03/10/17

Inside the CIA: Leaks, Moles and “Diversity”

By: Cliff Kincaid | America’s Survival

Former senior CIA Officer Michael Scheuer spent over 20 years with the CIA and talks in this interview about leaks, moles and “diversity” at the agency. The controversial and outspoken former chief of the Osama bin Laden unit in the CIA, he says the U.S. is losing the war on Islamic terrorism.

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.

01/15/17

The CIA’s War on Trump, Continued

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

Echoing New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s warning that the intelligence community is out to “get” President-elect Trump, a Brookings Institution expert who served in the Clinton administration says that Trump’s treatment of his spies will “come back to bite him” in the form of “devastating” leaks to the media that will make him look foolish or incompetent.

Leaking by intelligence officials and analysts is, of course, illegal.

“The intelligence community doesn’t leak as much as the Pentagon or Congress, but when its reputation is at stake, it can do so to devastating effect,” says Daniel Benjamin of the Brookings Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence. Benjamin previously served as the principal advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on counterterrorism and was embroiled in the controversy over Mrs. Clinton’s failure to stop the massacre of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.

Benjamin’s article, “How Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community will come back to haunt him,” did not refute the widely held belief that President Obama’s CIA and its director John Brennan were behind the recent leaks to The Washington Post and New York Times  depicting Trump as a Russian puppet. In fact, the implication is that the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community will seek further revenge on Trump if he continues to criticize them.

At his recent news conference, in regard to the leaks about his meetings with intelligence officials, Trump noted that “I think it’s pretty sad when intelligence reports get leaked out to the press. I think it’s pretty sad. First of all, it’s illegal. You know, these are classified and certified meetings and reports.”

But it appears that some intelligence officials believe they are above the law and can use illegal leaks to damage an elected President who has been critical of their work product.

In the most recent case, CNN and BuzzFeed were leaked a document offering unsubstantiated claims of Trump being sexually compromised by Russian officials. CNN summarized the document; BuzzFeed published the whole thing.

Trump denounced these leaks, with Director of the Office of National Intelligence James Clapper disclosing that he had called Trump about them and had declared his “profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press…” He said that he and Trump “both agreed that they are extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security.”

Trump said Clapper “called me yesterday to denounce the false and fictitious report that was illegally circulated.”

“I do not believe the leaks came from within the IC [Intelligence Community],” Clapper said. However, he did not indicate what investigation, if any, he had conducted to make this determination.

“When something goes wrong—say a military deployment to combat jihadi insurgents in the Middle East blows up in the Trump administration’s face—the press will overflow with stories telling of intelligence reports that were ignored by the White House and briefings the president missed,” Benjamin wrote. Such stories, of course, would be based on illegal leaks.

“Imagine what an aggrieved intel community might do to a genuinely hostile president,” he said. Benjamin’s comments suggest that the intelligence community will use the media to blame Trump for things that go wrong in foreign affairs, in order to protect its own reputation.

Benjamin should know something about the relationship of the Intelligence Community to the news media. His bio says that he began his career as a journalist and held positions as the Germany bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and Germany correspondent for Time magazine.

The Brookings expert said, “the CIA is usually one of the very first agencies to establish a relationship with new chief executives, because of the briefings it delivers before elections have even occurred and the beguiling prospect it offers of handling missions quietly and efficiently.”

It’s not clear what he means by this. The Obama CIA’s “covert” arms-running program in Syria has backfired in a big way, provoking a Russian military intervention, the loss of up to 500,000 lives, and a refugee crisis which threatens the future of Europe.

Benjamin speculated that Trump will ask the CIA to organize a covert operation to undermine the regime in Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism, and that the agency will offer him options that don’t guarantee success and which he may have to reject. He wrote that “…it is an iron law of bureaucracy that no agency will knock itself out for a leader it deems capricious, especially one who cannot be relied on to defend his own if something goes wrong.”

“The answer from the intel community will never be no,” he said. “Instead, the planners will brief the president on three different approaches. Then they will assess the risk of failure for each at 60-80 percent, providing the Oval Office with a dare it cannot possibly accept. For some, of course, this could turn out to be a silver lining in otherwise dismal story.”

In short, the CIA will look for excuses not to proceed, and then get back to the business of leaking damaging stories to the press when terrorist incidents and other problems occur.

Is the CIA really the “invisible government” that the so-called “conspiracy theorists” have warned about? Is there a “deep state” that tries to run the government behind-the-scenes?

Articles like those of Daniel Benjamin, a journalist who became a Hillary Clinton operative in the counter-terrorism field, seem to be more damaging to the idea of American self-government than anything the Russians have been accused of doing.


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.