Obama's CIA Secretly Intercepted Congressional Communications About Whistleblowers

[Swordsmyth]

Newly-declassified documents show the CIA intercepted sensitive Congressional communications about intelligence community whistleblowers.

The intercepts occurred under CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The new disclosures are contained in two letters of “Congressional notification” originally written to key members of Congress in March 2014, but kept secret until now.
In the letters, then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough tells four key members of Congress that during “routing counterintelligence monitoring of Government computer systems,” the CIA collected emails between Congressional staff and the CIA’s head of whistleblowing and source protection. McCullough states that he’s concerned “about the potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent ‘chilling effect’ that the present [counterintelligence] monitoring system might have on Intelligence Community whistleblowing.”
The idea that the CIA would monitor communications of U.S. government officials, including those in the legislative branch, is itself controversial. But in this case, the CIA picked up some of the most sensitive emails between Congress and intelligence agency workers blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing.


“Most of these emails concerned pending and developing whistleblower complaints,” McCullough states in his letters to lead Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees at the time: Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia); and Representatives Michael Rogers (R-Michigan) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland). McCullough adds that the type of monitoring that occurred was “lawful and justified for [counterintelligence] purposes” but

“I am not confident that Congressional staff fully understood that their whistleblower-related communications with my Executive Director of whistleblowing might be reviewed as a result of routine [CIA counterintelligence] monitoring.”–Intelligence Community Inspector General 2014

The disclosures from 2014 were released late Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). “The fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading Congressional staff’s emails about intelligence community whistleblowers raises serious policy concerns as well as potential Constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly,” wrote Grassley in a statement.
According to Grassley, he originally began trying to have the letters declassified more than four years ago but was met with “bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Brennan and Clapper.”


Grassley adds that he repeated his request to declassify the letters under the Trump administration, but that Trump intelligence officials failed to respond. The documents were finally declassified this week after Grassley appealed to the new Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson.

More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...whistleblowers

[acptulsa]

I'll bet you Trump's CIA is doing the same.

[Brian4Liberty]

I wonder if the Awan bros helped the CIA?

[AZJoe]

Brennan and Clapper Should Not Escape Prosecution

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa made a dramatic announcement this month … four years ago, he asked the Intelligence Community Inspector General to release two “Congressional Notifications” written by former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Grassley had had his requests to declassify the documents ignored repeatedly throughout the last two years of the Obama administration. … This time, his request was approved.

So what was the information that was finally declassified? … John Brennan ordered CIA hackers to intercept the emails of all potential or possible intelligence community whistleblowers who may have been trying to contact the Congressional oversight committees, specifically to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Judiciary Committee. …

Brennan ordered his people to hack into the Senate email system—again. …

The CIA is required by law to inform the Congressional oversight committees whenever one of its officers, agents, or administrators breaks the law, when an operation requires Congressional approval because it is a “covert action” program, or whenever something happens at the CIA that’s potentially controversial and the Agency wants to save itself the embarrassment of explaining itself to Congress later.

Brennan apparently ordered his officers to spy on the Senate. Remember, back in 2014 his officers spied on Intelligence Community investigators while they were writing the Senate Torture Report. This time, he decided to inform Congress. But Brennan and Clapper classified the notification. It was like a taunt. “Sure, I’m spying on Congress, which is illegal. But it’s classified, so what are you going to do about it?”
Grassley went through the proper channels. And even though Brennan and Clapper essentially gave him the middle finger, he didn’t say anything until the documents were finally declassified. …

John Brennan belongs in prison. He has flouted U.S. national security laws with impunity for years. … In these declassified notifications, he’s confessing to hacking into the Senate’s computer system. That’s a violation of a whole host of laws, from illegal use of a government computer to wire fraud to espionage. … Brennan was the leading force behind the prosecutions of eight national security whistleblowers during the Obama administration, almost three times the number of whistleblowers charged under the Espionage Act by all previous presidents combined. …

it’s a crime, a felony, to overclassify government information. … The CIA Inspector General said of the notifications, “I could see no reason to withhold declassification of these documents. They contained no information that could be construed as sources and methods.” … the notifications were improperly classified in the first place. …

Grassley went so far as to call out Brennan and Clapper by name. “What sources or methods would be jeopardized by the declassification of these notifications? After four-and-a-half years of bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Brennan and Clapper, we finally have the answer: None.” So why weren’t they declassified four years ago? Remember, it’s illegal to classify a crime. And it’s illegal to classify something solely for the purpose of preventing embarrassment to the CIA. Yet those were the very reasons for classifying the documents in the first place. … Recall that it was Clapper who lied directly to the Senate Intelligence Committee about intercepting the communications of American citizens. …

Brennan and Clapper need to learn that lesson the hard way. They broke the law. They ought to be prosecuted for it.

[Occam's Banana]

Obama's CIA Secretly Intercepted Congressional Communications About Whistleblowers

I'll bet you Trump's CIA is doing the same.

The possessive apostrophe has been applied to the wrong subject in both of these statements ...

[acptulsa]

The possessive apostrophe has been applied to the wrong subject in both of these statements ...

Right you are.

Kennedy thought in terms of Kennedy's CIA. The CIA repossessed Kennedy's ass.

[Swordsmyth]

A 15-year CIA veteran says he was systematically targeted for revenge by John Brennan and Robert Mueller after he exposed part of the CIA's waterboarding program, then later revealed the identities of two agency officers, according to the Daily Caller's Chuck Ross.

In a 2007 ABC News interview, John Kiriakou, now 54, revealed details of a 2002 incident in which the CIA waterboarded Saudi national Abu Zubaydah after mistaking him for al Qaeda's #3 official. Kiriakou later outed two CIA agents in subsequent interviews.

Kiriakou’s nightmare began years before his interview with the FBI, in December 2007, after he revealed in an on-camera interview with ABC News that the CIA had waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi national who the CIA falsely believed was al Qaeda’s No. 3 official. Kiriakou, the chief of counterterrorist operations in Pakistan, had helped capture Abu Zubaydah in March 2002.
He resigned from the CIA in 2004 and joined the private sector. -Daily Caller

Kiriakou, who now hosts a radio show for Sputnik International and works as a whistleblower advocate, expressed remorse for sharing the names with reporters, and hav maintained that none of the outed CIA officers were threatened or harmed, and no confidential methods were xposed. An internal "crimes report" was submitted following Kiriakou's comments, which the George W. Bush Justice Deparment decided not to pursue.
When President Obama took office, however, that changed.
"What we found in discovery was a memo from John Brennan, then the number 2 official on Obama's National Security Council - to the Justice Department saying ‘charge him with espionage," according to Kiriakou. The Justice Department responded, saying that Kiriakou had no committed espionage - to which Brennan replied "Charge him with espionage anyway and make him defend himself."
The memos in question were reportedly provided to Kiriakou's attorneys for his case and subsequently returned to the Justice Department.
The Sting
Following his stint in the private sector, Kiriakou went to work for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired at the time by Sen. John Kerry (D-MA). According to Kiriakou, the FBI launched a sting operation against him while he was in his new role.

The operation was undertaken by a 12-man “Kiriakou task force” set up by Mueller, who served as FBI director until 2013. The FBI declined comment on a list of questions about its investigation of Kiriakou.
In early 2011, Kiriakou met with the Japanese diplomat as he did with many other foreign dignitaries as part of his job. The pair communicated in Arabic, which Kiriakou speaks fluently, because the Japanese diplomat spoke poor English.
At the end of their fist meeting, Kiriakou says that the diplomat asked about his future plans. When Kiriakou said he was considering leaving the committee, the diplomat urged him to stay.
“No, I will pay you money,” the diplomat said, according to Kiriakou.
Kiriakou says he reprimanded the diplomat and reported the incident immediately to the Senate security office. -Daily Caller

Several days later, two FBI agents encouraged Kiriakou to maintain contact with the diplomat, and to have another lunch meeting. He did so - ultimately attending four meetings through April 2011, and summarized each of them in detailed reports to the FBI.
Meeting Strzok
The FBI's point-man on the sting operation was former counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, who was fired after he was discovered to have exchanged a trove of anti-Trump text messages while investigating then-candidate Donald Trump.
Meeting Strzok "was the worst day of my life," Kiriakou told the Caller.
"You remember you helped us with that case about a year ago," said one of the FBI agents he had worked with on the Japanese diplomat case, in a phone call. "Well we have a similar case, and we need your help."

When Kiriakou visited the Washington Field Office, he says that he was asked to help investigators figure out how his photo and those of nearly two dozen more current and former CIA officers had ended up in the prison cell of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner.
Kiriakou told the agents he had no idea how the photographs ended up at Gitmo.
But about an hour into his interview, which was in a room used for conversations about classified topics, the FBI agents revealed their true interest in Kiriakou.
“In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that right now we’re executing a search warrant at your house and seizing your electronic devices,” one agent said, Kiriakou recalled to The New York Times in 2013.
Kiriakou first remembers Strzok after his interrogation.
“When I came out of this interrogation, I heard him say, ‘tell me he implicated himself,'” Kiriakou recalled of Strzok to TheDCNF.
“The other FBI guy said, ‘he didn’t, not really anyway.'”
“Am I under arrest?” Kiriakou asked.
“Not yet,” Strzok replied.
Kiriakou was arrested the following Monday. Strzok was the agent who handcuffed him. -Daily Caller

"What they did was they played on my patriotism. What they did is they tricked me into going down there to help them catch a spy," said Kiriakou.
Kiriakou was indicted on April 5, 2012, on five charges related to the disclosure of classified information - including the outing of the two CIA officers. He notes that he appears to be the only CIA officer to face charges related to the illegal torture program - and spent 30 months in federal prison after being sentenced in January, 2013 after pleading guilty to leaking classified information to the journalists. He was released on Feb. 3, 2015 after serving 23 months, while the espionage charges initially filed against him were dropped.
Of Peter Strzok's downfall, Kiriakou says "Washington’s a small town, and karma’s a bitch ... And now it’s Peter Strzok’s turn to have his career and his reputation dragged through the mud."



https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...ion-undercover