Former spies threw a resignation party at a gay karaoke bar decorated with disco balls and mannequins.
That sentence is real. Every word of it. A group of ex-intelligence officers who got bounced from government over Trump's elimination of DEI programs gathered at a watering hole roughly a mile from the Pentagon to sing songs, vent frustrations, and apparently strategize their eventual return to federal service. The invite literally told people to "Come join the Deep State plot against the regime," which organizers later clarified was a joke, as reported here. Though the vibe inside suggested nobody was entirely kidding.
The guest of honor was Julia Curlee, a trans former CIA analyst who spent roughly 25 years in national security. We're talking Middle East assignments, South Asia postings, work in the CIA's China Mission Center, and a gig delivering the President's Daily Brief directly to then-Vice President Mike Pence. This person literally handed state secrets to the second most powerful human on the planet every morning. Now? Standing under streamers at a karaoke night.
Curlee got removed from the White House during Trump's second term after activist Laura Loomer publicly posted about a transgender "Biden holdover" in the NSC intelligence office and asked her followers to identify the person. According to Curlee's own essay in The Atlantic, Trump officials knew about the analyst's transgender status from the jump. "This hadn't been an issue until it was public, and then nothing else I'd done mattered," Curlee wrote.
After getting booted from the White House, Curlee actually spent three days helping the administration wrap up its budget and hand off the intelligence portfolio. Talk about professionalism. Then came a return to the CIA, where things had also changed dramatically. The agency had banned its LGBTQ employee group. Pride flags that had reportedly flown for decades vanished. Curlee described drafting a two-sentence Pride Month message to coworkers, then deleting the whole thing out of fear someone would snitch about the email. That moment sealed the resignation.
Also performing karaoke that evening was Meredith Cavan, the former chief of the CIA's Southeast Asia Department, who reportedly once used karaoke as an actual intelligence diplomacy tool with foreign officials. So apparently belting out "Don't Stop Believin'" can be both a career move and a coping mechanism.
Intelligence reporter Sasha Ingber attended what she called her first ever "CIA resignation party" and described the crowd as furious, determined, and playing the long game. She noted what she called a "patient but razor-like resoluteness" among attendees. They weren't just mourning lost jobs. They were angry about being "reduced to DEI" and losing the chance to apply decades of experience inside government.
The former officers believe that once this administration wraps up, they'll get another shot at public service. Ingber acknowledged the old LGBTQ employee resource group probably won't come back in its original form, but said attendees expected some new structure to replace it.
"This fight, this DEI battle, if that's what you want to reduce it to, is not over," Ingber said. So the Deep State, it turns out, has a playlist.
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