Archive for the ‘John Brennan’ category

« WarSclerotic home page

House Intelligence Committee sends subpoenas to intel agencies

May 31, 2017

House Intelligence Committee sends subpoenas to intel agencies, Fox News, James Rosen, May 31, 2017

Where NSA had previously complied with the House panel’s investigators, sources said that cooperation had ground to a complete halt, and that the other agencies – FBI and CIA – had never substantively cooperated with document requests at all. The investigators believe that even rudimentary document production as a result of the subpoenas will enable them to piece together a timeline linking the unmasking activity to news media reports, based on leaks, that conveyed the same information provided to the officials requesting unmasking.

**********************************

Three of the nation’s intelligence agencies received subpoenas Wednesday afternoon issued by the House Intelligence Committee, Fox News has confirmed, with each of the three demands for documents explicitly naming three top officials of the Obama administration: Susan Rice, who served as President Obama’s White House national security adviser; former CIA Director John Brennan; and former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power.

The three subpoenas, among a total of seven signed by panel chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), were served on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency, and all three explicitly referenced “unmasking” – a signal that the House panel is intensifying its investigation into allegations that Obama-era aides improperly demanded the “unmasking” of names of associates of President Trump that had appeared, in coded form, in classified intelligence reports, then leaked the data to news media organizations.

The other four subpoenas were issued at the behest of the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), and were said to be duplicative of subpoenas already issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting a parallel probe. These four are focused, sources said, on persistent – but as yet unsubstantiated – allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, as well as the case of Michael Flynn. The former White House national security adviser was dismissed after three weeks on the job because the White House concluded he had misled Vice President Pence about private conversations Flynn had had with the Russian ambassador late last year.

The other target of these four subpoenas is said to be Michael Cohen, a longtime Trump attorney. Cohen has denied participating in any effort at collusion with the Kremlin. Flynn, through attorneys, has unsuccessfully sought immunity from prosecution in exchange for congressional testimony.

The issuance of the seven subpoenas was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

The inclusion of Power’s name on the subpoenas marks the first appearance of the former U.N. ambassador in the controversy surrounding the Obama administration’s use of unmasking. Capitol Hill sources told Fox News they are devoting increasing scrutiny to Power – a former historian and winner of the Pulitzer Prize who worked as a foreign policy adviser in the Senate office of Barack Obama before joining his administration – because they have come to see her role in the unmasking as larger than previously known, and eclipsing those of the other former officials named.

Rice has previously denied any improper activity in her use of unmasking. “The allegation is somehow Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes, that’s absolutely false,” Rice told MSNBC on April 4. President Trump said at that time that he personally believed Rice had committed a crime. None of those named on the subpoenas has been formally accused of wrongdoing.

Inquiries placed with representatives of Power and Brennan were not immediately returned.

That Nunes signed the seven subpoenas, as is standard practice, underscored the chairman’s continuing influence over key aspects of over his committee’s probe, despite the fact that Nunes in early April “stepped aside” from his panel’s Russia probe. He insists his decision was not a formal recusal, and he is still awaiting a hearing by the House Ethics Committee, which agreed at the time to investigate whether Nunes had improperly shared classified data with the White House before presenting it to Schiff and the rest of the intelligence committee.

Nunes told Fox News in an exclusive interview on May 19 that he is an active chairman, including continuing to preside over the unmasking angle of the investigation

Investigative sources on the committee’s Republican majority staff told Fox News that the unmasking subpoenas do not reflect a “fishing expedition,” but were issued because documentary evidence already in hand warranted demands for additional documents relating to Rice, Brennan and Power.

Where NSA had previously complied with the House panel’s investigators, sources said that cooperation had ground to a complete halt, and that the other agencies – FBI and CIA – had never substantively cooperated with document requests at all. The investigators believe that even rudimentary document production as a result of the subpoenas will enable them to piece together a timeline linking the unmasking activity to news media reports, based on leaks, that conveyed the same information provided to the officials requesting unmasking.

President Trump and the White House have dismissed the long-running allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, and possibly the transition team, as “fake news,” a scandal ginned up by supporters of President Obama and Hillary Clinton to explain the Democratic nominee’s stunning loss to Mr. Trump last November.

However, the Trump administration belatedly acquiesced in the appointment of former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III as a special counsel to investigate the allegations “and related matters.” Critics of the administration have also pointed to sustained reporting alleging undisclosed contacts between key Trump aides and various Russians – Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the probe at an early stage because of such contacts – and to a memorandum prepared in February by former FBI director James Comey, leaked a few days after his termination by President Trump, in which Comey alleged that the president had personally importuned him to abandon the FBI’s probe of Flynn.

Categories: 2016 elections and Russia, CIA, FBI, Great Trump - Russia conspiracy, John Brennan, Michael Cohen, National Security Agency, Obama administration, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Unmasking
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Confirmed: John Brennan Colluded With Foreign Spies to Defeat Trump

April 19, 2017

Confirmed: John Brennan Colluded With Foreign Spies to Defeat Trump, American Spectator, George Neumayr, April 19, 2017

A supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, Brennan brought into the CIA a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump. He bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as “non-partisan.”

The Guardian story is written in a style designed to flatter its sources (they are cast as high-minded whistleblowers), but the upshot of it is devastating for them, nonetheless, and explains why all the criminal leaks against Trump first originated in the British press. According to the story, Brennan got his anti-Trump tips primarily from British spies but also Estonian spies and others.

***********************

An article in the Guardian last week provides more confirmation that John Brennan was the American progenitor of political espionage aimed at defeating Donald Trump. One side did collude with foreign powers to tip the election — Hillary’s.

Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump’s candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people.

John Brennan’s CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump. An official in the intelligence community tells TAS that Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with “Hillary for president cups” and other campaign paraphernalia.

A supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, Brennan brought into the CIA a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump. He bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as “non-partisan.”

The Guardian story is written in a style designed to flatter its sources (they are cast as high-minded whistleblowers), but the upshot of it is devastating for them, nonetheless, and explains why all the criminal leaks against Trump first originated in the British press. According to the story, Brennan got his anti-Trump tips primarily from British spies but also Estonian spies and others. The story confirms that the seed of the espionage into Trump was planted by Estonia. The BBC’s Paul Wood reported last year that the intelligence agency of an unnamed Baltic State had tipped Brennan off in April 2016 to a conversation purporting to show that the Kremlin was funneling cash into the Trump campaign.

Any other CIA director would have disregarded such a flaky tip, recognizing that Estonia was eager to see Trump lose (its officials had bought into Hillary’s propaganda that Trump was going to pull out of NATO and leave Baltic countries exposed to Putin). But Brennan opportunistically seized on it, as he later that summer seized on the half-baked intelligence of British spy agencies (also full of officials who wanted to see Trump lose).

The Guardian says that British spy head Robert Hannigan “passed material in summer 2016 to the CIA chief, John Brennan.” To ensure that these flaky tips leaked out, Brennan disseminated them on Capitol Hill. In August and September of 2016, he gave briefings to the “Gang of Eight” about them, which then turned up on the front page of the New York Times.

All of this took place at the very moment Brennan was auditioning for Hillary. He desperately wanted to keep his job and despised Trump for his alleged “Muslim ban,” a matter near and dear to Brennan’s heart. Not only was he an apologist for the Muslim Brotherhood, but Brennan’s Islamophilia dated to his days in college, when he spent a year in Cairo learning Arabic and taking courses in Middle Eastern studies. He later got a graduate degree with an emphasis in Middle Eastern studies. In 1996, his ties to the Islamic world tightened after he became the CIA’s station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He once recalled that “during a 25-year career in government, I was privileged to serve in positions across the Middle East — as a political officer with the State Department and as a CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, I saw how our Saudi partners fulfilled their duty as custodians of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina. I marveled at the majesty of the Hajj and the devotion of those who fulfilled their duty as Muslims by making that privilege — that pilgrimage.”

Out of this Islamophilia came a special dislike of Michael Flynn, who had planned to rip up the Obama-era “reset” with Muslim countries. Furious with Flynn for his apostasy from political correctness, Brennan and other Obama aides couldn’t resist the temptation to take him out after rifling through transcripts of his calls with the Russian ambassador. They caught him in a lie to Mike Pence and made sure the press knew about it.

Were the media not so completely in the tank for Obama and Hillary, all of this political mischief would make for a compelling 2016 version of All the President’s Men. Instead, the public gets a steady stream of Orwellian propaganda about the sudden propriety of political espionage. The headline writers at Pravda couldn’t improve on this week’s official lie, tweeted out by the Maggie Habermans: “Susan Rice Did Nothing Wrong, Say Both Dem and Republican House Aides.”

Liberals pompously quote the saying — “the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed” — even as their media enshrine it. Historians will look back on 2016 and marvel at the audacity of its big lie: whispers of an imaginary Trump-Russia collusion that wafted up from the fever swamps of a real collusion between John Brennan and foreign powers seeking Trump’s defeat.

Categories: CIA, CIA and politics, Democrats and Trump, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Spies, Susan Rice, Unmasking
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Dishonest CIA Director Rips Trump; Trump Should Rip him Back [Updated]

January 16, 2017

Dishonest CIA Director Rips Trump; Trump Should Rip him Back [Updated], Power Line,  John Hinderaker, January 15, 2017

John Brennan’s career in the Obama administration, first as counterterrorism adviser, then as Director of the CIA, has been a disaster. We have written about him many times; just search “John Brennan” on this site. Along with being an inept CIA Director, Brennan is a political hack. Today he went on Fox News Sunday and attacked Donald Trump. But the real news was Brennan’s inability to respond to questions about his agency’s use of the fake “Russian dossier” to smear Trump. That was the topic that Chris Wallace began with:

WALLACE: President-elect Trump has made it clear, as we just discussed, that he believes the intelligence community released, put out information about this unverified dossier in order to undercut him. Here’s what he said at his press conference.

TRUMP VIDEO: I think it was disgraceful, disgraceful, that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out be so false and fake out. I think it’s a disgrace, and I say that and I say that, and that something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do.

WALLACE: Mr. Brennan, your response.

JOHN BRENNAN, CIA DIRECTOR: Well, I think as the Director of National Intelligence said in his statement, this information has been out there circulating for many months. So, it’s not a question of the intelligence community leaking or releasing this information, it was already out there.

WALLACE: But it hadn’t been reported, though. And one of the reasons it hadn’t is because it hadn’t been verified. And when you briefed the president on it, you collectively briefed the president on it, the president-elect, that made it news.

That is exactly correct. Not a single news organization had reported on the fake “Russian dossier” because it was obviously bogus. The CIA, or someone in the intelligence community, deliberately turned fake news into a “legitimate” news story by purporting to brief Donald Trump on the smears against him, and then leaking the fact that they had done so. Brennan’s defense is pathetic.

BRENNAN: Well, nothing has been verified. It is unsubstantiated reporting that is out there, that has been circulating in the private sector and with the media as well by a firm that pulled this information together.

But what I do find outrageous is equating the intelligence community with Nazi Germany. I do take great umbrage at that, and there is no basis for Mr. Trump to point fingers at the intelligence community for leaking information that was already available publicly.

WALLACE: But it wasn’t available publicly. Various news organizations, if I may, various news organization had it, but they weren’t reporting it because it hadn’t been verified. And this brings me to the real question, Director Brennan, why on earth [would our] nation’s intelligence spy chiefs brief President-elect Trump, in your first meeting collectively with him, on this unverified information? First of all, it wasn’t intelligence, it was rumors. And secondly, by briefing him on it, you made it a news event and, therefore, gave news organizations an excuse to report it.

That is indeed the question, and Brennan has no answer.

BRENNAN: Well, I think news organizations should not assume what happened during that discussion with Mr. Trump.

WALLACE: Well, it’s been verified by the Director of National Intelligence that he was briefed on this information.

BRENNAN: Chris, bringing to the attention of the president-elect, as well as to the current president that this was circulating out there was a responsibility in the minds of the intelligence directors, of the intelligence community to make sure that there was going to be no evaluation of it, but just making sure that the president-elect was aware that it was circulating.

This is unbelievably disingenuous. “President-Elect Trump, we have vitally important news for you! You will be shocked–shocked!–to learn that your political enemies are trying to smear you with false claims! Which, by the way, we are about to leak.”

How dumb does Brennan think we are?

WALLACE: But shouldn’t you have done it a bunch of better ways, for instance, had a staff level person, give it to a staff level person, rather than the spy chiefs giving it to the president and the president-elect?

BRENNAN: Well, I think anybody who has read the reports that are out there, I think there are some very salacious allegations in there, again, unsubstantiated, that were circulating. And so, making sure that the president-elect himself was aware of it. I think that was the extent of what it was that the intelligence chiefs wanted to do.

WALLACE: One of the questions, though, is whether the intelligence community is going after — or somehow is going to try to undercut by selective leaks the new president-elect.

Let me ask my question, because former top intelligence officials have been bashing Mr. Trump for months, and I want to put a couple of these on the screen. Former acting CIA Director Mike Morell wrote, “In the intelligence business, we would say Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian federation.”

And then, former CIA Director Michael Hayden said he’d prefer a different term, “That’s the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but his blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”

Can you understand given that and given all these leaks that have been coming out for months, why the president-elect would think the intelligence community had it in for him?

BRENNAN: Well, these are private citizens now for speaking about the current political environment about individuals. So, I’m not going to try to defend or explain what they said. But I can tell you that the intelligence community is prepared to support the president-elect and his incoming team, as we have done throughout the course of our history.

Chris Wallace never asked, and John Brennan certainly didn’t answer, the obvious question: who leaked the fact that the intelligence agencies briefed Trump on the fake news dossier, and then leaked the agencies’ own memo summarizing the smears against Trump? Donald Trump didn’t. Who, then?

We know for sure that intelligence officials–I assume either Brennan or his subordinates at the CIA–were feeding reporters classified information about the fake dossier in order to damage Trump. Their conduct was so reprehensible–criminal, actually–that it disgusted even the New York Times. I wrote last Wednesday that it is time for heads to roll at the CIA:

[A] reasonably respectable newspaper like the Washington Post takes this [the CIA’s leaked briefing of the president-elect] as a green light to report the slanders against Trump:

A classified report delivered to President Obama and President-elect Donald Trump last week included a section summarizing allegations that Russian intelligence services have compromising material and information on Trump’s personal life and finances, U.S. officials said.

The officials said that U.S. intelligence agencies have not corroborated those allegations but believed that the sources involved in the reporting were credible enough to warrant inclusion of their claims in the highly classified report on Russian interference in the presidential campaign.

Note that, while the report is “highly classified,” “U.S. officials” didn’t hesitate to tell the Post and other news sources all about it.

***
This excerpt from the New York Times’s account tells you all you need to know:

[I]ntelligence agencies considered it so potentially explosive that they decided Obama, Trump and congressional leaders needed to be told about it and informed that the agencies were actively investigating it.

Intelligence officials were concerned that the information would leak before they informed Trump of its existence, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the summary is classified and talking about it would be a felony. [Emphasis added]

Right. So “intelligence officials” think nothing of committing a felony if it will help serve the cause of the Democratic Party. The CIA is a sick agency. Heads need to roll.

The first head that ought to roll is John Brennan’s, but he won’t survive the Obama administration in any event. There are more who should be sacked. Reporters are getting the vapors over the fact that Trump doesn’t trust the CIA. But if “intelligence officials” think it is better to commit a felony than to give Trump a fair shake, why should he?

UPDATE: The Associated Press never mentions Brennan’s humiliation, and instead tries to fool newspaper readers into thinking that the story from today’s Fox News Sunday appearance was Brennan’s chiding Trump with respect to Russia. Unbelievable. Or, it would be unbelievable if it weren’t the Associated Press.

Categories: "Trump dossier", CIA and politics, CIA and President Elect Trump, John Brennan, Media and Donald Trump
Tags: , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

CIA’s Brennan says tearing up the Iran deal would be “height of folly”

December 1, 2016

CIA’s Brennan says tearing up the Iran deal would be “height of folly”, Jihad Watch, , December 1, 2016

(Brennan’s statement is not the “clearest indication yet” that the Iran Scam needs to be rejected; many others predated it. It is, however, another pretty good indication of Brennan’s level of competence. — DM)

This is the clearest indication yet that tearing up the Iran deal is just what the U.S. needs to do. “Do the opposite of what John Brennan recommends” would be the wisest course the next administration could possibly take. John Brennan is the person who — after U.S. Muslim groups demanded he do so – “purged” all mention of Islam and jihad from law enforcement counter-terror training materials in 2011.

john_brennan

“CIA’s Brennan says tearing up Iran deal would be ‘folly,’” CNBC, November 30, 2016 (thanks to Lookmann):

Outgoing CIA Director John Brennan has said it would be the “height of folly” for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to tear up Washington’s deal with Tehran because it would make it more likely that Iran and others would acquire nuclear weapons.

“It could lead to a weapons program inside of Iran that could lead other states in the region to embark on their own programs,” Brennan said in an interview with the BBC aired on Wednesday.

“So I think it would be the height of folly if the next administration were to tear up that agreement.”…

Categories: CIA, Iran scam, Iranian nukes, John Brennan
Tags: , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment