Mike Pence stumbles through response to his transgender CIA briefer’s praise: ‘heartened’ she felt respected

Former Vice President Mike Pence said Sunday that he was “heartened” that Julia Curlee, a transgender former CIA officer who served as his daily intelligence briefer, remembered him treating her with dignity despite his long record opposing LGBTQ+ rights.

Pence appeared to stumble through the answer after CNN’s Dana Bash asked him about Curlee during an interview from Kyiv, Ukraine, on State of the Union.

“I haven’t — I haven’t read the article,” Pence began, repeating himself before thanking Curlee.

His response then briefly became tangled as he tried to connect his conservative politics, Christian faith and marriage to a familiar moral principle.

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“My conservative values are fairly well-known, but maybe some people didn’t quite know that among our Christian values is, my wife and I believe in treating others the way that we’d like to be treated, with decency and respect,” Pence said.

Eventually, he got it out. “And I was heartened to hear Julia reflect that that was the experience that took place in our office,” he said.

The experience helped persuade Curlee that public service could transcend politics. That belief contributed to her decision to remain in government when President Donald Trump returned to office in 2025.

Her White House assignment ended shortly after far-right activist Laura Loomer demanded that a transgender person “Biden holdover” on the National Security Council be identified and removed. Curlee was never given a reason for her dismissal. Pence did not address Curlee’s removal or Trump’s campaign against transgender people.

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Pence spent much of his political career opposing LGBTQ+ rights. Yet Curlee, a gay transgender woman entrusted with some of the country’s most closely guarded secrets, has described him as one of the most personally affirming figures in her life. Curlee joined the CIA in 2007 and became the first officer at the agency to transition openly and continue serving. During Trump’s first administration, she was selected to brief Pence nearly every morning.

Their pairing was unlikely. Pence opposed marriage equality and transgender military service. As Indiana governor, the Republican signed a religious freedom law that LGBTQ+ advocates warned could allow discrimination. But in a first-person account published by The Atlantic, Curlee wrote that Pence took intelligence seriously, working through briefing books, asking questions and sometimes challenging the CIA’s conclusions.

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When Curlee completed the assignment, Pence invited her wife and mother to the White House. Curlee’s mother had struggled with her transition years earlier. Pence took her mother’s hand, she recalled, and told her, “You must be very proud of your daughter.”

“No one has affirmed my gender identity quite like Mike Pence,” Curlee wrote.