As a Republican media consultant, I’m routinely invited to represent the right-leaning view on left-leaning news outlets, including CNN, MSNBC and NPR. Usually I’m invited to appear alongside two liberal panelists, a liberal show host, and a viewing audience rooting for my competitors. I’m not expected to take a dive, but everything is arranged to make it hard for me to win the argument.
Truth be told, I enjoy the challenge. The real reward, however, is the time spent beforehand in the greenroom. Hours waiting to go on air have given me a unique opportunity to meet a bunch of liberal journalists, activists, progressive politicians and Hollywood celebrities. They have all been friendly.
What have I learned from observing the other side of the political universe up close? Liberals are united in the belief that the election of Donald Trump constituted a cataclysmic anomaly in the political cosmos. They believe in their hearts that this cataclysm was instigated by an outside agent using cyber chicanery. Equally clear is their newfound collective purpose in life—to rectify this horrific reality any way they can.
I’ve listened in on numerous conversations about how voter manipulation is the only plausible explanation for Mr. Trump’s victory. One segment producer explained to me that despite the more than $1 billion in total marketing dollars spent on the presidential race—and almost two years of daily news coverage of the campaigns—it was the approximately $200,000 that might or might not have been spent by the Russians on social media that tipped the race in Mr. Trump’s favor. If so, those were the most effective ads in political history, despite the spelling mistakes.
This article gives us a different slant on Gina Haspel and her work with John Brennan. The author of the article is a retired CIA station chief and operations officer, and is president of Americans for Intelligence Reform. Nancy
The new director of the Central intelligence Agency must reverse the damaging Brennan reform
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
A group of former senior intelligence officials recently published a letter supporting Deputy CIADirector Gina Haspel as the nominee to be the next CIA director.
Critics of Ms. Haspel have focused most of their questions about her suitability for the position on her past role in the agency’s interrogation programs for captured terrorists after the September 11 attacks.
The debate so far is largely centered on the past and has ignored important questions about whether Ms. Haspel is the right person to bring much-needed reform to the CIA in the aftermath of disastrous reforms put in place under the administration of President Barack Obama.
A key indicator of concerns that should be raised about Ms. Haspel is the endorsement she received from Mr. Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, who has revealed himself a bitter partisan and critic of President Trump.
During his tenure as CIA director, Mr. Brennan worked closely with Ms. Haspel in drafting and launching the CIA’s so-called “modernization” plan.
As someone who spent a career in the shadowy world of intelligence, I can attest this damaging modernization went largely unnoticed by the public and never received the attention it should have from the agency’s congressional overseers and the public. The Brennan reforms will have a long-term impact by severely limiting the CIA’s espionage capabilities — and they should be reversed by the next CIA director.
Under Mr. Brennan and with the support of Ms. Haspel, the modernization plan systematically dismantled and destroyed the CIA’s operations division — the heart of the agency’s critical mission of using people to steal vital secrets around the world.
To avoid critical reaction, the weakening of the CIA’s operations branch was disguised under the modernization program by announcing with great fanfare the creation of a new Directorate of Digital Innovation. The new bureaucratic entity sought to redirect the agency toward using cyber capabilities as a key intelligence-gathering tool.
Historically, the operations division was staffed by an elite cadre of highly trained specialists schooled in the dark arts of espionage and capable of operating around the world — from places like Beirut to Beijing.
VIDEO JOHN GUANDOLO – MCMASTER MUST BE FIREDMcMaster Must Be Fired – He’s covering up Islamic Threat
#FireMcMaster@POTUSPublished on Aug 3, 2017
New revelations have surfaced that the Obama administration abused intelligence during the election by launching a massive domestic spy campaign that included snooping on Trump officials.
The irony is mind-boggling: Targeting political opposition is long a technique of police states like Russia, which Team Obama has loudly condemned for allegedly using its own intelligence agencies to hack into our election.
The revelations, as well as testimony this week from former Obama intel officials, show the extent to which the Obama administration politicized and weaponized intelligence against Americans.
Thanks to Circa News, we now know the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama routinely violated privacy protections while snooping through foreign intercepts involving US citizens — and failed to disclose the breaches, prompting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court a month before the election to rebuke administration officials.
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.”