President Trump has kept lots of constitutional rights activists like me quite busy since his return to the Oval Office. His misuse of federal agents and multiple state National Guard personnel from Red states in Blue cities for pretextual immigration enforcement actions that double as political repression operations has been a particular focus of mine.
But you don’t have to be America’s chief executive in order to have the power to try to violate a citizen’s rights. You can be a career bureaucrat and do it behind a veil of secrecy, believing that your actions will never see the light of day.
Fortunately, and at least occasionally, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and its companion statute, the Privacy Act (PA), can help reveal the dubious or even unlawful actions of those in the Executive branch.
Whereas FOIA is used to get federal records about policies, procedures, organizational structure, and the like released, the PA allows you to ask any federal agency or department for records that mention you by name. This is a story involving how a PA lawsuit exposed extremely questionable conduct by one career bureaucrat at the National Security Agency (NSA). First, some background.
On March, 2, 2017, yours truly authored a piece for the online journal JustSecurity.org, an outlet that focuses on issues at the nexus of national security and the law. That piece went into some detail about pre-9/11 managerial incompetence that contributed to Al Qaeda’s successful attacks on September 11, and the subsequent retaliation against NSA whistleblowers who attempted to expose the truth about how America’s most lethal intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor could’ve been prevented.
What I didn’t learn until just last month was that one NSA official, Patrick Bomgardner, was so outraged by my story – which contained no classified information – that he acted with the apparent intent of getting me prosecuted for my First Amendment protected speech.
And I only learned about Bomgardner’s action thanks to PA litigation I filed against my former employer, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The latest batch of documents released by the CIA in my PA suit in August 2025 revealed that almost three weeks after my JustSecurity piece ran, CIA officials forwarded the piece to Bomgardner at NSA. They did so because what I wrote –even though CIA officials had found no classified information in my story.
Bomgardner’s reply was telling.
“This is no longer a prepublication review. I’m forwarding to our Unauthorized Media Disclosures Working Group for action.
“UMDWG, Please see CIA’s request below regarding the article attached.
“Cheers
“Pat”
Everything I referenced in my JustSecurity piece was unclassified and publicly available, a fact CIA had already established and something Bomgardner could’ve confirmed himself by simply following the links in the piece. Instead, he reflexively engaged in an authoritarian response to my exercise of my constitutional rights, without any pressure or prompting from anyone in his chain of command.
I have a follow up FOIA with NSA asking for records relevant to Bomgardner’s pernicious referral to try to get me prosecuted to see just how far the process actually went. Even so, what Bomgardner did over eight years ago seems rather quaint in our current circumstances.
I want you to imagine federal law enforcement and intelligence services filled at the top and quite a way down into the bureaucracy with people who have that same kind of authoritarian impulse and worldview. Next, imagine that those same authoritarian-minded people were recruited by and answer to a president who daily calls for investigations, fines, firings, lawsuits, or worse against any American individual or organization that opposes his policies.
That is Donald Trump’s federal government in 2025, as the people of Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Boston and other cities can attest. And in the wake of the assassination of right-wing political pugilist Charlie Kirk last week and the regime’s reaction to it, it’s a near certainty that Trump’s campaign of political retribution and repression will intensify.
There is still a way to stop such repression. Senate Democrats could refuse to allow any government funding bill to get a vote.
The federal government runs out of money at midnight on September 30. Senate rules require 60 affirmative votes on a procedural motion to end debate on the underlying bill in order to proceed to a vote on the funding bill itself. If at least 41 Senate Democrats refuse to vote to end debate on a bill to fund the government after September 30, the flow of money to Trump’s political repression machine stops as of October 1.
While it’s true that Trump could declare federal law enforcement personnel “essential workers” and order them to stay on the job conducting ICE raids and politicized investigations of Trump’s “enemies,” but their landlords, mortgage lenders, credit card companies, and gas stations aren’t going to take IOUs because only Congress can appropriate funds, not Trump.
At this point, the choice for Senate Democrats is rather clear: stop funding Trump’s repression machine and have a chance to save the Republic or keep funding it and watch him go after every group and every person who dares to oppose his unconstitutional actions. Both are lousy choices, but one is clearly worse than the other. Such is America in 2025.
Former CIA analyst and ex-House senior policy advisor Patrick G. Eddington is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of The Triumph of Fear: Domestic Surveillance and Political Repression from McKinley Through Eisenhower (GU Press, 2025).
