Just a few short weeks ago, Yevgeny Prigozhin marched across Russia threatening, if not the nation’s seat of government, then at least the credibility of President Vladimir Putin’s regime. Putin made the mistake of allowing a competing power pole to emerge in his country, something he did out of necessity given the inadequate state of his armed forces at the beginning of the war.

Many Americans feel confident that nothing like that could ever happen in the U.S. The image of rogue military units marching on Washington is too strange for most. But the fact is, rogue parties have managed to wield unelected power without their own mercenary army, combining the propagandistic cunning of Putin and the destabilizing brazenness of Prigozhin.

America’s Prigozhin is not a single person—though names like John Brennan and James Comey rise to the surface—it is a subterranean ecosystem of permanent national security bureaucrats. In the wake of their attempts to subvert the Trump administration, we are left with an American regime that is troubled by alarming legitimacy issues and a dangerous gap between our foreign policy establishment’s wishes and what the American people will support when push finally comes to shove.

The attempt by our national security leaders to blame these issues on the rise of populism is predictable. They see the American people as failing them, not the other way around.

The interference of current and former intelligence agency and military officials in our domestic politics is now a crisis, open and ongoing. Russia deals with ex-spies and former officials very efficiently, but extrajudicial killing is not an example the U.S. should emulate. However, the national security state has crossed a Rubicon by entering domestic politics, and we must respond in a fashion that deters future Brennans and Comeys.

While we know as a matter of record that Brennan and others sought to throw the results of a presidential election in partnership with the mainstream media, some Americans are still waking up to the extent to which the national security state has an iron grip on our national discourse. The pioneers of censorship and deplatforming were our intelligence agencies, collaborating with corporate interests to influence public perception and punish those who didn’t toe their preferred line. None of that is now disputable, and the mistrust of both elections and elites was a predictable consequence.

They have revealed themselves as partisans, not apolitical institutionalists as they claim. They are also historically corrupt: either being paid for back-room representation by foreign countries or building personal brands as media stars with book deals, board seats, and boats. This matters even more in a world of rising international instability, where the spillover effects of the Ukraine war—which they cheer—begin to rudely assert themselves.

This corruption is more pernicious, and signals something more serious, than the typical and tolerated congressman or bureaucrat with a second home on the Eastern Shore. It is the type of corruption seen in countries where the president’s son gets a slap on the wrist despite video evidence of his guilt, and a campaign to decapitate his political adversary unfolds via coordinated moves by prosecutors with different authorities but one shared goal. We live in an era of massive domestic misinformation campaigns, like the fifty-one intelligence officials who signed the Hunter Biden laptop letter, with little fear of reprisal.

After 9/11, we grew the responsibilities and power of our civilian intelligence professionals and military leaders, and lionized them in film, never stopping to ask ourselves what they would do with that accumulated power. We now know the predictable answer, not because they are evil, but because they are human.

They have abused their power. That is not up for debate. Brennan and other officials have hurt the United States far more than Yevgeny Prigozhin hurt Russia. They have devolved into rank partisan activists and protectors of the old order, equating the maintenance of their system with the protecting of “our democracy.”

What we need now is a campaign to tame and shame. To tame these officials, we first need to mandate broader public disclosures when former public officials and others represent foreign government interests. Americans deserve to know who represents our adversaries, and to know if a person they hear on cable news or whose op-ed they see in the newspaper is on a foreign government’s payroll.

The legislature should thus pass the Foreign Agents Disclosure and Registration Enhancement Act currently in Congress. They should mandate more frequent reporting than the status quo of every six months, which is merely a recap of information in an already publicly available database. The report should be provided to Congress monthly, and the names of these individuals should be read aloud to become part of the congressional record. Ideally, news networks would voluntarily disclose the financial ties of their guests on the chyron underneath their supposed credentials. This is especially needed when the guests sit on the boards of companies for whose positions they are advocating. But that is likely too much to expect of American news media.

Next, the legislature needs to begin the hard work of winding down the censorship apparatus largely maintained by DHS and the FBI in conjunction with major tech companies. For those who may not have followed the story closely, the major tech companies—under pressure from left-wing legislators—stood up portals so that bureaucrats could flag your individual social media posts on a wide variety of topics. Those bureaucrats then used these portals to have speech removed and suppressed, and even paid the social media companies for doing the work of censorship that, by any reading of the First Amendment, they themselves could not do.

Congress must ban the FBI from accessing social media material in a formal capacity—even when willingly posted on popular platforms—unless part of an investigation into a specific criminal complaint. Further, Congress should dramatically restrict the ability of federal agencies to access social media information and accounts. It can use the language in a recent federal court injunction, since stayed, that seeks to bar specific federal officials from communication with social media companies as a partial guide. We don’t need a court case; we need Congress. It should also mandate that the “trusted partner” portals used by federal agencies to flag speech they don’t like be discontinued and mandate the release of all materials from the government’s side of these interactions.

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We can no longer tolerate a security apparatus that would horrify the Founders. We cannot and should not prevent former officials from speaking freely in media—nor should we emulate a Russian solution to this problem. But the status quo of a deep state that places its thumb on the scale does not work either. Curtailing it will require a shift in cultural perspective to the belief that those who politicize their public service must be exposed and shamed.

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s coup was quickly dealt with in Putin’s Russia, but in the U.S., we are still catching up to the betrayals of our former intelligence community officials who meddled in our domestic political process. Revealing what more they have done is the hard work of journalism, and we must hope that enough independent journalists are working to uncover what appears inevitable: further shocking disclosures, more past evidence of meddling, and surely efforts already underway to shape the outcome in November 2024.

But even as new disclosures come to light, for Brennan, Comey, and the others, they have already earned their shame.