Well, that was bodacious.

I've been critical of Sen Burr (REP) as chair of Sen Intel comm, but he did right here:



It would help if the entire REP senate came out and blasted Brennan

Admiral McRaven (former Navy SEAL and Commander of the US Special Operations Command who oversaw the mission to kill Bin Laden) joined the resistance apparently and gave a full-throated defense to John Brennan:

"Former CIA director John Brennan, whose security clearance you revoked on Wednesday, is one of the finest public servants I have ever known. Few Americans have done more to protect this country than John. He is a man of unparalleled integrity, whose honesty and character have never been in question, except by those who don’t know him.

Therefore, I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency…

Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.

If you think for a moment that your McCarthy-era tactics will suppress the voices of criticism, you are sadly mistaken. The criticism will continue until you become the leader we prayed you would be."

-from the Washington Post

McCraven is an Obama loving commie. His comments don't surprise anyone, do they?

Not surprised at all. For his entire presidency Obama stuffed federal LE/DOJ and the upper echelons of the military with leftist progressives. Much easier to control people who may not be receptive to your ideas when you control the military and federal LE.

Privately, Intel Officials Back Shutting Out Brennan, Clapper

https://www.realclearinvestiga...brennan_clapper.html

President Trump has been criticized for politicizing the intelligence community by threatening to strip the security clearances of former top officials including John Brennan and James Clapper. But numerous past and present senior intelligence officials say that the Obama administration started the politicization -- and that revoking the clearances of those who abuse the privilege for partisan purposes may help right the ship.

“As is often the case with the Trump administration, the rollout of the policy is bad, but the idea driving the policy is sound,” said one senior intelligence official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke to RealClearInvestigations only on condition of anonymity. “Under some Obama-era intelligence chiefs, intelligence was used as a political weapon. We need to root that out, not reward it.”

It is not clear if the White House is moving forward on Trump’s threats last month to revoke those clearances. After Brennan’s continued media attacks on Trump following the Helsinki summit with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Sen. Rand Paul advised the president to strip him of his clearance. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Michael Flynn: Unmasked.
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File

Some sources say former CIA director Brennan, ex-director of national intelligence Clapper and others with security clearances were emboldened to pursue political agendas through the anti-Trump media, in a climate of impunity created by the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute leaks attending Donald Trump’s election. Notable among the leaks, they said, was a top unnamed official’s “unmasking” of Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn in a January 2017 Washington Post column by David Ignatius, sourced to classified intercepts of Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador. Leaking such classified information is a felony.

"The very people who are now talking the most know the details of how the Flynn intercept was leaked," a senior U.S. official told RealClearInvestigations. "They wouldn't be out talking like that if they'd been interviewed by the FBI." The Department of Justice declined to comment.

In February, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the Justice Department is “aggressively” investigating the Flynn leak as one of 27 open investigations into unauthorized disclosures of classified intelligence. But to date none of those have brought indictments.

Brennan has used his current position as contributor to NBC News and MSNBC, as well as his social media presence, to wage a rhetorical assault on Trump. He described Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki last month as “nothing short of treasonous.” From his perch at CNN, Clapper has launched like-minded barrages against the White House. The networks did not respond to requests for comment from or about Brennan or Clapper.

Security clearances are commonly extended for the top leaders of the intelligence community after they leave their jobs, on the rare chance that they should be called upon to consult with their successors.

“The Trump administration is not going to call in Susan Rice for advice, never mind John Brennan,” said one active intelligence officer. “And if someone does get called in from a previous administration they can get a temporary clearance, akin to a one-day non-disclosure agreement.”

Trump’s threatened break with the tradition has been characterized by critics as a muzzling of free speech and open public debate. “Politicizing security clearances to retaliate against former national security officials who criticize the President would set a terrible new precedent,” the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee, California Rep. Adam Schiff, tweeted last month.
Sen. Rand Paul: Revoke clearances.
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File

Revoking security clearances would curtail the ex-officials’ ability to use for partisan ends the resources and institutions of the federal government, including classified intelligence. Published reports show that Obama-era intelligence officials embarked on this course even while they were in government.

Brennan and Clapper’s government records are tarnished by improprieties and abuses that they have been reluctant to acknowledge. Brennan was compelled to apologize to the Senate Intelligence Committee after it was discovered the CIA searched the computers of Senate staffers. The Obama administration used the foreign intelligence surveillance system to spy on congressional critics of the Iran nuclear deal as well as pro-Israel activists.

Clapper has denied that he misled Congress in 2013 when he said the National Security Agency does not collect data on American citizens.

According to the House Intelligence Committee’s March 2018 Russia report, Clapper also gave inconsistent testimony about his contacts with the press, including his future employer CNN, regarding the Clinton campaign-funded dossier alleging Trump’s ties to Russian officials. Clapper at first denied discussing it with the media and then admitted that he had.

With Clapper’s subsequent hiring as a national security consultant at CNN, Senator Paul and other conservatives argued that the media was effectively monetizing access to classified intelligence. “If they still have clearances, former colleagues still active may be passing them information,” says an acting intelligence official.

Another concern is that the emerging relationship between the press and the intelligence community may inspire active intelligence officers to leak to preferred news organizations with an eye to a job after retirement. “The situation,” says the official, “is ripe for abuse.”

Television contracts are status-enhancing and generous, but hardly more lucrative than the fees former top-level national security officials earn lobbying, consulting, or simply sitting on the boards of major financial, defense, or technology firms.

The issue, according to RCI’s sources, is that the growing alignment between anti-Trump media and former spy chiefs will further politicize intelligence, thereby compromising national security while continuing to fragment an already divided American public. All the while, the intelligence community is squandering the confidence of those they are sworn to serve.

“Brennan and Clapper and others certainly have the right to say what they like,” former CIA case officer Daniel Hoffman told RCI. “And their statements protected by the freedom of speech we enjoy in the U.S. are a measure of how concerned they are about this president. But while they get a favorable response from the ‘Amen’ chorus of Trump opponents, we should also consider the risk they are taking of feeding Trump's speculation they were partisan officials who sought to do him harm.”

Brennan claims not to have seen the infamous dossier alleging Trump’s ties to Russia until after the 2016 election, but circumstantial evidence suggests he disseminated reports on it to congressional leaders in August of that year.

Numerous Obama-era agencies, including the FBI and Justice and State departments, handled the dossier. Even though former FBI director James Comey called the documents “unverified and salacious,” his bureau and the DOJ used it to obtain a warrant to monitor the electronic communications of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Hoffman, a Fox News analyst himself, has written critically of Brennan and Clapper’s media posture. As a former CIA station chief in Moscow, Hoffman said he is especially concerned about Brennan’s speculation that Trump could be compromised by the Russians.

“Brennan and Clapper are doing Putin's bidding when they speculate without facts,” Hoffman told RCI, “in Brennan's case that Putin could blackmail Trump, and in Clapper's that the Kremlin's interference swung the election to Trump. Senior intelligence officers should know we speculate at our own peril."

In contrast with Brennan and Clapper, other recent former CIA directors have demonstrated the kind of circumspection once standard in former intelligence chiefs. Robert Gates has balanced public criticisms of Trump with praise. Longtime Clinton ally Leon Panetta’s rebukes are, compared with Brennan and Clapper’s, temperate.

David Petraeus, Obama’s third CIA director, lost his security clearance after he was charged with leaking classified intelligence to his biographer and then-mistress Paula Broadwell. Petraeus was replaced by Brennan.

The Obama administration is notable for having aggressively prosecuted leaks that it perceived as dangerous to national security. Reporters Sharyl Attkisson, James Rosen, and a team at the Associated Press were among those the previous White House put under surveillance.

It was a different matter when leaking served the Obama administration’s political interests.

The Washington press corps is dependent on leaks, including classified intelligence, for stories. The Obama administration tweaked the ecosystem and encouraged officials to leak against the incoming Trump administration.

As the Obama team left office, it spread intelligence products regarding the Trump administration’s alleged ties to Russia to ensure that reports proliferated throughout the government. Multiplying the number of potential media sources increased the likelihood that intelligence would be leaked to the press.

It appears that’s what happened with the Flynn leak. As a veteran reporter on the national security beat told RCI: “After the Washington Post broke the Flynn story, a colleague called an Obama administration source and got an explosive story like that confirmed in 15 minutes. Even reporters at second-tier publications got the story confirmed, and quickly, because so many people in the administration knew about it.”

But where that leak started is a different issue. "There are only a few people the leak could have come from,” one senior U.S. official told RCI. “The Flynn intercept doesn't go to rank-and-file FBI agents. It goes through the top rungs up to Comey, and from there it can only go across. To top DOJ personnel, and the White House. It could also go to John Brennan and James Clapper."

Brennan is a POS, and what a disappointment McRaven is - he can go away and STFU. Thinks he's special because he has seal and admiral next to his name - another swamp asshole with clouded judgement. When obama and clinton are your management heroes, you have taken a wrong path somewhere in your life/career.

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
McCraven is an Obama loving commie. His comments don't surprise anyone, do they?

Fuck him too. He's taunting POTUS to "come and take it" with HIS clearance now.

I say Trump should take him up on his offer.

quote:

Originally posted by 2012BOSS302:
Brennan is a POS, and what a disappointment McRaven is - he can go away and STFU. Thinks he's special because he has seal and admiral next to his name - another swamp asshole with clouded judgement. When obama and clinton are your management heroes, you have taken a wrong path somewhere in your life/career.

Pretty much to a person, once a military officer gets 2 or more stars, they have political ambitions.

The best part is 99% of the time they retire and then try to run in the same political circles and the swamp creatures pay them zero mind, because they are just some retired shmuck now, not on the Joint Chiefs or running SOCOM anymore. IE, the only reason swamp paid them any attention in the first place was the uniform and the position, not the actual person.

McRaven is just looking for attention, like most of those fucks crave.

quote:

Originally posted by 2012BOSS302:
Brennan is a POS, and what a disappointment McRaven is - he can go away and STFU. Thinks he's special because he has seal and admiral next to his name - another swamp asshole with clouded judgement. When obama and clinton are your management heroes, you have taken a wrong path somewhere in your life/career.

Politics is an inescapable part of attaining and climbing through flag ranks in all services, little different than appointments to courts. Politicians pick them, the Senate confirms them. It would be asking way too much to expect a President to select those who weren’t on board with him.

That said, I was disappointed to read McRaven’s comments. This might explain some of the troubling things coming out of Austin in recent years.

Bleepin’ hippies!

quote:

Originally posted by PASig:

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
McCraven is an Obama loving commie. His comments don't surprise anyone, do they?

Fuck him too. He's taunting POTUS to "come and take it" with HIS clearance now.

I say Trump should take him up on his offer.

Nah, fuck the asshole, but why play into his hands? Why give him "the badge of honor" that he's craving for?

He plays the pitiful political hack and shabby radical to the end.

American Spectator
George Neumayr

The real story about John Brennan’s security clearance is not that he lost it under a Republican president but that he once got one. One of the peculiar footnotes of Brennan’s history is that he obtained a position in Bill Casey’s CIA after having supported the Soviet-backed American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War. Had Casey conducted the polygraph test in which Brennan admitted to voting for Soviet proxy Gus Hall in 1976, Casey would have tossed him out of the office. Casey hated communists. Whoever hired Brennan must have been a Deep State holdover from the Carter years.

All of Brennan’s propaganda about “Trump-Russian collusion” is just sour grapes over the loss of his preferred candidate, Hillary, for whom he was desperately auditioning by launching an unfounded investigation into her opponent, and a remnant of his pro-Soviet nostalgia. Brennan’s much-vaunted “conscience” was pricked not by Soviet leaders who slaughtered their own people and enslaved hapless nations but by a Russian leader who — brace yourselves — isn’t keen on postmodern Western propaganda in favor of gay rights. Brennan prided himself on his “commitment” to alternative lifestyles and would pad down the halls of the CIA in a “rainbow lanyard,” as Bill Gertz once reported. Putin’s refusal to hold “gay pride” parades in Moscow infuriated Brennan. He also didn’t care for Putin’s unsentimental approach to Islamic terrorism. Brennan defined jihad as “self-improvement” and lobbied Obama to embrace the fanatics of the Muslim Brotherhood. Brennan got his wish when the Obama-backed Morsi rose to power in Egypt and wrecked it.

Michael Flynn thought that Brennan was a PC jackass of the first order, in thrall to the Muslims with whom he had traveled to Mecca during his stint as station chief in Saudi Arabia. Brennan got his revenge on Flynn by unleashing on him Stefan Halper, the vaguely pro-Republican oaf and Cambridge con man the Obama administration hired to spy on Trumpworld. Halper reported to his friends in British intelligence that Flynn in 2014 had been seen at a Cambridge University forum fraternizing with a Russian historian. That morsel of half-baked gossip was then fed to Brennan. In 2015, the British and presumably Halper kept bird-dogging Flynn. Part of Brennan’s “Trump-Russian collusion” fetish feeds off his hatred for Flynn, who had criticized the Obama administration for pursuing a pointlessly anachronistic course against Putin. Islamic terrorism, not Russian nationalism, threatened the vital national interests of America, argued Flynn. Brennan stewed over this disagreement and exacted his revenge on Flynn through Justice Department official Sally Yates, a Democratic hack who had joined the anti-Trump ring in the Obama administration along with her subordinate Bruce Ohr and fellow saboteur Peter Strzok.

The only criticism that Trump deserves for yanking Brennan’s security clearance is its delay. He should have done it on day one. Brennan was a security risk from the start — an anti-American radical of staggering proportions who should never have been permitted within a hundred-mile radius of Langley. Putin, Trump once said, is “laughing his ass off” at the mayhem dolts like Brennan have caused. Putin is also no doubt laughing at the spectacle of a former communist rising to the top of the CIA, then conducting in his retirement an attempted coup against a patriotic president on the claimed grounds that he is insufficiently hostile to Mother Russia.

Like the execrable Peter Strzok, with whom he conspired to “stop” candidate Trump, Brennan sputters about Trump as a “Russian asset.” But if anyone qualifies as a useful idiot for the Russians, it is Brennan. At the most critical moments in the Cold War, he was rooting for the Reds. He has gone from demanding “détente” to forbidding it, from raging about “McCarthyism” to impersonating it. Brennan never grew up. In his youth, he clamored for the overthrow of an American president; nothing has changed in his dotage. He is still vowing to sabotage an American president, and indulges the adolescent delusion that he somehow speaks for the proletariat, insisting that it will “defeat” Trump.

Samantha Powers, another lefty drip in Obama’s anti-Trump ring, warned Trump that he shouldn’t risk the wrath of Brennan. Who knows, implied Powers, what he might do? In taking away Brennan’s security clearance, Trump just took Powers at her word.

Link

quote:

Michael Flynn thought that Brennan was a PC jackass of the first order, in thrall to the Muslims with whom he had traveled to Mecca during his stint as station chief in Saudi Arabia.

Only Muslims are allowed to go to Mecca.

The Grand Mosque seizure occurred during November and December 1979 when extremist insurgents calling for the overthrow of the House of Saud took over Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The insurgents declared that the Mahdi (the "redeemer of Islam") had arrived in the form of one of their leaders – Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani – and called on Muslims to obey him. For nearly two weeks Saudi Special Forces, assisted by Pakistani and French commandos,[7] fought battles to reclaim the compound.[8] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Mosque_seizure

Those French commandoes were allowed in in the emergency only on condition they convert to Islam, depart at once and never return.

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
McCraven is an Obama loving commie. His comments don't surprise anyone, do they?

Mark Levin pretty much called him this yesterday and furthermore challenged McCraven to just surrender his security clearance and stop being a drama queen.

"Why don't you just surrender your security clearance Admiral, why all the drama queen stuff?? No one in this administration will ever want or need your advice on any national security matters your security clearance is already worthless you idiot!"

Levin can really produce some sharp tongue stuff when he gets on a roll!

To me, revoking or at least suspending a security clearance doesn't seem any different than changing the door locks and computer passwords after an employee leaves. I always thought they did that as a matter of course.

quote:

Originally posted by Il Cattivo:

quote:

So what the hell is to evaluate?

I don't know, but wouldn't it be interesting to find out what their last data searches are before their clearance goes away?

What, like there is some Top Secret databank they can search like Google?

quote:

Originally posted by PASig:

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
McCraven is an Obama loving commie. His comments don't surprise anyone, do they?

Fuck him too. He's taunting POTUS to "come and take it" with HIS clearance now.

I say Trump should take him up on his offer.

Unless this asshole is still in a position where he needs a security clearance, then he should lose it! Unless laws have changed, you leave a position that required a security clearance, that security clearance is removed, unless your new position continues to require one.

I may be wrong but it seems to me that there are a whole universe of "general stars" out there that still hold their security clearances.

When I left the army, my TSC clearance was taken as I no longer had a need for it. When I took a position as a civilian working in support of the AF, I had to get my clearance reinstated.

Has the "security arm" of our gubbermint actually gotten so incredibly screwed up that control of top secret clearances are never/seldom canceled when people leave jobs?

quote:

Originally posted by jhe888:

quote:

Originally posted by Il Cattivo:

quote:

So what the hell is to evaluate?

I don't know, but wouldn't it be interesting to find out what their last data searches are before their clearance goes away?

What, like there is some Top Secret databank they can search like Google?

Yes.

At a certain level, it is like being a “made man” in the mob. A made man must be respected, treated with respect. A made man cannot introduce himself to another made man, but must be introduced by a made man known to both. He cannot discuss family business with any other than a known made man.

If you are at a senior level, or were, your colleagues assume you are cleared. Things get discussed at the clubs, socially, at trade shows, conventions. If you are not cleared, it can be awkward, uncomfortable, risky.

quote:

I want to know how this asshole still had a clearance?

Knowing what's come out about this shitstain, the real question should be how did he get one in the first place.