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.
The FBI will not expedite the release of documents about secret meetings between Comey and Obama
Comey held a secret Oval Office meeting with Obama on Jan. 5, 2017
TheDCNF requested records of all meetings between the two
The FBI states it will not expedite the release of documents about secret meetings between FBI Director James Comey and former President Barack Obama, according to a letter the bureau sent to The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Such information is not “a matter of widespread and exceptional media interest in which there exists possible questions about the government’s integrity which affects public confidence,” David Hardy, the section chief for the bureau’s Record/Information Dissemination Section, told TheDCNF in a Feb. 26 letter.
TheDCNF, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), requested records of all meetings between Comey and Obama and sought an “expedited process” as provided under the act when issues are of great interest to the media and the records address issues pertaining to government integrity. TheDCNF FOIA request was filed Feb. 16, 2018.
The issue prompting the FOIA request was the disclosure Comey held a secret Oval Office meeting with Obama on Jan. 5, 2017. Comey never divulged the meeting to Congress.
Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, former deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and former Vice President Joe Biden also attended the meeting.
The National Archives revealed the existence of the meeting and released a declassified version of an email Rice sent to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Rice wrote an email to herself about the secret Jan. 5 meeting with Comey on Inauguration Day Jan. 20, 2017, as President Donald Trump was being sworn into office. The email suggested Comey may have misled Congress and was attempting to cover up the extent of his relationship with Obama.
Christopher Bedford, TheDCNF’s editor-in-chief, called the FBI denial “shameful.”
“The FBI just told us that Director James Comey potentially lying to Congress should not be of interest to us, that it doesn’t speak to their ‘integrity,’ and that it shouldn’t impact America’s ‘confidence’ in them,” Bedford said. “They said this with a straight face. We disagree, we think the American people disagree, and we think it’s absolutely shameful.”
Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and subcommittee chairman, and Lindsey Graham released the Rice email after they received it from the National Archives.
“President Obama had a brief follow-on conversation with FBI Director Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates in the Oval Office,” Rice stated in the email on Jan. 5.
The President urged Comey to proceed “by the book” on the Russian investigation, according to Rice.
Grassley of Iowa and Graham of South Carolina wrote to Rice in a Feb. 8 letter saying the email seemed “odd” to them.
“It strikes us as odd that, among your activities in the final moments on the final day of the Obama administration, you would feel the need to send yourself such an unusual email purporting to document a conversation involving President Obama,” the two wrote.
“Despite your claim that President Obama repeatedly told Mr. Comey to proceed ‘by the book,’ substantial questions have arisen about whether officials at the FBI, as well as at the Justice Department and the State Department, actually did proceed ‘by the book,’” the two senators continued.
Comey claimed in June 8, 2017, testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence he had only two face-to-face meetings with the president in which they were alone.
“I spoke alone with President Obama twice in person (and never on the phone) – once in 2015 to discuss law enforcement policy issues and a second time, briefly, for him to say goodbye in late 2016,” Comey’s opening statement read.
The qualifier that he had meetings with Obama “alone” permitted the former director to suggest he only met with the former president on two occasions.
TheDCNF filed its FOIA request before the bureau “seeking records that identify and describe all meetings between former FBI Director James Comey and President Barack Obama. This records request is for all meetings with President Obama alone or with meetings with the President in the company of other administration officials.”
TheDCNF requested records to include all Comey “logs, director appointment schedules, emails and memos outlining the meetings with the former President along with administration officials,” adding, the records “should list the date of the meeting, location, topic and meeting participants.”
TheDCNF stated it sought an “expedited request” for producing the records.
“The issue of Director Comey’s meetings with President Obama is a key troubling issue for Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley,” TheDCNF wrote in its application for the expedited processing. TheDCNF attached to Grassly-Graham letter to Rice in the FOIA request for expediting handling.
Hardy said TheDCNF failed to meet its standards for expedited processing as provided under 28 CFR 16.5 (e)(1)(iv).
“You have not provided enough information concerning the statutory requirements permitting expedition: therefore your request is denied,” he told TheDCNF.
I will not hold my breath on anyone in the Obama Administration going to jail.
Friday on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle,” host Laura Ingraham gave her take on the indictments handed down by special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe regarding interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Ingraham told viewers the indictments illustrated how Russia was still a threat to the United States despite then-President Barack Obama’s dismissal during the 2012 presidential election. She also said Mueller should interview 2016 Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State John Kerry, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes and former President Barack Obama as part of his investigation.
Partial transcript as follows:
INGRAHAM: We finally have indictments in the Mueller investigation related to meddling in the 2016 election and the only ones being charged are Russians. A federal grand jury has now indicted 13 Russian individuals and companies for interfering in the 2016 election.
They are charged with a bunch of things like creating fake ads, staging pro and anti-Trump campaign events and also setting up bogus-run organizations, but they’re not accused of rigging the election for Trump, but instead of waging information warfare to sow discord in the political system.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced the indictments and added this important caveat.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROD ROSENSTEIN, DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL: There is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charge conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
INGRAHAM: Did you hear that? No American knowingly took part in the meddling and the plot had no effect on the outcome of the election. The facts, as we know them right now, support the president’s argument, an argument we have been making on this show for months, that there was no Russian collusion.
Trump took a bit of a victory lap, tweeting today, “Russia started their anti-U.S. campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for president. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong. No collusion.”
Well, it certainly looks that way, but we don’t know for sure what else Mueller may have up his sleeve. Though, I’ll tell you who this totally vindicates. Conservatives and Republicans who have been warning people for years about how devious the Russians can be in this situation.
Remember, when President Obama sarcastically mocked Mitt Romney’s Russia warning back in 2012 during the presidential debate.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FORMER PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When you’re asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia. Not al Qaeda, you said Russia. In the 1980s or now, calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the cold war has been over for 20 years.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
INGRAHAM: Now, Obama was so convinced of that, his DOJ and FBI did next to nothing about the Russian skulduggery. I love that word. His State Department actually approved the visas for the Russian operatives that were indicted by Mueller today.
His FBI began spying on Trump Campaign Advisor Carter Page with a FISA warrant in the fall of 2016. Now details in today’s indictment do point to vindication for the Trump team. This is Jonathan Turley from tonight’s “Special Report.”
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JONATHAN TURLEY: This makes more sense than the narratives that everyone has been throwing around in conspiracies. This began in 2014, began before the presidential election. The Russians were taking targets of opportunity and shooting at everybody in the election but certainly working more against Hillary Clinton. But what it does show is that they did a really quite impressive job in finding this cyber trail to these individuals.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
INGRAHAM: I’ll say. And the indictment describes rallies that took place after the election, both in support of and against Trump, and by the way, some of them happened on the same day, all allegedly promoted by these Russian accounts.
You see this ad? Well, according to “Buzzfeed,” this anti-Trump rallies staged just four days after the election was promoted by something called “Black Matters U.S.,” a social media campaign thought to be organized by Russians.
So, why would Trump collude with Russians to stage anti-Trump rallies? Does that make any sense? Here’s the bottom line. The Trump campaign did not know about Russian interference in the election. But the Obama administration certainly did and may have in fact enabled it.
Given that we already know Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC paid for that fake Russian dossier, it’s time for the special counsel to interview Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, and maybe even Barack Obama. I say it’s high time that we determine who really colluded with the Russians.
Did Team Obama Abuse Intelligence Collection During the Lead-up to the Iran Deal, Too?
Trump and his associates may not have been the first political opponents the Obama White House targeted with a campaign of spying and illegal leaks, Tablet reported today. The Obama administration may have used information from classified foreign surveillance to smear and blackmail its political opponents during the lead-up to the Iran nuclear deal, too.
In a bombshell report in December of 2015, the Wall Street Journal alleged that Team Obama had spied on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials in order to stay one step ahead of their domestic opponents during the months-long debate about the unpopular deal. According to the Journal, the surveillance of the Israelis “also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups,” which may have been the whole point of the surveillance to begin with.
During the long and contentious lead-up to the Iran Deal the Israeli ambassador was regularly briefing senior officials in Jerusalem, including the prime minister, about the situation, including his meetings with American lawmakers and Jewish community leaders. The Obama administration would be less interested in what the Israelis were doing than in the actions of those who actually had the ability to block the deal—namely, Senate and House members. The administration then fed this information to members of the press, who were happy to relay thinly veiled anti-Semitic conceits by accusing deal opponents of dual loyalty and being in the pay of foreign interests.
This is exactly how Ben Rhodes’ infamous “echo chamber” worked as described by David Samuels in the The New York Times Magazine:
Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums…. ‘But then there are sort of these force multipliers,’ he said, adding, ‘We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them—‘
‘I can name them,’ I said, ticking off a few names of prominent Washington reporters and columnists who often tweet in sync with White House messaging.
The echo chamber was Team Obama’s insidious way of keeping politicians in line.
It didn’t take much imagination for members of Congress to imagine their names being inserted in the Iran deal echo chamber’s boilerplate—that they were beholden to “donors” and “foreign lobbies.” What would happen if the White House leaked your phone call with the Israeli ambassador to a friendly reporter, and you were then profiled as betraying the interests of your constituents and the security of your nation to a foreign power? What if the fact of your phone call appeared under the byline of a famous columnist friendly to the Obama administration, say, in a major national publication?
“At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents,” says a pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the day-to-day fight over the Iran Deal. “The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans engaged in perfectly legitimate political activism—activism, due to the nature of the issue, that naturally involved conversations with foreigners. We began to notice the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our own paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.”
This is what systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection for domestic political purposes looks like: Intelligence collected on Americans, lawmakers, and figures in the pro-Israel community was fed back to the Obama White House as part of its political operations. The administration got the drop on its opponents by using classified information, which it then used to draw up its own game plan to block and freeze those on the other side. And—with the help of certain journalists whose stories (and thus careers) depend on high-level access—terrorize them.
Once you understand how this may have worked, it becomes easier to comprehend why and how we keep being fed daily treats of Trump’s nefarious Russia ties. The issue this time isn’t Israel, but Russia, yet the basic contours may very well be the same.
As Lee Smith explains in Tablet, the Obama administration “redefined America’s pro-Israel community as agents of Israel” in making its case for the Iran deal and they used the same basic template to smear Team Trump, turning innocuous meetings and phone calls with the Russian ambassador into something far more nefarious.
Where the Israeli ambassador once was poison, now the Russian ambassador is the kiss of death—a phone call with him led to Flynn’s departure from the White House and a meeting with him landed Attorney General Jeff Sessions in hot water.
Obama changed the rules on distributing intercepted communications during his last weeks in office so that the intelligence could be “preserved” — which is apparently another way of saying “leaked.” Team Obama’s trail of breadcrumbs may also lead investigators to their systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection.
At least two Republican senators have called on Congress to investigate whether Rice had political motives for the “unmasking” Team Trump officials.
“I’m not going to prejudge here, but I think every American should know whether or not the national security adviser to President Obama was involved in unmasking Trump transition figures for political purposes,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Fox News. “It should be easy to figure out, and we will.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called for Rice to be subpoenaed. “The facts will come out with Susan Rice, but I think she ought to be under subpoena, and she needs to be asked, ‘Did you talk to the president about it? Did President Obama know about this?’ ” said Paul on MSNBC.
Steve Bannon Leaves National Security Council After Susan Rice Takedown
President Donald Trump’s Senior adviser Stephen K. Bannon has exited his role on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, claiming that his mission is complete.
“Susan Rice operationalized the NSC during the last administration. I was put on to ensure that it was de-operationalized,” Bannon said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal.
The council suffered a tumultuous transition after Trump’s first National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn resigned less than a month after he took office and was replaced by Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.
“General McMaster has returned the NSC to its proper function,” Bannon said in his statement. Other sources told reporters that Bannon was part of the council to monitor Flynn’s activity in the early days of the Trump administration.
Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Obama allies were furious that Bannon was allowed on the council, even though he rarely attended meetings. Rice was exposed earlier this week by reports revealing that she requested the unmasking of key members of Trump’s transition team.
A White House source confirmed to Breitbart News that Bannon will retain his security clearance in the West Wing.
Trump’s Secretary of Energy Rick Perry was added the council. Nikki Haley, the Representative of the United States to the United Nations was also included as well as Director of National intelligence Dan Coats, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford, and CIA director Mike Pompeo.
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.”