A career national security bureaucrat unleashed a wave of invective after overhearing a black woman in a Washington, D.C.-area coffee shop saying she planned to vote for former President Donald Trump.
Annetta Catchings, a former Republican candidate for mayor in Alexandria, Virginia, posted video of Patti Morrissey interrupting her private conversation after overhearing Catchings make a pro-Trump remark. Morrissey then went on a diatribe about how Trump is a felon and said “educated” people should not support him, citing her authority as a “35-year national security expert.”
According to a now-deleted LinkedIn profile, Morrissey worked in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the State Department, and the Pentagon through 2019. After online sleuths identified her, Morrissey blamed criticism coming her way on Russia, writing on Facebook that “there is a lot of threatening (most likely Russian) trolling going on right now…make a record of it” before apparently deleting the post.
Catchings wrote on X that Morrissey, seated at a nearby table in an Old Town Alexandria coffee shop, shouted at her after overhearing her say “As a conservative woman I could never vote for Kamala Harris because…”
The video shows Morrissey lecturing: “I’m shocked…. Educated women.”
“Educated? What does educated have to do with it?” someone with Catchings asked.
“It means you understand that someone who is a convicted felon who is a sex offender and accused of espionage, indicted for espionage,” Morrissey said.
“The only people who ever challenge me are white Democrat women,” Catchings replied.
Morrissey then grew angry, shouting “I am a thirty-five year national security expert! National security expert!”
“Oh, you’re so smart,” someone with Catchings said.
An apparent coffee shop worker then intervened, saying “Everyone can believe what they want to believe.”
Morrissey got up and leaned over her and said with disgust: “Absolute denial.”
“As a conservative woman I could never vote for Kamala Harris b/c,,,”
What happened next was 3 separate attacks from this stranger! Her friend had to hold her back. I was called uneducated as she proceeded to give me her resumé.#Unhinged pic.twitter.com/q1jRO5yUNs— Annetta Catchings for Alexandria (@annetta_of) November 1, 2024
Morrissey did not respond to a request for comment. But she wrote on Facebook that “This weekend the trolls taught me: Insisting our next President NOT be convicted of fraud, bribery & sexual assault, and NOT be indicted on espionage charges and of inciting an insurrection makes you a ‘white liberal’ and a ‘racist.’”
After working in federal roles through three years of the Trump administration, Morrissey left government to run a consulting firm called Global Foresight Strategies, which says it “helps government and private sector leadership anticipate and navigate the emerging impacts of global trends on regional security and stability.” Morrissey wrote on Facebook that she would soon be traveling to Ukraine.
“If you think the disinformation has been insane so far, it’s about to get much worse in these last four days,” Morrissey wrote in another Facebook post this week. “There will be an onslaught of lies from our strategic enemies to make it look like our election process is unfair and that the Democrats are cheating. brace yourself and don’t believe a word. And ask yourselves, why has Trump had seven phone calls with Vladimir Putin?”
She also echoed a false claim from CNN that Trump threatened Liz Cheney, misconstruing Trump’s observation that it is easy for politicians to support foreign wars they don’t have to fight in.
Morrissey’s political leanings were no secret during her time in ODNI, which advises the president on national security. She ran for state office in 2001 and 2003, and has continued to mingle with Democrat politicians, posting a photo of her meeting with Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine on September 24.
Trump has repeatedly come under fire for observing that career bureaucrats like Morrissey are largely Democratic partisans, who could interfere with presidents with whom they disagree. Another former top ODNI official, Eugene Vindman, is running for Congress in Virginia as a Democrat. During the Trump administration, Vindman and his brother used their status as nonpartisan career officials to give themselves an air of credibility as they leaked information meant to damage Trump.
It’s difficult for presidents to fire career employees. But under Trump’s proposed Schedule F designation, a president could more easily replace certain career employees who are in “positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.”
This week, the Washington Post wrote that a conservative group, the American Accountability Project, created a “DHS Bureaucrat Watchlist” containing names of high-level career employees at the Department of Homeland Security who have openly expressed animosity towards conservative positions including border control, so that an incoming Trump administration could ensure that they do not thwart its initiatives.
“There are a large number of people in the administration who have dedicated their life work to helping migrants settle in the United States,” said the group’s founder, Tom Jones. “These people are not going to do it. They are actually going to undermine it.”
The Post said Jones identified them “largely using public social media comments, prior work experience and campaign finance records,” and that it caused them to “fear for their families’ safety.”
