Tag: intelligence community

CNN, MSNBC Parade Discredited Spooks to Smear Trump’s Peace Talks

Corporate media networks have turned to former intelligence and defense officials to criticize President Donald Trump’s recent diplomatic efforts to bring an end to the Russia-Ukraine war.

Trump hosted a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday and then welcomed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to the White House on Monday for discussions on peace.

CNN and MSNBC have featured several former officials who previously advanced discredited narratives, including on the Hunter Biden laptop and the Steele Dossier, to question Trump’s strategy.

Former National Security Adviser John Bolton appeared on CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins on August 8, where he criticized the decision to host Putin in the United States.

“The only better place for Putin than Alaska would be if the summit were being held in Moscow,” Bolton said.

“So, the initial setup, I think, is a great victory for Putin. He’s a rogue leader of a pariah state, and he’s going to be welcomed into the United States.”

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The intelligence community – our protector or the perpetrator?

There is a peculiar alchemy in the world of intelligence work. Spend long enough marinating in the culture of suspicion, and reality itself warps. Every handshake is a coded exchange, every silence conceals a plot, and every stranger is a potential assassin in disguise. In this worldview, the universe is an endless chessboard of threat and counter-threat — and the only sane response is to move first, hit harder, and never, ever let the other side see you blink. It is a mindset that breeds not guardians, but paranoiacs with security clearances; not peacekeepers, but professional arsonists armed with plausible deniability.

The public is told these agencies are our shield — the last line between us and anarchy. We are sold an endless parade of threats, each requiring more secrecy, more surveillance, and more latitude for shadowy actors to do “what must be done”. The problem is that the line between protector and perpetrator has long since dissolved. The very institutions that claim to keep us safe are often the ones creating the dangers they then heroically “save” us from.

Domestically, their aim is less about defending liberty than managing the population. The FBI’s COINTELPRO operation wasn’t dismantling terror cells; it was dismantling dissent. Civil rights leaders, anti-war activists, and union organisers were wiretapped, infiltrated, and in some cases blackmailed into silence. Martin Luther King Jr, whose crime was speaking too effectively against injustice, was subjected to surveillance so obsessive it bordered on psychosis. Across the Atlantic, Britain’s Special Demonstration Squad embedded officers into protest groups for decades, with some maintaining romantic relationships under false identities. When the truth emerged, it was less James Bond and more EastEnders meets Kafka.

The same tactics persist in modern form. Peaceful protests find themselves salted with plainclothes agents who mysteriously seem to be the first to throw a brick, conveniently inviting a police crackdown. Whatever did happen to Ray Epps? In Canada’s 2022 trucker protests, there was no need for water cannons — the financial system itself became the weapon, freezing bank accounts and cutting people off from their own money for the crime of political disobedience.

If their behaviour at home corrodes democracy, their conduct abroad burns entire nations to the ground. The CIA and MI6’s fingerprints can be found in coups and covert operations from Tehran to Tegucigalpa. In 1953, Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown not for tyranny, but for the heresy of nationalising oil. In 1954, Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz met the same fate after challenging the stranglehold of United Fruit. Chile’s Salvador Allende was replaced in 1973 by Pinochet—a dictator whose “economic miracle” was fertilised with blood and electrocution.

The pattern is too consistent to be coincidence. In the 1980s, the CIA armed Afghan mujahideen in their jihad against the Soviets, among them a young Osama bin Laden. A generation later, the United States would spend trillions allegedly fighting the monster it had helped to train. And in 2003, a dodgy dossier on Iraq’s mythical weapons of mass destruction became the casus belli for an invasion that killed hundreds of thousands, destabilised the region, and paved the way for ISIS.

The 21st century has not brought restraint. The 2014 Maidan uprising in Ukraine was no spontaneous people’s revolt; leaked phone calls revealed U.S. officials selecting preferred leadership like items from a takeaway menu. Ukraine is now the front line in a NATO–Russia proxy war, its cities shelled and its young men fed into the grinder of geopolitics. In 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown apart — a surgical strike on Germany’s energy supply. Officially, no one knows who did it. Unofficially, the silence from Washington speaks volumes.

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Barack Obama’s DNI Clapper Told Intel Leaders to Compromise Standards for Trump-Russia Report

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper pressed the intelligence community to maintain a unified narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump, even as the National Security Agency raised concerns about the process, according to newly declassified top secret emails.

The emails, disclosed Wednesday by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, reveal that Clapper described the Obama administration’s effort to finalize a revised intelligence community assessment on “Russia Election Meddling” as a “team sport” that might require the community to “compromise” its standards.

The correspondence shows former National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers warning that his agency lacked adequate access to the intelligence underpinning the report’s conclusions.

In a Dec. 22, 2016, email to Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former FBI Director James Comey, Rogers wrote that his team had concerns about the pace of the process and the lack of transparency.

“I know that this activity is on a fast-track and that folks have been working very hard to put together a product that can be provided to the President,” Rogers wrote.

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CIA Leakers Weaponize ‘Sources And Methods’-Talking Points To Target DNI Tulsi Gabbard

Insiders within the Intelligence Community (IC), and specifically ongoing operators within the CIA, are targeting Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard…

The least understood issue right now, is how isolated and alone Tulsi Gabbard is on her mission to bring sunlight to the Intelligence Community weaponization and corruption.

…”There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things”…

The IC uses various media leaks and narrative engineers as the tools against their enemy; in this case DNI Tulsi Gabbard.

The most common arrow in their manipulative quiver is the term “sources and methods.” 

The Washington Post notes how the Intelligence Community is upset about DNI Tulsi Gabbard compromising their ‘sources and methods’ by releasing the House Intelligence Report that deconstructed the Russiagate Intelligence Community Assessment.

What has them so upset is Tulsi’s release of the House Intel report. This is the report that drove the FBI to raid Mar-a-Lago in an effort to retrieve it from Trump. This is the report that outlines how the CIA fabricated the Russiagate claims. Tulsi is being targeted for releasing this specific report. That tells you how important it is to the CIA.

WASHINGTON DC – […] The document that Gabbard ordered released on July 23 is a 46-page report stemming from a review begun in 2017 by majority Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. It takes issue with U.S. intelligence agencies’ finding earlier that year that Russian President Vladimir Putin developed a preference for Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton and aspired to help him win the election.

[…] The House report is the most sensitive document the Trump administration has yet released, and details of how its publication occurred have not been previously reported.

[…] The document contains multiple references to CIA human sources reporting on Putin’s plans. Such sources are among the agency’s most closely guarded secrets. After the report was completed in 2020, it was considered so sensitive that it remained in storage at the CIA rather than on Capitol Hill.

[…] as the Trump administration prepared to release the report publicly, there were multiple versions of it circulating, some with more redactions to protect sensitive information, current and former U.S. officials said. Gabbard, who has led the administration’s effort to relitigate the 2016 campaign, pushed to release as much as possible, they said.

“CIA put forward their proposed redactions and edits to the document,” said a person familiar with the process. Gabbard “has greater declassification authority than all other intelligence elements and is not required to get their approval prior to release.”

Trump then approved the publication of the version from Gabbard’s office “with minimal redactions and no edits,” this person said.

[…] It is unclear exactly how Trump gave his approval, or if he examined the competing versions of the House report beforehand. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. (READ MORE)

~ The HPSCI Report is Here ~

The HPSCI report release is what is driving the CIA bananas.

Despite efforts by Donald Trump to declassify the HPSCI report before leaving office, the CIA never released it.  No one except the internal Intelligence Community (CIA/DNI) had seen the HPSCI report until Tulsi Gabbard released it on July 22nd.  This is a key point, because the HPSCI report touches on all of the other declassified evidence recently released.

The authors of the HPSCI report had reviewed all of the same information John Durham reviewed.  The HPSCI report walks through the entire construct of the Intelligence Community Assessment ordered by President Obama on December 6, 2016.

Arguably, because of the underlying evidence reviewed to produce it, the HPSCI report is the most critical of the declassified release in the last few months. The HPSCI report walks through the timeline, as the ICA was created between early to late December 2016.

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The Fall Of The Israel Lobby—And Christian Zionism—Has Begun

My homily last Sunday was entitled The False Doctrine Of Christian Zionism Is Starting To Fall Apart.In this message, I said:

It is the Epstein case that is creating the cracks in the lie of Christian Zionism. Make no mistake about it: The Epstein pedophile network and the Israeli genocidal wars in the Middle East are indissolubly linked.

The reason the ruling class in Washington, D.C., and New York City are so determined to support Israel no matter how demonic its actions might be is directly due to Epstein’s (the Mossad’s) blackmail campaigns. And the members of Congress that are not blackmailed into submission by the Mossad are bribed into submission by AIPAC.

Americans put Trump in office because they saw the filth and corruption of Washington, and they thought Trump was truly different. Now, they are awakening to the truth that Trump has been neck-deep in Israel’s corrupting clutches all along. And they are also now seeing Israel for the vile, demonic state that it always has been.

The truth about Epstein, the truth about Israel, the truth about the Mossad, the truth about Netanyahu, the truth about Congress, the truth about Trump and the truth about Scofieldism-Dispensationalism is now beginning to shine through the cracks of Christian Zionism.

From Candace Owens to Clayton Morris to Tucker Carlson to Piers Morgan to Joe Rogan to Larry Johnson to Max Blumenthal to Phil Giraldi to Judge Andrew Napolitano to Pepe Escobar to Scott Ritter, and on and on, they are all courageously shining the light of truth on the deception of Christian Zionism.

Short videos from my podium at Liberty Fellowship are circulating

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Operation Mockingbird 2.0? — Tulsi Gabbard Confirms Intel Agencies Still Using Corrupt Media to Undermine Trump and Push Propaganda

Investigative journalist Benny Johnson confronted Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard with a question that many Americans have been asking for years: Is Operation Mockingbird still alive?

Gabbard confirmed that the current Trump administration is actively battling rogue intelligence operatives embedded deep within the federal government who are coordinating with corporate media to undermine the will of the American people and sabotage the President’s agenda.

Though Gabbard carefully avoided using the term “Operation Mockingbird,” her remarks left no doubt.

Operation Mockingbird was originally a CIA program to infiltrate and control major news organizations, using planted narratives, compromised journalists, and covert funding to steer public opinion in favor of the regime.

Though it was allegedly shut down in the ’70s, Americans have seen its fingerprints in everything from the Trump-Russia hoax to the coordinated censorship of COVID dissidents to the Biden laptop cover-up.

Gabbard’s comments all but confirm: the same forces that fed lies to The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post during Obamagate and Russiagate are still hard at work—leaking classified intelligence with political motives.

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Flashback: See How The Media Spread Russian Hoax Lies As Obama Intel Agencies Created Them

Using a declassified document released this week, it has never been easier to see how the propaganda press partners with politicians to hoodwink the public and shape the political landscape.

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, released a 2020 Oversight Investigation and Referral report about a 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) titled, “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election.”

It showed that under the direction of former President Barack Obama, then-CIA Director John Brennan and a handful of intelligence agents slapped together an ICA in two weeks, soon after Hillary Clinton lost the election. The ICA was used as the foundation of the Russia collusion hoax — the lie that Trump and Russia together cheated to win the 2016 election.

But the ICA was a terrible foundation for such a claim, because it was hastily written and had sketchy sourcing, including the fabricated and now debunked Steele dossier; and a six-word fragment of a sentence that mentioned Trump out of context. The report shows that intelligence agents argued with Brennen, telling him not to use information that was substandard, unclear, of uncertain origin, biased, or implausible.

The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway and Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland have an exclusive, must-read report with details on the strenuous objections high-level intelligence officers had to including the Steele dossier as a source for the ICA. Brennan included it anyway. Soon Obama and the propaganda press were passing off the suspect ICA report as solid proof of collusion.

With the HPSCI report in hand, rereading the corporate media articles that were used to spread the Russia hoax shows just how corrupt the media lies were. And instead of issuing correction notices, The New York Times and Washington Post are now doubling down on the hoax.

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The Intelligence Community Needs To Be Dismantled

At the direction of President Barack Obama in late 2016, our intelligence agencies pulled off what can only be described as a coup and a treasonous conspiracy against President-elect Donald Trump — a conspiracy that continued throughout his entire first term in office, hobbling his presidency and thwarting the will of the American electorate.

That’s what the bombshell documents released this week by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reveal: a criminal scheme, at the highest levels of the federal government, to deprive Trump the fruits of his electoral victory and, by extension, the American people of meaningful self-government.

At the center of this scheme was President Obama and his intelligence chiefs, who in December 2016 launched a conspiracy to prevent Trump from taking office or, failing that, to hamstring his presidency. “The evidence that we have found and that we have released directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment. There are multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence that confirm that fact,” Gabbard said Wednesday, adding that her office has forwarded all documents to the Justice Department and FBI “to investigate the criminal implications of this.”

It’s possible that those responsible for this long-running coup will face some kind of criminal prosecution and possibly conviction, but it’s highly unlikely. No one should hold their breath waiting for an Obama mugshot, as well-deserved as that might be given what he and his top officials did.

However, that doesn’t mean that nothing at all can be done. The conspiracy that these documents reveal should lead to a thorough reform of our intelligence agencies — not for the sake of political retribution, but for the survival of our republic. Simply put, our intelligence agencies as currently constituted are incompatible with republican self-government and the rule of law. They now function here in America much as they have functioned abroad for decades: as coup machines, undermining national sovereignty and imposing their will over and against the will of the electorate.

If nothing else comes of this scandal, it should be this: the complete dismantling of the intelligence community and its total reconstitution into agencies that can be held accountable to democratically-elected leaders. Right now, it’s accountable to no one, as the recent revelations demonstrate.

What makes such reform difficult isn’t just the power and insularity of these agencies, but that in this particular case they were weaponized by an outgoing president, Obama, who gave his intel chiefs a directive to push out a narrative, backed by official intelligence assessments, that Moscow stole the election for Trump. If a corrupt president is able to use the intel agencies like this, then reform of the agencies is necessary to prevent it from ever happening again.

The ins and outs of how all this happened, and what exactly Obama and his intelligence chiefs did in November and December of 2016, is admittedly a bit confusing, especially for those who never followed or perhaps have forgotten what happened back then and why we should care now, more than eight years later.

My colleagues here at The Federalist have in recent days done the heavy lifting of laying it all out in clear and unmistakable terms: Mollie Hemingway explained how top intelligence officials were overruled by Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, who insisted on the “key judgment” in a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russia had interfered in the election because Moscow “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.” The intelligence officials knew there was no evidence to substantiate that claim, which became a cornerstone of the Russia collusion narrative that Trump conspired with Russia to “steal” the 2016 election.

Shawn Fleetwood wrote about newly declassified records showing that “the phony dossier intel agencies used to spy on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was included in a critical Obama-era report on Russia’s activities in the 2016 election — despite claims from top Obama officials that it wasn’t.” That report, the above-mentioned ICA, relied on the infamous Steele dossier as evidence that Trump colluded with Moscow. Why? Because that was the only evidence they had to substantiate the explosive claim. The Steele dossier was of course an outlandish piece of opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign, and everything in it was fabricated.

Keep in mind the key part of all this is that after Trump won the 2016 election, but before he took office, Obama, Brennan, DNI James Clapper, and FBI Director James Comey, along with other top intel officials, deliberately manipulated the ICA so they could claim that Moscow had helped Trump steal the election. Russia has for a long time meddled in our elections, seeking to sow chaos and undermine the democratic process. But in 2016, Obama and his intel chiefs decided to manufacture a narrative that this time Russia didn’t just want to sow chaos, it wanted to help Trump win and then intervened to make that happen. That’s the central claim of the Russia collusion hoax, and what we learned this week is that it was all based on totally bogus evidence — evidence that was cobbled together at the behest of Obama himself.

But the Obama team didn’t stop there. As my colleague Sean Davis has explained, “Obama intel officials then prepared separate versions of the ICA — one for Congress, which did not include references to Steele dossier in the main body, a declassified version for public release which also excluded the dossier even though it was unclassified, and one for Obama and other executive branch officials, which included the Steele dossier references in the main body. The newly declassified review of the ICA concluded that this sleight of hand was done to allow top intel officials to avoid any public scrutiny or accountability for their inclusion of false, Clinton-funded opposition research in an ICA.”

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Russiagate Explained: The Sins Of The 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment

A key part of the House Permanent Selection Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) review is about then-CIA director John Brennan’s reliance on an obscure fragment to determine in the 2017 ICA that Putin “aspired to help Trump’s chances of victory when possible.”

The fragment, which is in bold below, comes from a raw human source intelligence report, or HUMINT in intelligence-speak.

“Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails) after he had come to believe t h a t the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [candidate Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.”

You might think that means Putin wanted Trump to win. That’s one interpretation.

But there were five different interpretations among the five people who wrote the ICA.

A senior CIA operations officers remarked: “We don’t know what was meant by that,” and “five people read it five ways,” the HPSCI reports says.

Usually that’s no problem, because as the Intelligence Community Directive standards (ICD 203) make clear, alternative interpretations should be included. Incredibly, the ICA failed to do that even though there was great disagreement on the fragment’s meaning.

The significance of this fragment to the ICA case that Putin “aspired” for candidate Trump to win cannot be overstated. The major “high confidence” judgment of the ICA rests on one opinion about a text fragment with uncertain meaning, that may be a garble, and for which it is not clear how it was obtained. This text-which would not have been published without DCIA’s orders to do so—is cited using only one interpretation of its meaning and without considering alternative interpretations.

The HPSCI gives some examples of alternative interpretations for “whose victory Putin was counting on.” Since the information was acquired in July 2016, it could have meant Putin “expected” a Trump victory at the upcoming Republican National Convention. The HPSCI notes that the convention’s outcome “was still uncertain to do active efforts to deny Trump a majority of convention delegates. This was a headline issue for the US political media at the time, though many pundits nonetheless expected — or ‘counted on’ — a Trump victory.”

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Russiagate’s Architects Suppressed Doubts To Peddle False Claims

Although Robert Mueller failed to find an election conspiracy between Donald Trump and Moscow, the former Special Counsel threw a lifeline to the Russiagate narrative by alleging that the Kremlin had engaged in a “sweeping and systematic” effort to get Trump elected and “sow discord” among Americans. 

Six years later, that questionable but enduring claim continues to unravel.

According to newly declassified documents, U.S. intelligence leaders concealed high-level doubts about one of Russiagate’s foundational allegations: that Russia stole and leaked Democratic Party material to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. In a September 2016 report that was never made public until now, the NSA and the FBI broke with their intelligence counterparts and expressed “low confidence” in the attribution to Russia.

The previously undisclosed dissent about Russia’s alleged hacking activities in the 2016 election is among several revelations released last week by Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. According to Gabbard, President Obama and senior members of his cabinet “manufactured and politicized intelligence” in its waning months to wage “a years-long coup against President Trump.”

Gabbard’s material adds to a body of evidence previously reported by RealClearInvestigations that challenges the widely parroted claim about the quality of evidence and the extent of Russian “interference operations” in the 2016 election. These conclusions – based on questionable assertions presented as hard facts – have been falsely portrayed as an intelligence consensus. When Trump, the nation’s commander-in-chief, cast doubt on the Russian interference allegations in a July 2018 news conference, former CIA chief John Brennan denounced him as “nothing short of treasonous.”

It turns out that Trump was not out of sync with the U.S. intelligence community he was accused of betraying. 

“Low Confidence” in Core Allegation

Until now, the purported U.S. intelligence consensus on Russian meddling has been conveyed to the public in three seminal reports. 

The first was a January 2017 intelligence community assessment (ICA) released in the final days of the Obama administration under the direction of Brennan and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The ICA accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering an “influence campaign” to “denigrate” Democratic candidate Clinton and “help” Trump win the 2016 election. Some of this effort involved propaganda on Russian media outlets and messaging on social media. 

The larger component hinged on the allegation that the GRU, Russia’s main intelligence agency, stole emails and documents from the Democratic Party and released that material principally via two online entities, DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, as well as the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has long denied that Russia or any other state actor was his source. Nevertheless, the January 2017 ICA stated that U.S. intelligence had  “high confidence” that Russia engineered the hack. 

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