel and the other weapons and intelligence contractors which make Washington run off endless intervention and war.
…and the Policies it Promotes
These are some of the people and institutions that made Spanberger’s and Slotkin’s careers, and to whom they’re loyal. Since they’ve been in office, Spanberger and Slotkin have made their legislative names as members of what Politico calls “a gang of national security Democrats” and what the Atlantic—the premier magazine of bipartisan establishment Washington—calls Democrats’ “patriotic vanguard.” Aside from emphasizing the divisive cultural issues that are manna to identity politicker Democrats, they mostly focus on a series of bipartisan political priorities related to national security. These include election security, humane processing of illegal immigrants, information sharing between government agencies, and combating China’s influence on college campuses.
All of these certainly garner some Republican support, but all of them also increase the power of Washington’s security and corporate apparatus. Indeed, a closer read of the bills introduced by Slotkin and Spanberger suggests that they strategically ally with Republicans not to increase security and transparency, but to increase defense and intelligence authority in ways that benefit their backers.
One example is Slotkin’s Synthetic Biology and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients Act; which jumps on the practical necessity, first raised by Trump, of manufacturing more pharmaceuticals in America. This is the kind of bill that directly benefits firms like Novia, Slotkin’s backer—and, given that she introduced the legislation, she has enormous discretion to write it in ways that will help contracts flow to these entrenched interests.
Another is one Slotkin co-sponsored with Spanberger: “Integrating New Technologies to Empower Law Enforcement at Our Borders Act” which “requires the Department of Homeland Security to . . . identify and deploy emerging and advanced technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, automation, and optical radar) to achieve greater situational awareness along the northern and southern U.S. borders between ports of entry.” This is a bill, again, that jumps on a problem President Trump identified—illegal border crossings. But it does this solely to focus on technological fixes that involve contracts with major weapons and technology providers working in fields that a wide array of observers have expressed concerns about empowering sans oversight.
The Real Aim of the Spanberger-Slotkin Op
Tellingly, when it comes to those people who openly challenge intelligence priorities, both Spanberger and Slotkin are vocally opposed. Just two months ago, both used their intelligence service as rhetorical cudgels against Tulsi Gabbard before the Senate vote to confirm her.
“As a former CIA case officer, I saw the men and women of the U.S. intelligence community put their lives on the line every day for this country — and I am appalled at the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to lead DNI,” Spanberger wrote, going on to label Gabbard an “ill-prepared and unqualified” nominee who “traffics in conspiracy theories and cozies up to dictators like Bashar-al Assad and Vladimir Putin.” The fact that Spanberger, who was no longer in Congress at the time of the nomination and was in fact running for Governor of Virginia, felt the imperative and the right to speak up about Gabbard shows just how seriously she takes her intelligence service—and the power of the agency she worked for.
Gabbard, it’s worth noting, is a military veteran who served in the wars the CIA helped create, and has been on record opposing the interventionist and surveillance capacities of the intelligence agencies. As DNI, she has been working to rein in unaccountable intelligence operatives and to push against nuclear proliferation: the ultimate outgrowth of the system of perpetual war that drives military corporate aggrandizement. This oversight is what Spanberger and Slotkin most adamantly reject. (A coming Restoration News report will show that their opposition has a long history.)
This report will show that, since the 1950s, intelligence agencies have preempted political oversight by infiltrating powerful Washington and Washington-adjacent institutions: corporations, consultancies, media, academia. Now, with their authority under threat, the agencies have the benefit of two ex-agents working as powerful politicians; only the second and third ex-agents to take this path in its history: intelligence operatives in Congress and the governorship who want intelligence operatives to run the country.