A video clip resurfaced Tuesday of Homeland actress Claire Danes telling CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert in February 2018 that the “intelligence community was…allying itself with journalists” during its battles with the Trump administration. Homeland ran on Showtime, starting during the Obama administration in 2011 and ending in 2020 during Trump’s first term.
Danes told Colbert that each year during the show’s run the cast, writers and producers would spend a week in Washington, D.C. for a “spy camp” with “real spooks”, meeting at a Georgetown club with people from the intelligence community, the State Department and the media.
Danes said the relationship between the Trump administration and the intelligence community soured at the start of 2017 (“there wasn’t great faith in the very beginning”) and that the spooks started allying with journalists. (Note: The alliance started earlier with the 2016 Russia hoax Steele Dossier and the early January 2017 intel-fed Washington Post hit that helped to take out Trump’s first national security advisor, Gen. Michael Flynn.)
A clip excerpted from a longer discussion on the subject by Danes and Colbert was posted by “The Chief Nerd” on X Tuesday morning and has garnered well over 4 million views as of Tuesday evening:
Colbert cuts off Claire Danes before she spills the tea about the intelligence community “allying itself” with the legacy media during Trump’s first term
Watch until the end… pic.twitter.com/c4q7VUXaFe
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) December 24, 2024
The complete interview, as posted to the Late Show’s YouTube page on February 6, 2018, shows Danes and Colbert having a little longer discussion about the distrust between the Trump administration and the intelligence community:
Excerpt from auto-generated transcript via YouTube (corrected by TGP):
Stephen Colbert: So one of the things that you do—do you do this every season—where you get to spend some time with actual spies?
Claire Danes: We do. We do. It’s like the coolest part of my job.
Stephen: Who sets that up? Who calls the CIA and says, “We’d like to come in and hang out with you guys”?
Claire: Yeah, so, Henry Bromell, one of our founding fathers of Homeland—one of our writers—passed away a number of years ago. But his dad was in the CIA, and his cousin, who was a mentee of his father, was also in the CIA. A very accomplished person there. He recently retired. In his retirement, he curates this week-long “spy camp” for us producers and writers.
Stephen: Really?
Claire: Yeah. So, we park ourselves in a club in Georgetown and talk to real spooks—people in the intelligence community, the State Department, journalists, and people who really know this world.
Stephen: What do they tell you? What’s the most surprising thing they’ve shared about their jobs or something you’d need to know?
Claire: Every year, it’s different, right? We’ve been at this for a while, and the climate has changed. But this year, it was all about the distrust between the administration and the intelligence world. The intelligence community was suddenly kind of allying itself with journalists, which usually they’re not such good friends…
Stephen: How long ago did you start shooting this season?
Claire: We started in late August, September.
Stephen: Because things didn’t really go south between the present, real administration and the intelligence community until the fall.
Claire: There wasn’t great faith at the very beginning, I don’t think.
Stephen: Yeah.
Claire: Really?
Stephen: The open hostility really started this past fall, I think.
Claire: Yeah, well, I think maybe it wasn’t so open, but it was real.
Stephen: And these people knew about it.
Claire: Yeah.
Stephen: And they told you about it, and you put it in a script.
Claire: Yeah. I mean, the administration wasn’t so eager to populate, you know, the State Department.
Stephen: I’d like to figure out what I’m going to make jokes about in about four months. Could I read any of the scripts you’ve got coming up? It would save so much time.
Claire: It’s not an exact mirror, but it is riffing on what is happening. It’s like a parallel vision.
A reminder of the axis President Trump faced in his first term: The intelligence community, the media and Hollywood, all colluding together to circumvent the democratic process and take him down.
