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.
Trump, time for you to be Trump and get these pieces of shit
Scott Uehlinger: Susan Rice Unmasking ‘Abuse of Power’ Violates ‘Spirit of the Law,’ Should Be ‘Further Investigated’
Former CIA operations officer Scott Uehlinger, co-host of The Station Chief podcast, talked about the Susan Rice “unmasking” story with SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily.
“I think it’s an issue which deeply concerns people like myself and other people, working-level officers in the intel community,” Uehlinger said. “Even though at this point, there seems to be no evidence of breaking the law, this ‘unmasking’ of people was ill-advised at best. I think it really shows that abuse of power and the fact that many people in the Obama administration were willing to violate the spirit of the laws designed to protect Americans, perhaps rather than the law itself.”
“As a working-level CIA officer, we were always told by upper authority, you’re always told to – and the quote is – ‘avoid the appearance of impropriety,’” he said. “Well, this does not pass that smell test, definitely.”
Uehlinger said another thing that concerns working-level officers in the intelligence and military communities is “the American people, average Americans like myself, are tired of seeing two sets of rules followed by the higher-ups and then the working-level people.”
“This is just part of that again. A working-level officer would have gotten into big trouble doing anything remotely like this,” he observed. “But now, we have a lot of people saying that she should just be given a pass.”
“While I understand, you know, it’s important that the Trump administration has to move forward with its domestic agenda, but these allegations demand to be further investigated,” he urged.
Kassam proposed that Democrats and their media would not allow the Trump administration to move forward with any part of its agenda until this “Russia hysteria” is cleaned up. That will be a difficult task since, as Kassam noted, the hysteria has been burning at fever pitch for months without a shred of evidence to back up the wildest allegations.
Uehlinger agreed and addressed Kassam’s point that media coverage alternates between “no surveillance was conducted” and “we know everything about Trump’s Russia connections.”
“The Obama administration relaxed the rule that allowed raw intelligence that was gathered by the NSA to be shared throughout the government,” he pointed out. “First of all, to relax that, there is absolutely no operational justification for doing that. With all of the counter-intelligence problems, with espionage, with Snowden, all these things we’ve had, to raise by an order of magnitude the access to this very sensitive information makes no operational sense at all.”
“So for someone to approve that, it’s clear they had another intent, and I believe the intent was to allow for further leakage,” he charged. “To give more people access, thus more leaks, which, in fact, would hurt the Trump administration. It seems very obvious when you put that together and combine it with the actions of Susan Rice and other people in unmasking people. That is the true purpose behind this.”
“I say this as somebody who – you have to remember, when I was a station chief overseas, this is what I was reporting on. I was in countries like Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kosovo – countries which constantly had the offices of the prime minister or president using the intelligence services to suppress the domestic opposition. So I’ve been to this rodeo before, many a time. I saw the storm clouds gathering several weeks ago, and everything I’ve suspected has so far come to fruition,” Uehlinger said.
He pronounced it “very disappointing” that such transparent abuse of government power for partisan politics would occur in the United States.
“An intelligence service has to have the trust of the people and the government in order to function effectively,” he said. “With all of these scandals happening, and with the name of perhaps the CIA and other intelligence community elements in the mud, this makes the object of protecting our national security more problematic. The agencies have to have the trust of the American people, and they’re losing it, because it seems as though they’ve been weaponized – perhaps, like I said, not breaking the law but playing very close to the line.”
Kassam suggested that leaking the information might have been illegal, even if Rice was legally entitled to request information on Donald Trump’s campaign and unmask the U.S. persons monitored during surveillance of foreign intelligence targets.
“That’s absolutely the case,” Uehlinger agreed. He went on to argue that the absence of hard evidence for any wrongdoing by the Trump campaign in all of these leaks was highly significant.
“Since basically the Obama administration has sort of loaded this with these rule changes and all to allow for leaks the fact that there is no ‘smoking gun’ of Trump administration collusion with Russia indicates that there isn’t any. There is nothing substantial here because a juicy morsel like that would certainly have been leaked by the same people that have been leaking everything else. The fact it hasn’t been leaked out means it does not exist,” he reasoned.
Kassam said some of the Russia hysteria came from imputing sinister motives to conventional business dealings, arguing that Trump’s organization made deals around the world, and it is exceedingly difficult to do business with any Russian entity that is not somehow connected to the Russian government.
“That’s an excellent point. You’re absolutely right,” Uehlinger responded. “It shows these people who are doing these gambits are relying on the relative ignorance of the American public of the actual nuts and bolts of intelligence to make their point. Anyone with any background in this stuff can see it for what it is: a desperate attempt to discredit an administration because they were crushed in the past elections.”
Trump shakes loose the traitors in the intelligence community
Former NSA Analyst Claims Intel Community Will Go ‘Nuclear’ Against Trump
John Schindler, a former National Security Agency analyst and current columnist for the New York Observer, said Wednesday that the intelligence community will go “nuclear” against President Donald Trump.
The national security columnist also quoted a senior intelligence official telling him that Trump “will die in jail.” “Now we go nuclear. [Intelligence community] war going to new levels. Just got an [email from] from senior [intelligence community] friend, it began: ‘He will die in jail,’” Schindler tweeted.
The Observer columnist has for months taken a strong stance against Trump. He recently wrote an article called “The Spy Revolt Against Trump Begins.”
This came after President Trump angrily tweeted about continued leaks to major media outlets. “Information is being illegally given to the failing [New York Times] & [Washington Post] by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?). Just like Russia,” Trump wrote.
Schindler received heat for his tweet suggesting a coup by the intelligence community.
ABC News chief foreign correspondent Terry Moran tweeted, “If this source is for real, talk of a ‘Deep State’ coup aren’t insane. [The president] will ‘die in jail’? Who do you think you are?”
The former NSA analyst stood by his comment and said, “Surprisingly, some US spies consider [the president] colluding with [Russian intelligence services] + Kremlin, [including] election theft, to be kinda treason-y.”
