Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Brennan called President Donald Trump’s decision Wednesday to revoke his security clearance an “attempt to suppress freedom of speech” and to “punish critics.”
John O. Brennan
✔@JohnBrennan
This action is part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump to suppress freedom of speech & punish critics. It should gravely worry all Americans, including intelligence professionals, about the cost of speaking out. My principles are worth far more than clearances. I will not relent.
NBC News
✔@NBCNews
BREAKING: President Trump is revoking former CIA Director and high-profile Trump critic John Brennan’s security clearance, White House says. https://nbcnews.to/2w9hobN
Brennan was a controversial figure during the Obama administration
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders read a statement earlier Wednesday from the president that explained his decision, citing his constitutional authority and duty to protect the nation’s secrets:
Mr. Brennan has a history that calls in to question his objectivity and credibility. In 2014, for example, he denied to Congress that CIA officials under his supervision had improperly accessed the computer files of congressional staffers. He told the Council on Foreign Relations that the CIA would never do such a thing. The CIA’s Inspector General however contradicted Mr. Brennan directly, concluding unequivocally that agency officials had indeed improperly accessed congressional staffers files. More recently, Mr. Brennan told Congress that the intelligence community did not make use of the so-called Steele dossier in an assessment regarding the 2016 election, an assertion contradicted by at least two other senior officials in the intelligence community, and all of the facts.
Additionally, Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations, wild outbursts on the internet and television about this administration. Mr. Brennan’s lying and recent conduct, characterized by increasingly frenzied commentary is wholly inconsistent with access to the nation’s most closely held secrets and facilities, the very aim of our adversaries which is to sow division and chaos.
The president also said that the clearances of several other former Obama administration officials — “James Clapper, James Comey, Michael Hayden, Sally Yates, Susan Rice, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr” — was also under review. Yates was briefly acting Attorney General under Trump before she was fired for refusing to enforce the travel ban, a revised version of which was later upheld by the Supreme Court. Ohr still works at the Department of Justice.
Brennan, who describes himself in his Twitter profile as “Nonpartisan American who is very concerned about our collective future,” has emerged as a vociferous, even alarmist, critic of President Trump. Last month, he accused the president of treason for his press conference with Russian president Vladimir Putin, and hinted that Republicans should help impeach him.
John O. Brennan
✔@JohnBrennan
Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???
The left has argued in recent weeks that conservatives who are banned from social media platforms or targeted by boycotts do not have a “free speech” argument — yet that is the same argument Brennan invokes in defense of his former privilege to access the nation’s secrets.
“Says a lot, DOESN’T IT?” Sharyl Attkisson shares leaked internal email that’s SO VERY damning for John Brennan
You know when an email says, ‘Internal use only, please do not forward,’ that what’s inside is going to be (good!) very damning for SOMEONE, somewhere. And in this case with the email leaked in Sharyl Attkisson’s tweet, that someone is John Brennan (with a dash of Obama).
Looking back, this leaked internal email from government intel firm says a lot, doesn’t it? pic.twitter.com/Q2MYNlJQRz
LeadingMarines@LeadingMarines
Watched you and it gave me chills. 7 combat tours and almost 100 yrs active duty defending the constitution in my family. NOT WHAT WE FOUGHT FOR. Old enough to remember Nixon and ashamed DEMS have politicised this. Not what the guy on right fought for!
This editor still doesn’t understand why people like Brennan don’t lose that clearance the moment they are no longer in the official position. It’s not like people who lose, quit, or switch jobs get to keep accessing their old jobs after they’re gone.
Revoke it. No brainer.
Sharyl Attkisson
✔@SharylAttkisson
·
Looking back, this leaked internal email from government intel firm says a lot, doesn’t it? pic.twitter.com/Q2MYNlJQRz
How did the candidate of hope and change turn into the president of secret kill lists, drone strikes hitting civilians, and immunity for torturers? The answer may lie in his relationship with the CIA director, a career bureaucrat turned quiet architect of a morally murky national security policy who isn’t going to let a little thing like getting caught spying on the Senate bring him down.
Shortly before 9 a.m. on March 11, 2014, Dianne Feinstein, the 80-year-old chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, walked into the Senate chamber with a thick stack of papers and a glass of water. The Senate had just finished a rare all-night session a few minutes earlier, and only a handful of staffers were left in the room. Feinstein had given thousands of speeches over her career, but none quite like this.
“Let me say up front that I come to the Senate floor reluctantly,” she said, as she poked at the corners of her notes. The last two months had been an exhausting mix of meetings and legal wrangling, all in an attempt to avoid this exact moment. But none of it had worked. And now Feinstein was ready to go public and tell the country what she knew: The CIA had broken the law and violated the Constitution. It had spied on the Senate.
“This is a defining moment for the oversight of our intelligence community,” Feinstein said nearly 40 minutes later, as she drew to a close. This will show whether the Senate “can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation’s intelligence activities, or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee.”
Two hours later and a few miles away at a Council on Foreign Relations event near downtown Washington, the CIA responded. “As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into Senate computers,” CIA Director John Brennan told Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, shaking his head and rolling his eyes to demonstrate the ridiculousness of the charges, “nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn’t do that.”
Brennan was 58, but that morning he looked much older. He’d hobbled into the room on a cane following yet another hip fracture, and after some brief remarks he eased himself into a chair with obvious discomfort. Two years earlier in a commencement address at Fordham University, his alma mater, Brennan had rattled off a litany of injuries and ailments: In addition to his hip problems, he’d also had major knee, back, and shoulder surgeries as well as “a bout of cancer.” Years of desk work had resulted in extra weight and the sort of bureaucrat’s body that caused his suits to slope down and out toward his belt. “I referred the matter myself to the CIA inspector general to make sure that he was able to look honestly and objectively at what the CIA did there,” Brennan said. “And, you know, when the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.”
Mitchell, who had already asked him two questions about the allegations, pressed again. “If it is proved that the CIA did do this, would you feel that you had to step down?”
Brennan chuckled and stuttered as he tried to form an answer. Two weeks earlier, he had told a dinner at the University of Oklahoma that “intelligence work had gotten in my blood.” The CIA wasn’t just what he did; it was his “identity.” He had worked too hard to become director to give up without a fight. “If I did something wrong,” Brennan eventually told Mitchell, “I will go to the president, and I will explain to him exactly what I did, and what the findings were. And he is the one who can ask me to stay or to go.”
But Obama was never going to ask for his resignation. Not then, and not months later when the CIA inspector general’s report came back, showing that the agency had done what Feinstein claimed. Brennan was Obama’s man. His conscience on national security, and the CIA director he’d wanted from the very beginning. Not even a chorus of pleas from Democratic senators, members of Obama’s own party, made any difference. John Brennan would stay, the untouchable head of America’s most powerful intelligence agency.
Brennan has been many things: a CIA official, a CEO, and even, briefly, a television pundit. He was a top official at the CIA during the torture years of the Bush administration, and the architect of Obama’s shadowy, controversial drone program. But for all that, he remains largely unknown, the gray heart of United States national security policy. Of the dozens of former and current government officials I reached out to, men and women from both the Bush and the Obama administrations, few seemed to have a handle on him. Some saw him as strong and principled, a warrior-priest who could do no wrong. Others saw him as a yes-man who sucked up to power and got lucky.
Several former colleagues, particularly in the CIA, refused to talk about him. He is vindictive, one explained through an intermediary: “He’ll come after me.” Another initially agreed to chat and then emailed me back a few days later, writing, “Unfortunately, I learned today that, because of my active security clearances and continuing work with the intelligence community, it would be best for me to decline your offer of an interview.”
Brennan himself was of little help. Through a spokesperson, he declined multiple interview requests over a series of months. Two years earlier, I’d argued that he was the wrong man for the CIA based on his counterterrorism approach in Yemen. But now I wanted to get a fuller sense of him, both as a person and as a director, and look at his entire career rather than just a single country. Brennan wasn’t interested. Even relatives were off-limits. At one point I sent his older sister a three-line email, explaining who I was and asking if she “might have some time to answer some questions about him and what he was like as a kid.” She never wrote back. But the next day I received an email from the CIA’s head of public affairs warning me against “harassing the director’s family.”
And yet in almost every public speech he’s given over the past 10 years, Brennan opens with a smattering of personal anecdotes, little crumbs of biographical detail that, along with everything else, form an almost kaleidoscopic portrait of the man and the country he serves. It all depends on the angle, the subtle shift in emphasis that changes everything: inside government or outside, friend or foe, enhanced interrogation techniques or torture, signature strikes or crowd killing, patriot or criminal.
This is Brennan’s story, his life and his career. But it’s also ours. The excesses and mistakes of more than a decade of war, what we tolerate and what we don’t. What we’re willing to forgive and what we won’t. Politicians who don’t deliver on their promises, and well-intentioned individuals who bring about great harm. It’s about the man he is, and the country we’ve become. The institutionalization of a post-9/11 national security state, and the unending compromises of a country always at war.
The origin story Brennan prefers, the one he tells reporters, goes something like this: One day in the spring of 1977, during his senior year at Fordham, he was riding the bus to class when he came across a CIA recruitment ad in the New York Times. Brennan was intrigued. He liked history and he liked to travel. Back from a year abroad in Cairo, Brennan had already applied to graduate school, but even he seemed to know he wasn’t cut out for academia. “He never struck me as someone who would go on and get a Ph.D.,” John Entelis, one of his professors, told me last fall. “He just didn’t fit the mold.”
On a campus filled with what another of his former teachers described as “well-groomed hippies,” Brennan fit right in with long hair and an earring. He blended in within the classroom as well, rarely raising his hand or trying to make a point. To his professors, Brennan still carried himself like the jock he had been in high school, like someone who hung out near the back of the room and didn’t appear comfortable speaking in public. “He wasn’t intellectually aggressive,” Entelis said.
But that year in Egypt had given him a case of what Brennan would later call “wanderlust.” And that is why in the spring of his senior year, weeks away from graduating, he was so intrigued by the ad. Even his birthday, Brennan often explains in interviews, seemed to fit. Nathan Hale, often considered America’s first spy, was hanged on Sept. 22, the same date Brennan was born.
Hale was 21 the day the British executed him in what is now upper Manhattan, less than eight miles from Fordham’s campus. Brennan was the same age that spring. Completing the circle was the fact that Hale was born in 1755, Brennan in 1955. For an undergraduate with a romantic sense of history, the parallels must have been powerful. In many ways, this appears to be how Brennan views himself: Hale’s successor and heir — patriotic, idealistic, and willing to do whatever it takes to serve his country.
Three years after that day on the bus, following a graduate degree in government from the University of Texas and wedding the woman he took to his college graduation, Brennan walked into the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as a career trainee making just over $17,000 a year (a “GS-9” on the government’s “general schedule” pay scale). Two of the CIA’s four directorates, the Directorate of Intelligence and what was then called the Directorate of Operations, got most of the attention. These were, respectively, the analysts who stayed home and the case officers who worked abroad, or in rough agency slang: the nerds and the jocks. Brennan had little doubt. He was a jock.
That lasted around a year. In 1981, Brennan switched to the intelligence side. Of the people who eventually agreed to speak with me, several had theories for the move. Like their views of Brennan himself, some were dark and others more innocuous. But none of them knew for certain. Brennan didn’t talk about it and they didn’t ask. “It was unusual,” one of them told me. “But not unprecedented.” The recruit who had once dreamed of operating abroad was now a deskbound analyst, a nerd.
The CIA did, however, send him to Saudi Arabia for a couple of years as part of a joint program with the State Department. But that wasn’t quite the same. Instead of a covert program with the CIA using the State Department as cover, this was an open one: CIA analysts working as foreign service officers. The State Department, which never had enough people to go around, got a free body, and the CIA got some time abroad for its analysts, who often spent most of their careers in Langley.
None of this, however, stopped Brennan from later suggesting to co-workers that this had been a full-fledged agency position. It was one of those habits powerful men often acquire, revising and editing their stories as they go, shaping everything to fit their audience of the moment. Bosses who had never championed Brennan in life were transformed into mentors in death, and small exchanges took on the flavor of intimate conversations. People who didn’t know Arabic were convinced he spoke the language fluently; Republicans he worked with thought he was one of them, while Democrats left the conversation thinking he was theirs.
By the time Brennan got back to Langley in 1984, the agency was undergoing a culture change. “Loyalty to individuals assumed a much greater role,” wrote former CIA analyst John A. Gentry in a biting critique published years later (and removed from the internet soon after Gentry declined an interview for this story). “Those who adapted to the new rules,” Gentry continued, “experienced often meteoric rises.” Brennan adjusted quickly, finding mentors and winning promotions.
“To get ahead in the Directorate of Intelligence you had to do three things,” Judith Yaphe, who worked in the same office as Brennan, told me. “You had to write well, brief well, and get along with others well. And John knew how to do all three.” Other co-workers noticed a similar set of skills. “John’s got a very good political sense of what people want,” said one former CIA official who worked with Brennan and requested anonymity to talk about a former colleague. “John is very good at managing up.”
For the next few years, Brennan did exactly that, as he worked his way up the agency ranks. The older men who ran the division liked him. Brennan seemed to remind them of a younger version of themselves, and they rewarded him for it with promotions and plum assignments. They saw him as a “rising star, an up-and-comer,” the former CIA official said.
Brennan came into the agency in 1980 as a Middle East specialist in what would turn out to be the final decade of the Cold War, the CIA’s main focus since its founding. Once inside, Brennan started spending time on counterterrorism, a new subfield that few really understood. The CIA established its first counterterrorism center in 1986. Within four years, Brennan was running terrorism analysis for the center. A decade later, the Middle East and counterterrorism, Brennan’s two specialties, would be at the center of a revamped CIA. And, in time, so would he.
To get there, Brennan needed the help of two men: George Tenet and Barack Obama. He met Tenet in the mid-1990s when they were both at the White House, Tenet as a member of the National Security Council and Brennan as the CIA’s daily briefer to the president. Two decades later, just after the 2008 presidential elections, he met Obama for the first time.
Both times the meetings came at just the right moment: before Tenet moved to the CIA and before Obama went to the White House. Each was looking for a guide, someone they could trust. And Brennan made sure he was exactly what they needed: a perfect deputy, loyal and devoted. “John knew how to show his superiors ‘I pledge allegiance to you,’” one former co-worker told me.
In 1995, when Tenet left for Langley as the CIA’s deputy director, he took Brennan with him as his executive assistant. The two went well together, patron and guide. Tenet gravitated toward the big issues as he learned how to navigate the CIA’s hallowed seventh floor — where the CIA’s top officials have their offices — while Brennan handled the details and protected his boss. “John was George’s alter ego,” said John Rizzo, a longtime lawyer at the CIA and author of the memoir Company Man, who worked extensively with both men. “He was Tenet’s eyes and ears to the rest of the agency.” Other former senior CIA officials were more blunt: “Brennan is a creature of George,” one of them said. (Through a spokesperson, Tenet declined a request for an interview.)
Later, during a stint as Tenet’s chief of staff, Brennan became notorious for asking, “How will this affect George?” according to an article in the Los Angeles Times. The closer the two became, the more Brennan seemed to conflate Tenet with the agency he ran. Loyalty to one meant loyalty to the other. Tenet was the CIA, and it was Brennan’s job to protect him. “Brennan is a very good staff officer,” the same former senior CIA official explained to me. “He’s detailed, and incredibly hardworking. His whole life was serving the principal.”
Brennan followed Tenet up the agency ladder, rising alongside his patron. Tenet would eventually make director and, just before that in 1996, Brennan asked for a promotion of his own. Sixteen years after he’d started at the CIA, Brennan still wanted to be a spy. That’s what had attracted him all those years ago on the bus to Fordham, and that’s what he wanted now. In 1996, Tenet gave Brennan his wish, and made him chief of station in Saudi Arabia. Much like Brennan’s initial move from operations to intelligence, putting a career analyst in charge of a station was unusual although not unprecedented.
But there was a bigger problem. On the government pay scale, Brennan was a GS-15, making somewhere between $70,000 and $90,000 per year. CIA station chiefs are members of a separate pay scale, called the Senior Executive Service, and at the time they were making more than $123,000 per year. Brennan didn’t need just one promotion; he needed three. And that was unprecedented. “I’d never heard of anything like it,” one former senior CIA official told me. Tenet was playing favorites.
On June 25, 1996, shortly before Brennan arrived in the kingdom, a truck bomb struck the Khobar Towers, killing 19 American servicemembers in one of the deadliest terrorist attacks against the U.S. at the time. A few weeks later, Osama bin Laden faxed out a fatwa, declaring war on the United States. Few had heard of bin Laden at the time, and almost no one paid attention to his statement. According to multiple intelligence officials who requested anonymity to talk about classified operations, Brennan’s tenure in Saudi Arabia — like much of the CIA at the time — was marked by caution and convention. He walked a careful line with the Saudis, not wanting to push them too hard.
In early 1998, while in Saudi Arabia, Brennan helped convince Tenet to pull the plug on an agency operation to capture bin Laden. Brennan favored a Saudi effort, which was still in the works, to convince the Taliban to expel the al-Qaeda leader from Afghanistan. But the Saudi talks with the Taliban eventually broke down. The CIA never got another opportunity to capture bin Laden. Years later, Brennan defended his actions, telling a congressional committee, “I didn’t think that it was a worthwhile operation and it didn’t have a chance of success.” Besides, he added, “I was not in the chain of command at the time.”
When Brennan did finally get his chance to take part in an actual operation, al-Qaeda wasn’t even the target. The CIA had put together a disruption campaign aimed at Iranian intelligence, and, according to Tenet’s memoir as well as a U.S. official working in Saudi Arabia at the time, Brennan was supposed to approach one of their agents on the streets of Riyadh and ask if he wanted to work for the U.S. The CIA shadowed the agent for weeks, tracking him back and forth to work and planning the confrontation. But the closer the operation got, the more worried Brennan became. According to the same U.S. official, Brennan asked an FBI agent to borrow a bulletproof vest. “John,” the FBI agent said, “he’s not going to shoot you; he’s going to laugh at you.” Brennan blanched, but insisted.
On the big day, Brennan approached the Iranian’s car and said, “Hello, I’m from the U.S. Embassy, and I’ve got something to tell you.” The agent jumped out of his car, said something about Iran being a peace-loving country, and then sped off.
“That’s not how you recruit an agent,” Lindsay Moran, a former case officer in the Directorate of Operations, told me. “Historically, a number of bad things have happened when an analyst has been put in charge of a station.”
At Brennan’s going-away party in 1999, Ambassador Wyche Fowler Jr., a white-haired political appointee and former senator from Georgia, who stood on tradition and spoke in a nasally Southern drawl, gave a glowing retrospective of Brennan’s three years in the kingdom. Sitting at tables in the ambassador’s massive dining room, the men who worked with Brennan on a daily basis tried to square what they were hearing with their own experience. “It was like he walked on water,” a U.S. official who attended the event later told me. “It sounded like John was a god.”
Toward the end of his remarks, Fowler’s voice started to crack and his hand moved toward his eyes as if he might cry. “It was so over-the-top,” the former U.S. official told me. “We were almost embarrassed for him.” Another agent whispered: “Is he drunk?” But that’s how it was between Brennan and his supervisors. He knew how to manage up.
Everyone From Obama’s Administration Should Be In Jail.
President Donald J. Trump announced his decision to demand an official investigation of former President Barack Obama’s administration on Sunday for infiltrating or surveilling his presidential campaign for political reasons.
“I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!” Trump wrote on Twitter on Sunday afternoon.
Trump frequently blames investigations of his campaign on Obama, suggesting that politically motivated investigators were unfairly targeting his campaign.
He spent most of Sunday morning sharing his thoughts on Twitter about the ongoing Russia investigation, suggesting that the ongoing “witch hunt” was out of control. “Things are really getting ridiculous,” Trump wrote, noting that so far there was no collusion found by special investigators.
He criticized Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team as “13 Angry and heavily conflicted Democrats” who were part of the Obama administration.
“STOP!” he wrote. “They have found no collusion with Russia, No obstruction.”
Trump again redirected the continuing investigation towards failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Democrats, Tony Podesta, the DNC, and politically biased FBI officials.
“Republicans and real Americans should start getting tough on this Scam,” he wrote.
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!
Could The Snitch Be Mitch McConnell And His Chinese Friends?
House Republicans are again battling with the Justice Department over information related to the Russia investigation, this time over documents the intelligence community said involves a top-secret source who has provided information to the CIA and FBI.
The mysterious source has also gathered information that was given to Special Counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to The Washington Post.
WaPo reported Justice Department and intelligence community officials issued a stark warning to the White House on May 2 against a request from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. Nunes had submitted a subpoena to the Justice Department on April 24 for records related to the Russia probe.
Justice Department and intelligence community officials argued to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly that complying with the subpoena would reveal the identity of a top-secret source and would undermine protocol regarding intelligence sources, according to WaPo.
WaPo provided one small clue about the source: he or she is American.
Kelly discussed the issue with Trump, who sided with the intelligence officials. WaPo noted that it is unclear whether Trump knew that information from the source has been shared with Mueller. Trump has been heavily critical of the Mueller probe, which he has described as a “witch hunt.”
On Thursday, the day after the White House meeting, the Justice Department told Nunes that the agency was “not in a position to provide information responsive to your request regarding a specific individual.”
“Disclosure of responsive information to such requests can risk severe consequences, including potential loss of human lives, damage to relationships with valued international partners, compromise of ongoing criminal investigations, and interference with intelligence activities,” Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s office of legislative affairs, wrote to Nunes.
Nunes shot back in a statement to WaPo, saying that the Justice Department is “citing spurious national security concerns to evade congressional oversight while leaking information to The Washington Post ostensibly about classified meetings.”
Nunes threatened to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt of Congress for failing to provide the documents on Sunday.
The standoff is not the first between Nunes and the Justice Department. The Republican has battled the agency over other records related to the Russia investigation, including surveillance warrants granted to the Justice Department to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The FBI and Justice Department relied heavily on the unverified Steele dossier to obtain the spy warrants, according to documents provided to the House Intel panel.
Nunes also recently threatened to subpoena the Justice Department for the FBI document that laid out the initial rationale for the bureau’s counterintelligence investigation into possible collusion. The investigation was opened on July 31, 2016 based on information about then-Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.
The Australian government reportedly passed information to the U.S. government about a barroom conversation that Papadopoulos had in London in May 2016 with Alexander Downer, the former Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. Downer reportedly relayed that Papadopoulos claimed to have learned the Russian government had obtained stolen Hillary Clinton emails. (RELATED: In Private, George Papadopoulos Denies Collusion)
The Daily Caller News Foundation has reported that Papadopoulos was introduced to Downer by Erika Thompson, another Australian diplomat.
Two weeks before that meeting, Papadopoulos met in London with Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor and diplomat who is suspected of being a Russian operative. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty on Oct. 5 to lying to FBI agents about the timing of his encounters with Mifsud and with two Russian nationals. He told the special counsel’s office that Mifsud said in that meeting that a Russian government official told him about stolen Clinton-related emails.
Halper, who works closely at Cambridge with Sir Richard Dearlove, a former MI6 chief, contacted Papadopoulos about writing a policy paper on Israeli and Cypriot energy issues. Halper, an American, paid Papadopoulos $3,000 for the paper and covered the cost of his room, board, and a flight to London. Papadopoulos met with Halper and one of his assistants for several days in London.
During one of their meetings, Halper asked Papadopoulos about Russia and emails, according to sources close to Papadopoulos’s version of the encounters.
TheDCNF also learned that Halper approached two other Trump campaign advisers, including Carter Page. Halper invited Page to attend a symposium at Cambridge in July 2016.
Another campaign official told TheDCNF they were contacted by and met with Halper several days before Halper’s initial outreach to Papadopoulos. That official, who did not want to be identified, said they were surprised to learn of the Papadopoulos encounter.
I don’t think Obama spied on Trump, Hell i Know he did.
Spying On Trump: Americans overwhelmingly believe the Obama administration “improperly surveilled” Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and a majority say they would like to see a special prosecutor appointed to look into possible misconduct by the FBI and Department of Justice in spying on Trump, the latest IBD/TIPP poll shows.
One fact emerges from the poll of 900 people conducted from Jan. 25 to Feb. 2: The public doesn’t necessarily buy into the Democratic narrative that the Trump campaign “colluded” with Russia to tamper with the 2016 presidential election.The poll also suggests that many Americans think the roots of the allegations made against Trump extend beyond the two major party campaigns in the last presidential election and deep into the Obama era’s intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies, and may involve active political bias on the part of supposedly nonpartisan employees of both the Justice Department and FBI.
In the IBD/TIPP survey of public opinion, we asked respondents “How closely are you following news stories about the role played by the FBI and the Department of Justice during the 2016 presidential election?” Of those who responded, 72% said they were following the story either “very closely” (39%) or “somewhat closely” (33%). Our responses were taken only from those who were following the story closely.Some 55% of those said it was “likely” that the Obama administration “improperly surveilled the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.” There was an obvious partisan split among the responses, with 87% of Republicans and 55% of independents saying the improper spying took place, but only 31% of Democrats.
On the question of whether a special counsel was needed to “investigate whether the FBI and the Department of Justice improperly surveilled the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election,” 54% responded “yes,” and 44% “no.” Again, 74% of Republicans and 50% of independents wanted a special counsel appointed. But even 44% of Democrats thought it would be a good idea.
If so, a full-on investigation might be in the cards, not just of the so-called Steele dossier on Trump, which was funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and by the Democratic National Committee, but of key members of the Obama administration, including former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former FBI Director James Comey.
We further asked Americans whether they thought “some senior career civil servants at the FBI and Department of Justice knowingly coordinated to frame the president with allegations of Russian collusion in order to cast a cloud over his presidency.”
There, the readings were not as definitively strong as with the other two questions. Of those queried, 35% said yes, Justice and FBI officials coordinated their actions to frame the president for colluding with the Russians, while 60% said no. This had by far the biggest partisan split of all, with 77% of Republicans saying yes, but just 11% of Democrats and 30% of independents agreeing.
Plainly, Americans are concerned by what they’ve read and heard of the surveillance of the Trump campaign and would like a full investigation.
The poll’s contents are troubling for those in the Democratic Party and the left-leaning media who had hoped to make a case with the American people that President Trump worked with Russian officials to win the 2016 election. The American people don’t seem to believe it.
More seriously, recent revelations suggest that the Obama administration FBI and Justice Department “basically conspired with the Democratic Party, the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign to exonerate her of violations of the Espionage Act and, in the course of trying to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president, to frame him for a nonexistent crime of collusion” with the Russians, as former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova told Fox News.
Using the Hillary-funded Steele dossier on Trump, which included false and outrageous claims that couldn’t be verified, the FBI and Justice Department convinced the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on sometime Trump volunteer Carter Page. In doing so, they were able to spy on much of the rest of the Trump campaign, as well. However, the initial application for the surveillance in October 2016 did not mention that the source for the surveillance request was a political campaign. If it had, it might well have been rejected.
The possibility that an administration used the federal apparatus to spy on a political foe reeks to high heaven. As House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes noted last week, “The American people understand the FBI should not go to secret courts, using information that was paid for by the Democrats to open up investigations with warrants of people of the other political party.” It’s the stuff of banana republics and totalitarian dictatorships.
With so many Americans having questions about the Russia collusion scandal, we won’t be surprised if it leads not just to an investigation of the events of late 2016, when much of the activity took place, but to the time before that — when the Obama administration, keen on protecting Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects, began to use the federal bureaucracy for what appears to be political purposes. For the record, that’s against the law.
The question going forward may well become: What did President Obama know about the dossier, and when did he know it?
For months and months, our fake news media have been freaking out over a meeting Donald Trump Jr. took with a Russian lawyer in the hopes of getting some dirt on Hillary Clinton. Again and again, we have been told that this is the smoking gun of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Of course, that is nonsense. Moreover, Don Jr. and the others in attendance caught on to the scheme within a few minutes, and as far as we now know, that was the end of that.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of others, who actually have colluded with the Russians as a means to dig up dirt on Trump.
Here are seven American politicians and institutions who have or are at least suspected of colluding with the Russians as a means to destroy President Trump.
The CIA
This former CIA Director lied under oath about unmasking.
Although the far-left New York Times is desperately hoping to control the explosion of this bombshell by shrouding it in a laughable story about the CIA trying to retrieve stolen National Security Agency cyber-weapons, the anti-Trump outlet is still forced to report that after “months of secret negotiations, a shadowy Russian bilked American spies out of $100,000 last year, promising to deliver stolen National Security Agency cyberweapons in a deal that he insisted would also include compromising material on President Trump, according to American and European intelligence officials.”
And that $100,000 was only supposed to be the first down payment towards a cool million.
The CIA was hoping for images of Trump urinating on hookers in Moscow hotel rooms. All they got was a 15-second clip of some guy in a hotel room talking to some women.
The payoff happened in September of last year.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)
Tell me that this pervert and liar should not be investigated.
In early 2017, Democrat Adam Schiff, the ranking member of House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (so you would think he would know better), thought he was colluding with Ukrainian officials to get compromising materials against Trump. The Ukrainian officials ended up being Russian pranksters. The best you can say about Schiff is that he colluded with Russians to make a horse’s ass of himself.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)
The horse man was working with the Russians to bring Trump down. Look at those damn horse teeth.
In March of last year, Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence committee, colluded with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch to dig up dirt on Trump.
Naturally, because he has no spine, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) immediately ran to Warner’s defense. “Sen. Warner fully disclosed this to the committee four months ago,” the jellyfish tweeted. There is just one problem… If you look at the timeline, that “full disclosure” came a full seven months after the collusion occurred.
Rubio fired off another non-sequitur in Warner’s defense. “Has had zero impact on our work,” Rubio wrote, as though that means anything when it comes to the fact that Warner colluded with Russians to harm a sitting president and hid that information from the committee for more than a half-year.
Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele
Steele is the former British spy hired by the D.C.-based Fusion GPS to put together the phony Russian dossier that even disgraced former-FBI Director James Comey declared “salacious and unverified.”
To compile these lies, Steele reportedly worked directly with Kremlin officials:
How good were these sources? Consider what Steele would write in the memos he filed with Simpson: Source A—to use the careful nomenclature of his dossier—was “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.” Source B was “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.” And both of these insiders, after “speaking to a trusted compatriot,” would claim that the Kremlin had spent years getting its hooks into Donald Trump.
In other words, Steele and Fusion GPS colluded with the Russians to manufacture lies about Trump. Steele then leaked those lies to a complicit media in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
Fusion GPS also “spearheaded the campaign to undo the Magnitsky Act, American legislation imposing sanctions on Russian officials and other figures close to Vladimir Putin. Their work featured a smear campaign against the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, financier William Browder.”
If successful, this Fusion GPS campaign would have been of great benefit to the Russian government and countless oligarchs who want the Magnitsky Act’s sanctions lifted.
The Hillary Clinton Campaign
This woman should me handed after being shot.
Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign hired Fusion GPS to put that dossier together. In other words, the Clinton campaign’s paid agents colluded with Kremlin officials to manufacture lies about Trump that would then be leaked to a complicit media in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
The Democrat National Committee (DNC)
Why is Little Debbie and Simpson not been indicted?
The DNC hired the D.C.-based Fusion GPS to put that dossier together. In other words, the DNC’s paid agents colluded with Kremlin officials to manufacture lies about Trump that would then be leaked to a complicit media in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
The FBI
You can trust the honest sex symbol James Comey right?
Our own FBI not only put Steele on the payroll, a guy who colluded with the Russians to manufacture lies about Trump, the FBI used lies and the dossier — including Kremlin lies — to obtain FISA warrants to spy on Trump campaign affiliates.
DOJ’s Rosenstein OK’d Surveillance of Ex-Trump Adviser
This corrupt looking child molester.
A controversial and classified memo shows that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein okayed an application shortly after taking office last year to monitor a former Trump campaign associate, according to a report.
The Department of Justice under President Trump extended surveillance on Carter Page, believing that he was acting as a Russian agent, the New York Times reported late Sunday, citing people familiar with the memo’s contents.
The document faulted the FBI and the DOJ for failing to completely explain to the intelligence court judge in seeking the warrant that they were relying on information supplied by Christopher Steele, who compiled the disputed dossier that contains unsubstantiated claims about Trump’s ties to Russia, the newspaper said.
Research for the dossier had been paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
A number of top DOJ officials can approve such surveillance but the responsibility usually falls to the deputy attorney general, the newspaper said.
The report also said the FBI and the DOJ did nothing improper in seeking the surveillance warrant against Page, who was part of the campaign until September 2016.
A White House spokesman said Trump wants “transparency throughout this process.”
“Based on numerous news reports, top officials at the F.B.I. have engaged in conduct that shows bias against President Trump and bias for Hillary Clinton,” Hogan Gidley told the Times.
“While President Trump has the utmost respect and support for the rank-and-file members of the F.B.I., the anti-Trump bias at the top levels that appear to have existed is troubling.”
The FBI had been keeping an eye on Page for years and an investigation in 2013 showed that a Russian spy tried to recruit him.
But a visit to Russia in July 2016 when he was working with the Trump campaign renewed the bureau’s interest and they began monitoring him again that fall, the Times said.
That surveillance led the FBI and DOJ to seek to renew the application in the spring of 2017, shortly after Rosenstein was confirmed in April, the newspaper said.
Trump has had Rosenstein in his crosshairs, venting to staff his frustration with the DOJ’s No. 2 and mulling whether he should fire him, according to reports.
Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to investigate Russian meddling in May 2017 after Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, who had been heading up the probe.
Trump wanted to fire Mueller last June, but backed off after White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign, the Times reported last Friday.
The White House and some Republican lawmakers are calling for the memo to be declassified and released to the public to show how the agencies are biased against the president.
But Democrats who have seen the four-page memo — written by House Republicans — say they carefully selected information that is intended to discredit the investigation into Russian involvement in the election and any collusion on the part of the Trump campaign.
The DOJ called efforts to release the memo “reckless” without the department and the FBI first being able to review the document to see if it harms national security.
So-Called Conservative Free Beacon Paid Fusion GPS For Anti-Trump Research
Fake republican and Anti-Trump fraud Paul Singer of Free Beacon.
The conservative website the Washington Free Beacon triggered the research into then-candidate Donald Trump by Fusion GPS that eventually led to the now-infamous Trump “dossier,” the publication’s editor-in-chief and chairman acknowledged in a statement Friday night.
The research effort was known to have been supported by Republican allies before the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign picked up the tab for the research, but the original funder of the research was unknown until now. The resulting dossier was compiled by former British spy Michael Steele and contained unsubstantiated allegations about then-candidate Trump’s connections to Russia. Mr. Trump has denied the allegations.
The Free Beacon’s connection to the dossier was first reported by the Washington Examiner’s Byron York Friday night.
The site began as a non-profit entity before becoming a for-profit enterprise several years ago. It has never disclosed its owners or financial backers, but the New York Times reports hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer provides a large amount of its funding. The site covers national security issues, politics, culture and media criticism, among other topics.
The Free Beacon says Steele was not involved in the research at the time of its involvement, and “none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier.” The Free Beacon also said it had no knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the DNC or Clinton campaign. The Free Beacon has retained third-party firms since its launch in 2012, the statement says.
In the statement, editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti and chairman Michael Goldfarb said that the publication retained Fusion GPS “to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton.” The statement said representatives of his publication approached the House Intelligence Committee Friday and offered to answer questions.
“But to be clear: We stand by our reporting, and we do not apologize for our methods,” Continetti and Goldfarb wrote.
Here is the full statement from the Free Beacon:
Since its launch in February of 2012, the Washington Free Beacon has retained third party firms to conduct research on many individuals and institutions of interest to us and our readers. In that capacity, during the 2016 election cycle we retained Fusion GPS to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton. All of the work that Fusion GPS provided to the Free Beacon was based on public sources, and none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier. The Free Beacon had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele. Nor did we have any knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie, and the Clinton campaign.
Representatives of the Free Beacon approached the House Intelligence Committee today and offered to answer what questions we can in their ongoing probe of Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier. But to be clear: We stand by our reporting, and we do not apologize for our methods. We consider it our duty to report verifiable information, not falsehoods or slander, and we believe that commitment has been well demonstrated by the quality of the journalism that we produce. The First Amendment guarantees our right to engage in news-gathering as we see fit, and we intend to continue doing just that as we have since the day we launched this project.
Network corrected exclusive story involving Trump and hacked documents
Trump: ‘Their slogan should be CNN – the least trusted name in news’
Donald Trump, in his first tweet on Saturday, said: “Watch to see if CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?” Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump on Saturday fired more shots in his offensive against CNN, after the network was forced to correct an exclusive report that had seemed to implicate his administration in a scandal involving the release of leaked documents.
“Fake News CNN made a vicious and purposeful mistake yesterday,” the president tweeted. “They were caught red handed.”
He added: “CNN’S slogan is CNN, THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS. Everyone knows this is not true, that this could, in fact, be a fraud on the American Public. There are many outlets that are far more trusted than Fake News CNN. Their slogan should be CNN, THE LEAST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS!”
The CNN report said Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, received an email offering him access to hacked Democratic party emails from WikiLeaks before the documents had been made publicly available.
But in fact, the email was sent on 14 September 2016, after the material was made publicly available – and not 4 September as CNN first reported.
In a statement, CNN said its “initial reporting of the date on an email sent to members of the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks documents, which was confirmed by two sources to CNN, was incorrect. We have updated our story to include the correct date, and present the proper context for the timing of email.”
It was the second major correction in a CNN story involving Trump and Russia. Russia is believed to have been behind the original hacking of the documents.
In June, three CNN journalists resigned after the network retracted a report on alleged ties between Trump officials and a Russian investment fund. “What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS,” Trump tweeted then. The network said the three journalists who reported that story failed to follow editorial procedures.
In his first tweet on Saturday, Trump added: “Watch to see if CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?”
CNN said it would not fire the reportersbehind the Friday story, as editorial procedures had been followed.
The president also attacked “fake news” on Friday night in Florida, at a rally endorsing Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. In particular, Trump zeroed in on an error made last week by ABC News correspondent Brian Ross, over the prosecution of Mike Flynn in the special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the US election.
ABC suspended Ross but did not fire him. The president suggested that attendees at his rally should sue the news outlet for the stock market losses that resulted from the original story.
“Did you see all the corrections the media’s been making?” Trump said. “They’ve been apologizing left and right.”
Trump also said CNN had “apologised” for its corrected story. It has not.
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‘We want Roy Moore’: Trump endorses controversial candidate at rally – video
Also on Friday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders used Twitter to highlight CNN’s use of a picture of the wrong Raj Shah in a report on her deputy. “CNN this is definitely not @RajShah45 but it is #FakeNews,” she wrote.
Donald Jr added his thoughts in a tweet Saturday morning, writing: “Strange that the #fakenews media never gets stories wrong in favor of Trump. It’s almost like they do it on purpose.”
There is no evidence that reporting errors and corrections have become any more frequent during the Trump presidency. Trump’s embrace of the concept of “fake news”, though, has allowed him to make substantial political hay from every corrected story.
According to an October Politico poll, 46% of Americans said they believed the media was guilty of wholesale fabrications about the Trump administration. More than three-quarters of Republican voters thought so.
David Frum, a former George W Bush speech writer who is now senior editor at the Atlantic, has become one of Trump’s most vociferous critics. He addressed the issue on Saturday morning on Twitter.
While reporters “slip in their work”, Frum wrote, “the work itself is trying to inform the public about the doings of the most systematical untruthful administration in American history”.
Frum continued: “Never forget, though, that the media are not the protagonist in the drama. The protagonists are the officials engaged in the deception, headed by the president himself.”
Plus 10 points for creativity. Minus 1,000 points for a stupid lie with inevitable consequences.
While the media rushes frantically from one manufactured Trump scandal to another, the examination of the deeply troubling lenghts to which Obama Inc. went to sabotage his political opponent and successor using eavesdropping continues. One of the most striking revelations has been the number of ‘unmasking’ requests filed by Samantha Power.
Not only did Power file a whole lot of them, 260 requests to unmask the identities of Americans being spied on is a whole lot, but why would an ambassador to the UN even need such classified info?
And to that, Samantha Power had a simple and incoherent response. “It wasn’t me.”
South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy revealed in an interview on Fox News on Tuesday that Power was “emphatic” on the point that someone else in the Obama administration made the unmasking requests that have been attributed to her.
Fox News recently reported that Power made approximately 260 unmasking requests — a rate of one per business day — in her final year in office, including up through the end of Obama’s term.
Unmasking has become an issue because someone inside the Obama administration unmasked the identities of Trump associates identified in classified intelligence reports collected by the intelligence community during surveillance of foreign targets. Some of those details were illegally leaked to the media.
Gowdy, a member of the Intelligence committee, said that Power “was pretty emphatic” last week in disputing that she made 260 unmasking requests.
“She would say those requests to unmask may have been attributed to her, but they greatly exceed by an exponential factor the requests she actually made,” Gowdy told Fox’s Bret Baier.
“Her perspective, her testimony is, ‘they may be under my name, but I did not make those requests.’”
It’s a really bizarre defense that relies on either challenging the relevant paperwork or suggesting that someone else using her name made those requests. The latter defense is rather crazy. If true, it would constitute a major crime. If untrue, then Power has hung herself. Susan Rice repeatedly lied about her unmasking requests, but what Power is doing here is Hillaryesque. And we know how that worked out for her.
Obama administration knew about Russian bribery plot before uranium deal
The Obama administration knew that Russia had used bribery, kickbacks and extortion to get a stake in the US atomic energy industry — but cut deals giving Moscow control of a large chunk of the US uranium supply anyway, according to a report Tuesday.
The FBI used a confidential US witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed the Kremlin had compromised an American uranium trucking company, The Hill reported.
Executives at the company, Transport Logistics International, kicked back about $2 million to the Russians in exchange for lucrative no-bid contracts — a scheme that violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the report said.
The feds also learned that Russian nuclear officials had gotten millions of dollars into the US designed to benefit the Clinton Foundation at the same time then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government committee that signed off on the deals, sources told The Hill.
The racketeering operation was conducted “with the consent of higher-level officials” in Russia who “shared the proceeds” from the kickbacks, an agent later stated in an affidavit.
But the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder did not bring charges in the case prior to the deals being cut.
At the time, President Barack Obama and Clinton’s State Department were trying to “reset” relations between the two nuclear rivals — an effort that largely failed.
The first deal was wrapped up in October 2010 when the State Department and the Committee on Foreign Investment agreed to sell part of Uranium One, a Toronto-based mining giant with operations in Wyoming, Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, South Africa and elsewhere, to the Russian nuclear company Rosatom.
The move gave the Russians control over roughly 20 percent of the US uranium supply — and gave Russian strongman Vladimir Putin a large and profitable stake in the US atomic power industry.
When Donald Trump slammed Clinton on the campaign trail in 2016 over the sale, her spokesman said she was not involved in the committee review and that the State Department official who handled it said she “never intervened . . . on any [committee] matter.”
In the second deal, in 2011, Obama gave the OK for Rosatom’s Tenex subsidiary to sell the Canadian company’s uranium to American nuclear power plants.
Before, Tenex could only sell reprocessed uranium from dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons to power plants in the US.
“The Russians were compromising American contractors in the nuclear industry with kickbacks and extortion threats, all of which raised legitimate national security concerns. And none of that evidence got aired before the Obama administration made those decisions,” a source told the paper.
Instead of disclosing the racket in 2010, Justice continued investigating for nearly four more years, so Americans and Congress didn’t know about Russian nuclear corruption at the time the deals were completed.
Obama and the Clintons defended their actions in 2015, declaring that there was no evidence that Russians had done anything wrong and there was no national security reason to oppose the Uranium One deal.
The decision to approve Rosatom’s purchase of Uranium One has been a source of political controversy since 2015, when author Peter Schweizer documented how Bill Clinton pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from Russian entities.
But FBI, Energy Department and court documents showed that the feds had gathered a mountain of evidence well before the committee’s decision that Vadim Mikerin — the top Russian overseeing Putin’s nuclear expansion inside the US — was engaged in crooked behavior starting in 2009.
Holder was also on the foreign investments committee at the time the Uranium One deal was approved — but multiple current and former government officials told The Hill they did not know whether the FBI or DOJ ever told other committee members about the crimes they had uncovered.
Evidence of the illegal conduct was gathered with the help of an American businessman who acted as a confidential witness and who began making kickback payments at Mikerin’s direction and with the permission of the FBI.
The first kickback recorded by the FBI through its informant was dated Nov. 27, 2009, the records show.
In affidavits signed in 2014 and 2015, an Energy Department agent assigned to help the FBI in the case testified that Mikerin supervised a “racketeering scheme” that involved extortion, bribery, money-laundering and kickbacks that were directed by Russia and provided kickbacks to top Russian energy officials with ties to the Kremlin, according to the report.
The case exposed a serious national security breach, The Hill reported, as Mikerin had given a no-bid contract to Transport Logistics Intern
John O. Brennan
