A former CIA officer stripped of his security clearance by the Trump administration has announced he’s running for Senate as a Democratic candidate to claim Mitch McConnell’s long-held Kentucky seat.
Joel Willett launched his candidacy Wednesday, weeks after director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revoked his clearance as part of a purge targeting 37 current and former intelligence officials.
“I’ve seen firsthand how the Trump administration and their far-right allies are trying to weaponize the government against anyone who disagrees with them,” Willett said in his announcement. “That just made me more determined to run.”
Following the revocation, Willett faced attacks from Trump-aligned online activists such as Laura Loomer and received death threats, according to his campaign. Gabbard at the time accused those targeted of “politicizing and manipulating intelligence” but provided no supporting evidence for the claims.
But for Willett, the experience has crystallized his concerns about democratic institutions and the treatment of public servants who express dissenting views.
“It’s not lost on me that this happened exactly two weeks after my name surfaced as a potential candidate,” Willett said in an early September interview with the Guardian, calling the revocations “a nakedly political act that is intended to silence dissent”.
Willett said it’s the Trump administration that’s politicizing intelligence agencies, which “is erasing over 100 years of progress on professionalizing our civil service”.
“At the current rate we’re going, the country that I swore an oath to will be unrecognizable in five to 10 years,” he said.
The 41-year-old served at the White House situation room after stints with the army, FBI and CIA before leaving government in 2015. He has since worked in the private sector while occasionally criticizing Trump’s approach to intelligence agencies, including signing a letter in 2019 calling for Trump’s impeachment.
Like other millennial upstarts on the Democratic roster seeking their state’s senate seat, including Maine’s Graham Platner and Texas’ James Talarico, Willett’s early messaging hones in on economic inequality. In his campaign launch, he criticized budget legislation that will “transfer $4tn out of much needed government services [and] put it in the pockets of billionaires”.
But he also has his eye on fentanyl addiction, as both his parents battled with the drug and his father died of an overdose in 2019. “Fentanyl didn’t care that I worked at the White House,” he said. “It affects all families, truly without fear or favor.”
Willett enters what is sure to be a closely watched race for a seat being vacated by McConnell, who held it for over 40 years, in a state that has voted for Republicans for the senate for the last few decades. But Kentucky in recent years has been friendly to less-ideologically focused lawmakers: voters in the state twice elected Andy Beshear, a Democratic governor, during the Trump era, as well as Republicans Thomas Massie, who is facing the president’s wrath in his coming re-election bid, and occasional Trump critic senator Rand Paul.
