Amaryllis Fox Kennedy says she stepped down from roles in the Trump administration last month after concluding she couldn’t keep signing checks amid what she described as unchecked taxpayer spending and intelligence agencies’ use of money and gold, and after a
When Amaryllis Fox Kennedy walked away from her Trump administration job last month, she first framed it as a financial decision—time, she said, to return to private life to keep her family financially on track.
In an exclusive interview published Wednesday, she offered a different and far more combustible explanation.
Kennedy, the former intelligence official and the daughter-in-law of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told The Wall Street Journal that she left in part because she believed the intelligence community was using taxpayer funds and gold bullion without meaningful oversight. She said, “I couldn’t keep signing the checks. I would have become complicit.” She added that without “functional oversight of the intelligence community’s ample and unsupervised movement of money and gold. ” the country was “stuck living in something less than the constitutional republic our founders designed.”.
Kennedy’s background is tightly linked to the machinery she says she came to distrust. A former CIA officer, she held multiple posts in the Trump administration. She served as a deputy director of national intelligence. sat on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. and oversaw spending of the CIA and 17 other agencies at the Office of Management and Budget.
In her telling, it wasn’t the mission itself that troubled her. She said some of the intelligence activity she observed was “brilliant. courageous. and everything an American would be proud to fund.” But she contrasted that with other activity she described as “broken and corrupt and result in domestic political activities that no American would condone.” She declined to provide details on national security grounds. but said actors within U.S. intelligence agencies were using “covert resources to affect political outcomes,” according to the account published by the Journal.
She also connected her decision to what she described as obstruction by career intelligence officials. Kennedy said she resigned “once it became clear that certain intelligence agencies were stonewalling elected leaders.”
That accusation landed amid a separate public narrative about why she left. Kennedy dismissed a report from The Washington Post that cited sources saying she quit in part because she disagreed with President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. She told the Journal that the Post report was inaccurate and said she praised Trump for “future-proofing” against a longer conflict.
Her central complaint, she insisted, was not foreign policy. “My concern isn’t about the president’s foreign policy,” she told the Journal. “It’s about the political weaponization of our security services here in the United States.”
The CIA pushed back sharply. In a statement to the Journal, a CIA spokesperson disputed Kennedy’s claims, calling them “totally false,” and adding that “the CIA keeps its oversight committees fully and currently informed regarding agency resources and expenditures.”
Kennedy said she would maintain her seat on the president’s intelligence advisory committee. But she also set a condition for any return to the administration—she said she’d only come back if there was “a genuine appetite to eliminate domestic political abuses” in the intelligence community.
For Kennedy, the decision reads less like a simple career move and more like a line drawn at what she believes is accountability without checks. For the CIA, it is a claim she says is false—one that she argues is contradicted by ongoing oversight and visibility into agency spending and resources.
Amaryllis Fox Kennedy RFK Jr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. CIA deputy director of national intelligence Office of Management and Budget President’s Intelligence Advisory Board intelligence oversight taxpayer funds gold bullion Trump administration war with Iran domestic political activities
Checks? Gold? Sounds like a spy movie not a job.
So she quit because she couldn’t keep signing checks and then says it was unchecked spending? Like… that’s literally what budgets are. Also gold bullion? I dunno if that’s even accurate or just politics.
Wait but she was in charge of intelligence spending right? If she saw it was corrupt, why stay and then blame it on someone else later. I’m not saying she’s lying, but the whole “couldn’t be complicit” thing feels convenient after the fact.
This article is kinda all over the place. First it’s ‘financial decision to keep her family on track’ and then it’s like ‘intelligence using taxpayer money and gold without oversight’ and ‘domestic political activities’?? Okay but aren’t intelligence agencies always spending money, and isn’t oversight like a thing? Kinda feels like she got caught up and now she’s trying to spin it as patriotism.