Tag Archives: Intelligence Agencies

04/18/17

British Role Confirmed in Trump Spying Scandal

Accuracy in Media

A Special Report from the Accuracy in Media Center for Investigative Journalism; Cliff Kincaid, Director.

The British Guardian posted a report on April 13 claiming that its sources now admit that the British spy agency GCHQ was digitally wiretapping Trump associates, going back to late 2015. This was presumably when the December 2015 Moscow meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Lt. General Michael Flynn took place.

This runs contrary to the blanket nature of the denial insinuated in GCHQ’s carefully-crafted statement of March 17 claiming it was all “nonsense” and “utterly ridiculous” that they conducted surveillance of “thenpresident-elect” Donald Trump (emphasis added). The surveillance went back a year before he became “president-elect.”

President Trump’s claim of being “wire tapped” has been vindicated. Indeed, the surveillance is far more extensive than even he suspected at the time.

Based on the new disclosures, we can safely conclude that the world’s most advanced and extensive system of computerized espionage was indeed used against him and people he worked with, for political purposes, with the knowledge and approval of top Obama officials such as CIA Director John Brennan (one major name implicated by the Guardian).

Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst, Judge Andrew Napolitano, who said GCHQ was involved in wiretapping Trump, has also vindicated. Fox News owes Napolitano an apology for yanking him off the air for a week for making that “controversial” and now-verified assertion.

Trump Was Right

President Trump stressed the pervasive “extent” of this Obama political “wiretapping” to Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business in an Oval Office interview on April 11 (aired April 12).  “Me and so many other people” surveilled, Trump said. He explained again that he had picked up the “wire tapped” terminology straight from the headline of The New York Times (of January 20) as he has explained before (on March 15; see AIM report).

Now we’re learning that GCHQ did wiretap Trump for a year before the election. “Trump” is, of course, shorthand for Trump associates and possibly Trump himself directly, depending on context. But GCHQ is trying to put a positive spin on what it admits would be illegal spying on U.S. citizens if done by U.S. agencies.

The Guardian’s sources claim a heroic role for the British GCHQ as a courageous “whistleblower” in warning U.S. agencies to “Watch out” about Trump and Russia—but carefully avoiding mention of the U.S.’s NSA, which must be protected at all costs as part of the NSA-GCHQ spy-on-each-other’s-citizens “wiretap shell game.” (See AIM Special Report of March 18).

These sources virtually admit the mutual “wiretap shell game” by inadvertently mentioning the Trump-Russia data was originally passed on to the U.S. by GCHQ as part of a “routine exchange” of intelligence. The use of this term, “exchange,” suggests what we had previously reported—the shell-game “exchange” between the NSA and GCHQ where they can spy on each other’s citizens and deny it all.

British Wiretapping

Past British Prime Ministers have been implicated in various scandals involving wiretaps.  Some have involved the “Echelon” global surveillance system set up by the NSA with its counterparts in the other “Five Eyes” nations—UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  Any one of these countries is able to circumvent domestic laws against spying on their own citizens by asking another Echelon member country to do it for them. This is precisely the “wiretap shell game” used by the Obama administration to have British GCHQ spy on Trump, as outlined by Judge Napolitano and his sources.

To avoid unraveling the longstanding Five Eyes spying “wiretap shell game,” the GCHQ had to pretend they “routinely” came across this Trump-Russia wiretap data “by chance,” unprompted by requests from U.S. agencies (such as the NSA or CIA) or by Obama officials, working outside normal NSA chain of command on Signals Intelligence or SIGINT (as Judge Napolitano reported on March 14).

So the heroic British GCHQ comes to the rescue with conveniently “accidental” (our word) captures of wiretap communications between Trump people and sinister-sounding “Russian intelligence agents,” with the wiretaps sent here to help out the U.S. agencies. We are supposed to believe the U.S. agencies and the Obama White House just passively received this bombshell wiretap data from GCHQ, no questions asked, for over a year from late 2015 to early 2017. (The Guardian has no end date for the surveillance, such as the November 8 election, and indicates continued surveillance into the Trump transition, with the FBI “throwing more resources” into the investigation then.)

Did Obama officials ever say, “Wait! Stop sending us this material, it may be illegal!” It does not appear so. Hence, the questions that have to be asked by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are:

  • Were there requests for more wiretap data on Trump and his team?
  • Were there requests for more complete transcripts, or even voice recordings?

This “alerting” of the U.S. on Trump-Russia communications was needed, according to the Guardian and its U.S. and U.K. intelligence sources, because the U.S. agencies were “asleep” or “untrained,” or were legally prohibited from “examining the private communications of American citizens without warrants.” But to the GCHQ, America is a “foreign” nation and evidently they think they are free to spy on Americans “without warrants.”

Obama’s CIA and the Anti-Trump Task Force

Previous reporting has said that an interagency task force of six U.S. intelligence agencies was set up to investigate the alleged Trump-connected names supposedly discovered in “incidental collection” of digital wiretap surveillance of Russian communications. The six agencies are said to consist of the CIA, NSA, FBI, the Justice Department’s National Security Division, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Treasury Department financial crimes unit.

Until now, no one has known who in the Obama administration set up the task force, who directs it, what its operating directives state, what its activities have entailed, and who it is really accountable to.

But the Guardian is now reporting that it was CIA Director John Brennan who initiated, in about August 2016, what clearly seems to be an illegal domestic investigation of the Trump political campaign, which would be prohibited by the CIA charter.

Reportedly “Brennan used [British] GCHQ information and intelligence from other partners to launch a major interagency investigation.” The infamous fake “Trump dossier” is apparently dragged in too.

Brennan then proceeded to give highly classified “urgent” briefings to individual members of the Congressional “Gang of Eight.” Beginning on about August 25, with then-Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) on that date, CIA chief Brennan claimed that the Russian email hackings of the Democratic National Committee were designed to help Trump win the election, according to The New York Times. These partisan briefings represent the politicization of the CIA under Obama, and are of dubious legality.

In September 2016, this anti-Trump intelligence task force changed the previous “incidental” collection to outright direct targeting of Trump people so that their communications with Russia were “actively monitored,” not merely retrieved retroactively in digital archives with names having to be laboriously “unmasked.” (See also New York Times January 19/20, February 14.)

Unmasking is unnecessary if one starts with the specific names of Trump personnel first, and then flags them for future surveillance, going forward in time. In that case, the “actively monitored” and flagged Trump names automatically trigger alerts in the NSA-GCHQ computers whenever the names turn up. These wiretap reports would then have been submitted to Obama officials at the level of national security adviser Susan Rice and CIA director Brennan, and perhaps to Obama himself.

Interestingly, the Guardian’s sources carefully try to avoid implicating or involving the NSA in GCHQ’s allegedly unprompted reporting on intercepted wiretap data on Trump associates. It’s the “shell game” again with the NSA and GCHQ covering for each other.

British GCHQ Director Implicated

Instead, the Guardian’s anonymous intelligence sources say that then-director of GCHQ Robert Hannigan passed on a top secret “director level” report on Trump-Russia in “summer 2016” to CIA Director John Brennan, rather than to the NSA. However, if GCHQ was using NSA’s digital wiretap facilities to “routinely” spy on Trump people, then the NSA would be implicated by the very arrangement used.

As we predicted at AIM, the unexpected sudden resignation of GCHQ director Hannigan, announced on January 23, makes him the potential villain and scapegoat. Hannigan stayed on his job until his replacement took office on April 7.

In an unprecedented BBC interview on April 5, Hannigan fired a parting shot at the Judge Napolitano and White House reports of his GCHQ’s spying on Trump. Hannigan snidely dismissed the reports, saying, “We get crazy conspiracy theories thrown at us every day. We ignore most of them. On this occasion it was so crazy that we felt we should say so and we have said it’s a ridiculous suggestion.”

The Guardian’s report refutes Hannigan, barely a week after he left office, possibly with official connivance or approval. But why is Hannigan getting being thrown under the bus so soon? Is it fear of the impending findings of U.S. Congressional and official investigations exposing GCHQ?

Such reports in the British press on highly sensitive intelligence matters surely must have been quietly cleared by the British government as a first fallback position on GCHQ spying on Trump. Otherwise the Guardian would be in deep trouble under the UK’s Official Secrets Act and its D-Notice procedure to suppress or censor news stories on secret intelligence matters.

Finally, the British also seem to be trying to spread the blame around to a laundry list of other countries allegedly passing on intelligence about Trump-Russia contacts—Germany, Estonia, Poland, Australia, the Dutch and the French DGSE.

Still, no “smoking gun” has ever been found in any of this wiretap material, for it would already have been leaked like Lt. Gen. Flynn’s fairly benign conversations with the Russian ambassador that got him fired.

Despite the sensational news from The Washington Post that the FBI obtained a FISA warrant to wiretap ex-Trump adviser Carter Page, which may even still be in effect, his “Russian contacts” also seem to be completely ordinary and routine. Page is so confident of his innocence that he has been going on various television news programs to talk openly about his work on Russia, supplying Russian contacts with some of his New York University classroom materials.

To be sure, a certain large percentage of these kinds of business meetings with Russians will turn out to be with undercover Russian intelligence officers—unbeknownst to the Western business and academic people meeting them. The media portray them as suspicious. But this kind of Russian spy game has always been going on since the Cold War and is nothing new.

The FISA warrant, rather than proving any malfeasance by Carter Page—again no “smoking gun”—only adds to the evidence that what President Trump said from the start was true: that Trump and his associates were under electronic surveillance.

Unasked Questions

What do the wiretaps on Trump actually say? The media don’t want to know if the NSA-GCHQ wiretaps actually exonerate President Trump.

One of the advantages of the adversarial system in the courts is that advocates on the opposing side ideally get a fair chance—unlike the one-sided media with journalists who, at the rate of more than 90 percent, contributed to the Hillary Clinton campaign (see this Columbia Journalism Review study of election records).

Questions not asked of Rice or other sources by the media include whether she or other Obama officials “flagged” the unmasked Trump team names for future NSA (or British GCHQ) automatic unmasking and delivery of transcripts and summary reports.

Did the Obama people regularize the “unmasking” so that routinely a new retroactive search was automatically ordered with automatic unmaskings? That would be another way to turn “incidental collection” into an effectively ongoing wiretap order. Did President Obama or Rice or others request actual sound recordings of Trump and others to review?

Did the Obama team “unmask” other presidential candidates and associates besides Trump, such as Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who visited Moscow in December 2015 and dined with Putin? Fox is reporting that Congressional investigators are now looking into whether other presidential candidates and Members of Congress were surveilled too. In 2014, CIA director Brennan was caught red-handed lying to the Senate about the CIA’s criminal hacking of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s computer system.

We are told that many, if not most, of these wiretaps and unmaskings of Trump people were not even wiretaps about Russia or “incidental collection” on legitimate foreign intelligence subjects, though they may have begun that way.

The evidence now indicates that the information was procured for partisan political purposes—to spy on the Trump opposition to Hillary Clinton using the full weight of the U.S. government’s NSA spying apparatus (or NSA facilities used by British GCHQ).

Pompeo Must Clean Out the CIA

Trump’s CIA Director Mike Pompeo is in a position to get to the bottom of this scandal. Yet, on April 13, 2017, in his first public speech as director, he seemed to indicate that the evidence being developed in connection with the CIA’s role in the illegal surveillance of President Trump was going to be ignored or brushed aside. It was a forceful, even strident, defense of the Agency.

“I inherited an Agency that has a real appreciation for the law and for the Constitution,” he claimed. “Despite fictional depictions meant to sell books or box-office tickets, we are not an untethered or rogue agency. So yes, while we have some truly awesome capabilities at our disposal, our officers do not operate in areas or against targets that are rightfully and legally off-limits to us.”

The evidence suggests the opposite. The CIA under Obama’s CIA Director Brennan was involved in illegal surveillance, using those “truly awesome capabilities,” against political targets that should have been off-limits.

One of those targets was the President who appointed Pompeo as CIA director.

Related AIM Special Reports:

Just Who Was the Russian Agent After All?

on April 11, 2017

Watergate-style Wiretapping Confirmed

on April 4, 2017

A Watergate-style Threat to the Democratic Process

on March 18, 2017

How CNN Recycled Last Year’s Fake News

on February 20, 2017

03/18/17

A Watergate-style Threat to the Democratic Process

Accuracy in Media


A special report from the Accuracy in Media Center for Investigative Journalism; Cliff Kincaid, Director.
(Editor’s Note: Public hearings on this controversy are scheduled for March 20 and 28 by the House Intelligence Committee.)

Senate Intelligence Committee leaders from both parties, Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA), have issued a disingenuous statement that “no element of the United States government” surveilled “Trump Tower.” They dishonestly evade the fact that media reporting two days earlier had said that British intelligence operating at U.S. behest had likely been implicated in wiretapping Trump and Trump associates, all at the instigation of the U.S. government.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said on March 16 that Fox News sources have reported through retired Judge Andrew Napolitano that then-President Obama had used two officials to arrange with the British NSA, called GCHQ or Government Communications Headquarters, to carry out the wiretapping of both Trump and Trump associates. (See this AIM guest column.) The British now dispute this claim.

This evasive use of British spying is done in order to leave no American “fingerprints” on the highly illegal operation, as the White House quoted Judge Napolitano. It is a long-standing practice under treaty-like intelligence agreements that British intelligence can use NSA facilities, and vice versa, for shell-game eavesdropping.

The trick is for the two agencies to swap places so that the NSA can deny they are wiretapping, and the GCHQ can deny that they are wiretapping. The Brits are trying to escape in between these moves of what a key expert has called the US-UK “wiretapping shell game.”

This is the first time that news sources have explicitly stated that Obama personally ordered the wiretapping of Trump himself, through Obama officials going to the British, though it has been implied in the past by the suspicious lack of any circumspect denials, even when The New York Times said on January 19 and 20 that “wiretapped communications” went to the Obama White House. No one in the article said “Obama White House—but not Obama personally.”

Consider how one important person—President Trump—got the clear media message that he was indeed the target of the spying: President Trump told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson that he read this New York Times story of January 20 before he tweeted about Obama “wiretapping” him. White House spokesman Spicer quoted from this article.

Continue reading →

03/10/17

Obama’s CIA Embarrassed by Another Mole

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

It was a case of incredibly bad timing on the part of CBS News. On the same day we learned that there had been a massive leak of classified information engineered through President Obama’s CIA, the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley featured one of Obama’s former CIA directors arguing that Trump was being irrational by criticizing the intelligence community.

Obama’s former CIA director, Leon Panetta, wondered about the “trust of the American people in the credibility” of Trump, when his own credibility was in question.

The bizarre spectacle was another indication that the liberal media have come completely unglued over President Trump’s unorthodox way of doing business in Washington, and his willingness to confront the issue of corruption in the intelligence community.

The question, in the wake of the WikiLeaks disclosures of some of the CIA’s most important secrets, should have been what Leon Panetta and other Obama CIA directors, such as John Brennan, were doing when all of this classified information was being stolen.

It is apparent that CBS and other media organizations are too close to the intelligence community to question what is really going on. Indeed, in retrospect, it might seem proper to ask whether the anonymous sources in the intelligence community leaking derogatory information against Trump are trying to divert attention away from the infiltration of their own ranks by agents for Russia, China, or other American enemies or adversaries.

In somber tones, as the CBS News website put it, Pelley wondered what Panetta thought of Trump’s “various outbursts in recent weeks, including the unproven charge that Mr. Obama ordered surveillance on Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential election.” Pelley asked, “Is it appropriate to ask whether the President is having difficulty with rationality?”

How can the charge be “unproven” when the liberals’ favorite newspaper, The New York Times, covered the use of “wiretapped data” against Trump, and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported on private conversations involving former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn?

Does CBS think the American people are stupid?

No wonder the people trust Trump’s tweets over fake news from the media.

It would have been more appropriate to ask why Obama’s CIA has been leaking like a sieve, and what, if any, benefit the American people are getting from what Watergate reporter Bob Woodward calls the $50 billion a year “espionage establishment.”

Under Obama, a series of moles in the intelligence community have been uncovered, including Army intelligence analyst Bradley/Chelsea Manning, CIA/NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, and now, with the WikiLeaks disclosures, another “anonymous” leaker has come forward. The latest came when Obama was president and Brennan was CIA director. The documents are only being released now.

As noted by Trump press secretary Sean Spicer, “…all of these [leaks] occurred under the last administration—that is important.”

To make matters worse, and to show his disdain for the concept of protecting America’s secrets, Obama commuted the espionage sentence for Manning, facilitating his release from prison on May 17 of this year.

Manning’s treachery “put American lives at risk and exposed some of our nation’s most sensitive secrets,” noted House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WS).

But Manning was in the process of changing from a man to a woman, after having served openly in the Armed Services as a practicing homosexual. So he was special and different.

Obama’s commutation was a “dangerous precedent,” Ryan noted, which indicated that those who “compromise our national security” won’t be held accountable for their crimes.

Obama, who couldn’t have passed a background check, nominated Panetta as CIA director in 2009. Panetta served two years in that position, and went on to become Secretary of Defense. He started his career in the Democratic Party as a far-left congressman from Santa Cruz , California, with a laundry list of connections to communists and socialists, including suspected espionage agent and Communist Party member Hugh DeLacy,  himself a one-time Democratic member of Congress.

As noted by journalist Wes Vernon, researchers found a “Dear Hugh” letter from then-Rep. Panetta that offered a summary of a report on U.S. military operations unavailable for public distribution. In the letter, Panetta wrote, “If there is anything I can do for you in the future, Hugh, please feel free to call on me.” When DeLacy passed away in 1986, Congressman Panetta spoke at his memorial service.

Panetta also had deep links to the Marxist Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.

If there had been serious congressional panels in the Senate and House—and security agencies like the FBI—that conducted real background checks, Panetta would never have been confirmed as Obama’s CIA director. Back in 2011 we noted, “no evidence that the Panetta-DeLacy relationship was ever examined by the FBI or the Senate when Panetta was being considered and confirmed for the post of CIA Director.”

Panetta was followed as CIA director by David Petraeus, who was convicted of mishandling classified information, and then John Brennan, who voted communist before joining the CIA and reportedly converted to Islam while stationed in Saudi Arabia.

“The new leaker may very well have been hired as a result of CIA Director Brennan’s decision to lower standards for CIA hiring because he wanted to create a more diverse CIA workforce and Brennan rushed to staff his new cyber office,” commented former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz of the Center for Security Policy.

Brennan promoted the hiring of transgenders and pioneered a multi-year “Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (2016 – 2019)” for the agency that is still in effect.

A different approach might have been to hire people based on their love of country and loyalty to the Constitution.

Trump’s “outbursts” seem mild compared to the records of disaster and destruction of American national security that characterize the tenure of Obama’s CIA directors.

Pelley hyped the fact that Panetta was CIA director when Osama bin Laden was killed, although his al-Qaeda successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is still on the loose, and al Qaeda has proven to be a resilient organization that President Trump has had to target with military might in Yemen.

Reportedly, the FBI is investigating the leak from the CIA. But as we have pointed out on numerous occasions, the FBI still hasn’t solved the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, despite evidence that al-Qaeda infiltration of U.S. labs explains why the anthrax that was used to kill five Americans was made in the U.S.

The entire intelligence community, including the FBI, seems to be thoroughly infiltrated and compromised, and unable to identify the nature of the corruption that constantly eats away at U.S. national security.

Panetta frets about Trump’s “credibility” on the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley when Panetta and the president he served had none to begin with.

All of which proves Trump’s claim that the media are the enemy of the people.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

03/7/17

Media Collusion with the “Espionage Establishment”

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

Host Chris Wallace of “Fox News Sunday” spent most of his Sunday show on the subject of whether there is any evidence of Trump officials colluding with Russia to affect the 2016 presidential election. “On the Russian collusion, there’s a lot of smoke, no evidence,” said panelist Bob Woodward of Washington Post Watergate fame.

But we do have substantial evidence of media collusion with the U.S. intelligence community.

“Few understand the CIA and espionage culture as well as [David] Ignatius,” Woodward once said of his colleague, a foreign affairs columnist for the paper. These comments are significant. Ignatius is the Post journalist who received an illegal leak of classified information regarding Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador. The disclosure led to Flynn’s resignation as Trump’s national security adviser.

The leak and its publication on January 12 were both illegal actions under the law.

Attorney Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch tells Accuracy in Media that Ignatius is not alone. “What you see in these leaks—David Ignatius of The Washington Post and others—are the intelligence agencies being manipulated by the left to destroy the Trump presidency and everybody around him.” Ignatius openly boasts of his contacts in the intelligence community, especially the CIA.

Woodward was a guest on the Sunday edition of “Fox News Sunday,” but was never asked about his colleague receiving illegal leaks of communications intelligence information.

Instead, the major issue on the show was whether President Trump has made charges about wire-tapping his administration without proof. “NO EVIDENCE CITED FOR ‘WATERGATE’ PLOT” was one of the front-page headlines in the Post over President Trump’s charges that former President Obama was behind the wiretapping.

The media were unanimous. “Trump’s baseless wiretap claim” was the headline over a CNN story.

While Trump’s tweet alleging Obama’s personal role seemed like a stretch, some reported “facts” already in the media put some substance behind what the President was trying to convey in a few words and phrases. For example, the British Guardian reported on January 11:

“The Guardian has learned that the FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (FISA) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The FISA court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus. According to one report, the FBI was finally granted a warrant in October, but that has not been confirmed, and it is not clear whether any warrant led to a full investigation.”

Regarding the alleged personal involvement of former President Obama, the left-wing publication The Intercept reported on January 13:

“With only days until Donald Trump takes office, the Obama administration on Thursday announced new rules that will let the NSA share vast amounts of private data gathered without warrant, court orders or congressional authorization with 16 other agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security.”

The conservative Wall Street Journal reported:

“Only days before the inauguration, President Obama also signed an executive order that allows the National Security Agency to share raw intercepts and data with the 16 other agencies in the intelligence community. NSA analysts used to filter out irrelevant information and minimize references to Americans. Now such material is being leaked anonymously.”

The new rules and procedures, which were promulgated pursuant to a presidential executive order, were signed by Obama Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch on January 3 and reported under the innocuous New York Times headline, “N.S.A. Gets More Latitude to Share Intercepted Communications.”

As the Journal suggests, what Obama’s administration did was to set the stage for the leaks through David Ignatius of the Post and others. You don’t have to be Bob Woodward to suspect something is going on here.

“The people that report on national intelligence at all the networks, including Fox—and I love Fox News—are scared of taking on the intelligence agencies because their sources will be cut off and they won’t have a profession anymore,” Larry Klayman tells Accuracy in Media.

Interestingly, the personal website of David Ignatius features a laudatory review of one of his books, The Director, about a fictional director of the CIA. This is the context in which Bob Woodward said of Ignatius, “Few understand the CIA and espionage culture as well as Ignatius.” Another reviewer, Philip Kerr, also of The Washington Post, says “I strongly suggest you read The Director. It makes Tom Clancy look like an episode of Get Smart.”

“Get Smart” was the comedy show about a bumbling secret agent who had a phone in his shoe. Ignatius clearly understands the nature of the intelligence business and doesn’t joke around.

But most of the media won’t raise the obvious question: who is Ignatius collaborating with and why? The answers suggest actual collusion and even criminal conduct.

Woodward said on “Fox News Sunday” that “you’ve got to understand that as President Trump has this vast espionage establishment as his disposal, $50 billion a year plus, even in the CIA they call him the First Customer. So he can get the information he wants. He’s the only one in the government.”

But is he really a customer? Or is he in this case a victim?

If the intelligence community is trying to bring down a duly elected government of the United States, it is a story that must be told. Will the media tell this side of the story, or will they protect their anonymous sources and a $50 billion espionage establishment they collude with to make a living?

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

03/5/17

SPYGATE: Mark Levin Provides The Timeline And Proof Of The Obama Administration Using Police Tactics Against Trump [VIDEO]

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Mark Levin is on a tear and it is a wonder to behold. I just watched him provide solid proof on Fox News on how all these police tactics against President Trump did indeed occur. The media provided most of the proof themselves that the two FISA requests were sought by Obama… the first one in June of last year, which mentioned Trump directly and was denied, and a second that occurred in October last year and was narrowed in scope, then was approved. It looks like it may have been targeting a server in the White House that was emailing Russian banks supposedly. No wrongdoing was found, unless of course you count what Obama did.

Levin has laid out exactly how this should be investigated and he has the full attention of the White House. His findings and recommendations have been circulated to several White House staffers, according to Washington Post reporter Robert Costa. The FISA orders and transcripts should now be made public and hearings should begin over all this. The media is still insisting there is no proof, when they provided said proof. This is insane.

From Conservative Review:

Mark Levin, Conservative Review’s editor-in-chief, recommends the Trump administration open an investigation into Barack Obama. Levin states the former president’s team used police-state tactics against then-candidate Trump during the 2016 election.

“The gravity of this is unparalleled. It appears that during the course of a presidential election, the Obama administration used both intelligence and law enforcement agencies to investigate the Republican nominee’s campaign and certain surrogates,” Levin tells Conservative Review.

Levin – who served as chief of staff for President Reagan’s Attorney General Ed Meese – explained the potential scandal on his Thursday evening radio show:

“We have a prior administration – Barack Obama and his surrogates – who are supporting Hillary Clinton and her party, the Democratic Party. Who were using the … intelligence activities to surveil members of the Trump campaign, and to put that information out in the public.”

“The question is: Was Obama surveilling top Trump campaign officials during the election?” Levin asked on “The Mark Levin Show.”

Mark Levin is calling this a silent coup. And he is correct. I’ve looked right at this evidence for months and I never connected the dots. I’m so glad Levin did. It is obvious to me that Barack Obama did know about all this and had Lynch at the DOJ once again do his dirty work. There was and is an orchestrated plan to sabotage the Trump presidency and not only stop him from getting his appointees approved, but stop him from accomplishing anything of merit or that would hurt the Obama legacy.

A myriad of things now look very connected. The protests and riots, Valerie Jarrett moving into Obama’s mansion, Jarrett’s daughter being hired by CNN to cover the DOJ and Jeff Sessions when she’s not even a journalist, the attack on Jeff Sessions himself, and on and on and on. When do we wake up and realize we are at war within? And that Obama and his activists must be stopped and held accountable. You’ve got Loretta Lynch literally calling for blood and death in our streets: “…They’ve marched, they’ve bled and yes, some of them died. This is hard. Every good thing is. We have done this before. We can do this again…” – Loretta Lynch, February 28 2017 This is who we are fighting and we must now see this through and show the left that we will not stand for police state tactics against Americans like this and especially against an elected President.

Full Interview:

03/4/17

A Revolutionary “Deep State” Conspiracy Against Trump

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

“This country is becoming unglued. We’re in the stage of a revolution here.” Attorney Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch says an “alternative government” in the intelligence community continues to target President Trump for the purpose of overthrowing his administration. “These intelligence agencies are more powerful than the president himself.” Obama is the “Wizard of Oz” working behind the scenes against Trump, Klayman says.

NSA

03/3/17

Investigate and Prosecute the Press

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

The House Intelligence Committee has released the “Scope of Investigation” for its inquiry into the alleged Russian active measures campaign targeting the 2016 U.S. election. One item on the agenda is, “What possible leaks of classified information took place related to the Intelligence Community Assessment of these matters?” That is an easy one.

One of the answers lies with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who “broke” the story regarding illegal surveillance of Trump national security adviser Michael T. Flynn. Ignatius received illegal leaks of classified communications involving Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador to the United States. The claim we see so often in the media that Flynn was too cozy with Russia is a smokescreen. The purpose of the leaks, which likely came from the CIA and perhaps other agencies, was to stop Flynn before he could take action to reform the U.S. intelligence community. That’s obvious when you consider that Ignatius is an admitted mouthpiece for the CIA and has a reputation for doing what the agency demands of him.

The owner of the paper he works for, Jeff Bezos, does business with the CIA.

Since it’s doubtful that Ignatius will volunteer his testimony and reveal his sources, a subpoena will be necessary. He can then be prosecuted if, as expected, he conceals the names of those who used him as a conduit for illegal leaks of classified information. It is clear that he has inside information about the “alternative government,” as attorney Larry Klayman calls this network of secret operatives, or the “Deep State,” as others call it. These are the “anonymous sources” who manipulate the press, reveal national security information, and threaten the foundations of our constitutional republic. They are the real traitors, not the officials who had innocent conversations with Russians.

Does House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) have the guts to get to the bottom of this subversion of our democratic system? Like President Trump, he says he is concerned about illegal leaks. It’s time for him to take action. Otherwise, the illegal leakers will keep picking off our elected officials and those they appoint, using secret information they twist and distort for partisan political purposes.

Gregg Jarrett, a Fox News anchor and former defense attorney, should understand this. But he has weighed in on this topic and seems to conclude that Ignatius is above the law.

He says, “Whoever conveyed the information contained therein to The Washington Post committed a felony. The Post reporter, David Ignatius, who published the classified material may also be prosecuted, but he should not be” (emphasis added).

Here’s where Jarrett makes a mistake that plays into the hands of an irresponsible press.

Jarrett says, “The law draws little distinction between the leakers and the recipient who publishes the classified information. Assuming the leakers will not reveal themselves, the government may feel it has no choice but to prosecute the only person whose name is known. That is, the reporter.” However, he goes on, “This would be a mistake. While the statute itself clearly criminalizes the publishing of classified material, the First Amendment should and must render that portion of the law unconstitutional as it applies to a journalist.”

That’s his opinion. The appropriate statute, 18 U.S. Code Chapter 37, section 798, on the “Disclosure of classified information,” authorizes prosecution of those who leak, and those who publish the leaks. The relevant sections “do not exempt any class of professionals, including reporters, from their reach,” as one Justice Department official has testified.

Jarrett argues for a press exception, saying, “The Framers well knew that a free press is a cherished cornerstone in any democracy. It is the only real way to hold government officials accountable for their actions.”

In this case, however, Ignatius may stand in the way of holding the government accountable because he is protecting the identities of illegal leakers.

Jarrett himself notes the highly classified nature of the information that was disclosed. “The collection of signals transmitted from communications systems as ‘signals intelligence’ is known by the acronym SIGINT,” he points out. “The National Security Agency collects and analyzes the information. But any of the 16 other agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community may have gained access to the Flynn-Kislyak conversations. Many of them likely did, given Ignatius’s reference to ‘multiple agencies’ as his sources.”

Rather than exercise his First Amendment rights, Ignatius may be protecting a conspiracy of government officials whose motive is to destroy those members of the Trump administration who they oppose. By protecting these people, Ignatius is not holding government accountable; he is protecting a criminal enterprise.

The conservative journalist Kenneth R. Timmerman has it exactly right. He says, “The rogue weasels have struck. Terrified that Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn would tear them out root and branch, they connived and colluded, anonymously of course, to leak highly-sensitive intelligence information to destroy Flynn before he could destroy them.”

He is referring to how Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had plans to reform the U.S. intelligence community and purge traitors from the intelligence community.

Timmerman authored Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender, which documented the existence of a network of current and former government officials, many from the CIA, working to undermine U.S. foreign policy and benefit America’s enemies.

In the Flynn case, he figures the leakers were senior career officials who could be counted on to leak sensitive information that would embarrass or confuse President Trump. His column, published on February 14, concluded, “It’s time for the Attorney General to launch a thorough investigation to unmask the leakers, before the damage gets worse.”

It did get worse, with another leak targeting Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Once again, The Washington Post was the chosen vessel for the leakers.

In his column about the war on the Trump administration from within the intelligence community and the Justice Department, Timmerman wrote, “When domestic enemies rear their head and seek to undermine the president and his lawful orders, that’s called sedition.”

If these “domestic enemies” are free to use members of the media for their own purposes, then democracy has become a terrible joke. Seditious or espionage activities have to be exposed.

As the House Intelligence Committee moves forward, members should consider the relevance of another statute, 18 U.S. Code Chapter 115. It deals with “Treason, Sedition, and Subversive Activities.”

The First Amendment is not a license to subvert the government elected by the people. Members of the press must be held accountable for their crimes.

The American people are counting on Rep. Nunes to take proper action. The fate of the Trump administration may depend on whether he does his job, and does it quickly.

  • Call his office at 202-225-4121. Tell him we know that Ignatius was the admitted recipient of these illegal leaks and that he should be held accountable. There is no time to waste.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

02/17/17

The “Permanent State” has a Press Office

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

President Donald Trump’s controversial complaint that the intelligence community was using police-state tactics against him has been confirmed in the forced resignation of his national security adviser Michael T. Flynn. When Trump made his complaint, he was referring to leaks of potentially damaging information about him from an unverified dossier. In the Flynn case, several commentators have noted the use of surveillance techniques that are probably illegal.

A Wall Street Journal editorial wonders if “the spooks” who were listening to Flynn obeyed the law, and what legal justification they had for their eavesdropping. The paper added, “If Mr. Flynn was under U.S. intelligence surveillance, then Mr. Trump should know why, and at this point so should the American public. Maybe there’s an innocent explanation, but the Trump White House needs to know what’s going on with Mr. Flynn and U.S. spies.”

In “The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn,” Eli Lake writes about the highly controversial tactic of using “government-monitored communications of U.S. citizens” against Flynn and leaking them to the press. He added, “Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do.”

In a column entitled, “Why you should fear the leaks that felled Mike Flynn,” John Podhoretz writes, “No joke, people—if they can do it to Mike Flynn, they can do it to you.” He said that “unelected bureaucrats with access to career-destroying materials clearly made the decision that what Flynn did or who Flynn was merited their intervention—and took their concerns to the press.”

Why was Flynn targeted? Lake writes that Flynn had “cultivated a reputation as a reformer and a fierce critic of the intelligence community leaders he once served with when he was the director the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama. Flynn was working to reform the intelligence-industrial complex, something that threatened the bureaucratic prerogatives of his rivals.” Podhoretz says Flynn “had an antagonistic relationship with America’s intelligence agencies” and was their “potential adversary.”

That Flynn wanted to reform the intelligence community is true. But the more serious concern about Flynn from the perspective of the intelligence community is that he was opposed to the Obama policy, carried out by John Brennan’s CIA, of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic terrorists in the Middle East. He had been outspoken about this since leaving the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Flynn’s links to Russia and the conversations he had with the Russian Ambassador are minor compared to the disasters in the Middle East that Flynn was exposing. The proxy war the Obama administration waged in the Middle East produced debacles in Egypt, Libya and Syria. In Egypt, the military rescued the country from a Muslim Brotherhood takeover engineered by Obama’s CIA. Libya is still in shambles, and Syria has been lost to the Russians and Iranians. The result in Syria alone is 500,000 dead and millions of refugees.

As documented extensively by AIM’s Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, the U.S. under Obama switched sides in the war on terror, in favor of the terrorists. There were, of course, terrorists on the other side as well. In Syria, the Russian/Iranian/Syrian axis employed terrorist tactics to drive back the U.S.-supported terrorists. That produced a humanitarian disaster that is still unfolding.

Trump has inherited this disaster, and he and Flynn were trying to do something about it. But Trump’s proposal for vetting refugees from failed states has been struck down by liberal judges, and Trump has unfortunately accepted their jurisdiction in the case.

As we explained in a previous column, in a review of Flynn’s book, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency “thinks that the administration he served, headed by Barack Obama, tried to accommodate our enemies, selling out American interests in the process.” This is the world that President Trump faces and is trying to rectify.

We said at the time that “if Flynn wants to turn things around, he will have to lead a purge of the Clinton and Obama agents in the Pentagon and other agencies who have been deliberately withholding information about the nature of the threats and how our lives are in peril from an ‘enemy alliance’ that Obama has been supporting as President of the United States.”

It now appears that Flynn, or rather Trump, didn’t move fast enough, and that these special interests from the swamp have struck first, nailing Flynn’s scalp to the wall.

The media know that the Obama administration helped to produce the humanitarian disasters in countries like Syria and Libya. They ran stories about CIA arms shipments to terrorists in the region through countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. But when Flynn got into a position of power and was able to do something about exposing these dirty wars, he became the target. He became a target of surveillance and was tripped up about what he said and remembered about discussions with the Russian Ambassador.

On Capitol Hill, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), seems to be one of the few legislators concerned about the illegal leaks that drove Flynn from his job. He is even quoted as saying that the leakers “belong in jail.”

The American people have a right to know whether there is a “permanent state,” as Eli Lake says, and what role it is playing. But since the major media have been complicit in the intelligence community’s assault on Flynn, there is no reason to believe the media will want to get to the bottom of this subversion of our democratic system of government. Their hands are dirty, too.

It looks like the permanent state has a press office.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

02/14/17

Kellyanne Conway Reveals The Reason That Michael Flynn Finally Had To Go [VIDEO]

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton | Right Wing News

I am sure you have heard that Michael Flynn resigned as National Security Adviser last night amidst allegations that he spoke of sanctions with the Russians before Trump took office. I have never cared for Michael Flynn. I gave him a clean slate when he came in. But after hearing what transpired, resigning was the right thing to do. I don’t know whether he resigned of his own volition or at the behest of President Trump, but he had to go. He spoke to the Russian ambassador five separate times. You can bet the intelligence agencies have that on tape. When Mike Pence asked him if he had discussed sanctions, he lied to him and Pence went forth and looked like a fool over it. The word out there is Pence was furious. Kellyanne Conway came right out and said that lying to Pence was the deciding factor here.

Michael Flynn was originally fired by Obama after serving a couple of months under him. He only lasted a couple of weeks with Trump and he probably would have been gone sooner, but Trump remained loyal to him. As recently as 2014, Flynn had gone to Russia before Trump came into the picture. The Department of Justice warned the White House that Flynn was susceptible to blackmail from the Russians. Just before Trump came into office, Obama levied sanctions on Russia. Normally, the Russians would have struck back, but did not, saying they would wait for the Trump presidency. That was after calls from Flynn, who most likely assured them that sanctions would be lifted. This whole mess is complicated. You have nine leakers involved that went to the media. These are probably a mix of White House insiders (leftovers from the Obama administration) and intelligence people.

From NBC’s Today Show:

“In the end, it was misleading the vice president that made the situation unsustainable,” Conway told TODAY’s Matt Lauer.

The incomplete information or the inability to completely recall what did or did not happen as reflected in his debriefing of particular phone calls — that really is what happened here,” she said.

Flynn’s departure comes less than a month into the job and follows revelations about information he shared with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak over American sanctions against Russia in late December, weeks before Trump took office.

“He knew he had become a lightening rod and he made that decision,” Conway said.

On TODAY, Conway was asked repeatedly why, despite reports that the Justice Department told the White House last month that Flynn had misled them and even put himself at risk for blackmail, he continued to retain the president’s full trust.

Conway said Flynn continued to be a part of daily presidential briefings as recently as Monday but “as time wore on, obviously, the situation had become unsustainable.”

She said that the president accepted Flynn’s resignation and “wishes him well, and we’re moving on,” noting three “very strong candidates” the administration is considering to replace him.

Arguably, Flynn was the worst pick of those chosen for Trump’s cabinet. I am not sad to see him go as I feel he was compromised by the Russians. I’m also not happy about it as it hurts the Trump administration deeply and exposes a very dangerous rift between Trump and the intelligence agencies. The left will also use this to accuse Trump of further connections with Russia. Trump needs to aggressively clean house in the White House and intel agencies and get rid of everyone who was ever even remotely connected to Obama. If I were him, I’d have Pompeo in my office this morning, reaming him a new one over this.

There appears to be chaos in the People’s House right now and that just can’t be allowed. The Democrats won’t care about the truth, just nailing Trump every way they can. They also don’t care that it hurts the country and puts us at risk. The media is celebrating this today and that is just despicable. Thankfully, Trump has three solid contenders to replace Flynn. Kellogg would be my choice at this point. It doesn’t matter how I feel about Flynn personally… this is a massively bad thing to happen so shortly after Trump takes office. Time to get serious and perhaps try some of that extreme vetting within our own leadership.