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Chad Pergram ‏@ChadPergram 2m Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell resigns.

Avril Haines will be the first woman to be second in command at the CIA, but critics point not to her gender but her lack of CIA experience. Her choice suggests Obama wants a close ally. Plucking from a collection of high-powered female lawyers serving the White House, President Obama has nominated Avril Haines as the next deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. One former senior CIA official tells the Monitor that her nomination has prompted surprise among his former colleagues, not due to Haines’s gender, of course, but because she is a relative unknown in the community. He...

The seeds of the relationships between Donald Trump and key figures in the Russian business and political worlds — now the subject of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation — were planted at least five months before Trump’s now famous 2013 trip to Moscow, during a previously unreported visit to a raunchy Las Vegas nightclub with the son of a prominent oligarch and Putin ally, according to a new book about Trump and his Russian ties. The excerpt being published today explores the events surrounding Trump’s November 2013 visit to Moscow to oversee the Miss Universe pageant, and to vigorously pursue...

WASHINGTON — The State Department has hired an alarming number of law-enforcement agents with criminal or checkered backgrounds because of a flawed hiring process, a stunning memo obtained by The Post reveals. The background problems are severe enough that many of the roughly 2,000 agents in State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security can play only limited roles in agency efforts to police bad conduct and prosecute wrongdoers. ... “Department intakes of new . . . officers since the hiring surge a decade ago have reportedly been flawed, with ‘mitigation’ of troubling histories including criminal matters,” according to a December 2012 memo...

The CIA’s deputy director plans to resign and will be replaced by White House lawyer and agency outsider Avril D. Haines, Director John O. Brennan said Wednesday. Haines, who will succeed career officer Michael Morell on Aug. 9, has served for three years as President Obama’s deputy counsel in charge of national security issues and as legal adviser to the National Security Council. Although she has never worked inside the intelligence agency, “she knows more about covert action than anyone in the U.S. government outside of the CIA,” Brennan said in an interview.

Microsoft has collaborated closely with U.S. intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, top-secret documents obtained Thursday by the British Guardian show. The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month. According to the Guardian, the documents show that: snip

<p>Sexy spook Anna Chapman, busted in the summer of 2010 as part of a sleeper cell of Russian agents, proposed to fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden on Twitter.</p> <p>Snowden, who revealed the secret NSA surveillance program PRISM, has been stuck in Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport since June 23, after fleeing his Hong Kong hiding place. He has been caught in legal limbo after being stripped of his US passport and has sought asylum wth 21 countries.</p>

BERLIN – Edward Snowden is increasingly unhappy with the situation in Russia, where he has lived for more than three years. President Vladimir Putin once welcomed the National Security Agency contractor for his propaganda value, but he may be wondering if it’s all been worth it. Snowden arrived in Moscow in June 2013. That was almost a year before the Crimea annexation, and Russia could still try to sell itself to radical leftists who admired Snowden as the lesser evil, compared with the Big Brother United States. Putin talked a lot about Snowden, showing obvious delight for thumbing his nose...

June 12, 2013 State Department Whistleblower, a Career Foreign Service Officer, Seeks Congressional Protection After State Threatens Her Kids Bryan Preston The State Department whistleblower is Aurelia Fedenisn. She worked in the department’s inspector general’s office until her retirement in December 2012. According to USA Today, she has sought protection as an official whistleblower after the State Department directly threatened her, once at her home. It threatened her with criminal charges when she turned over documents to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) showing evidence that the department had watered down her report, in which she alleged that the department at the...

House leaders seek GAO probe of State Department failure to report Russian nuclear missile treaty violationsTwo senior House leaders on Friday requested an investigation by Congress’ General Accountability Office (GAO) into the State Department’s failure to report Russian violations of a 1987 nuclear missile accord.“It is clear from my subcommittee’s oversight that the administration did not fully disclose what it knew about Russian arms control violations when it was trying to get the New START treaty ratified,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces.“Its all-consuming drive to protect its Russia reset...

People in the area reported a man driving erratically and yelling from a black Honda Civic with signs and stickers -- some referencing Sept. 11, 2001 -- about 3 p.m. Monday, News4’s Jackie Bensen reported. One sign read "Death to Capitalism," bicyclist Jen House told News4...... Several of what appear to be gas cans and propane canisters are visible inside the car, which prompted police to close several streets in the area and evacuate Ross Elementary School and an apartment building as a precaution, Bensen reported.

Hillary was very engaged with Putin in order to share common ground in world affairs. “I would love it if we could continue to build a more positive relationship with Russia,” Clinton said during a speech to Goldman Sachs on June 4, 2013. In the same speech, Clinton said “obviously we would very much like to have a positive relationship with Russia and we would like to see Putin be less defensive toward a relationship with the United States so that we could work together on some issues.” During a speech to the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago on...

The political consulting firm Democracy Partners is at the center of the Project Veritas investigation exposing Democrat operatives instigating violence at Trump rallies and plotting potential voter fraud. Robert Creamer is the founder of Democracy Partners and a frequent visitor to the Obama White House. Logs show Creamer making 340 visits to the White House, with 45 of those meetings including President Obama. As reported by Breitbart News, Creamer issued a statement after the first two videos that he was “stepping back” from his “responsibilities working with the campaign.” Interim DNC Chairman Donna Brazile tried to put distance between the...

Legal sources tell NBC News that the former second-highest-ranking officer in the U.S. military is now the target of a Justice Department investigation into an alleged leak of classified information about a covert U.S. cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear program. According to legal sources, retired Marine Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been notified that he’s under investigation for allegedly leaking information about a massive attack using a computer virus named Stuxnet on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Gen. Cartwright, 63, becomes the latest alleged leaker targeted by the Obama administration, which has already...

A pipeline pumping natural gas from Myanmar to energy-hungry China has gone fully operational, state-run Chinese media said on Monday. BEIJING: A pipeline pumping natural gas from Myanmar to energy-hungry China has gone fully operational, state-run Chinese media said on Monday. The project, stretching more than 2,500 kilometres from western Myanmar to southwest China, will help the world's second-largest economy feed its growing energy needs. It comes as close political ties between the two nations have weakened, after Myanmar's quasi-civilian regime took office in 2011 and brought in sweeping reforms that have led to the scrapping of most Western sanctions....

Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who was allowed to travel to the U.S. after escaping from house arrest, said Monday that New York University is forcing him and his family to leave at the end of this month because of pressure from the Chinese government. The university denied Chen’s allegations. Chen said in a statement that China’s Communist Party had been applying “great, unrelenting pressure” on NYU to ask him to leave, though he did not provide details or evidence to back his claim. Chen said Beijing’s authoritarian government has more influence on the American academic community than is perceived. “The...

PARIS — France and Mexico have angrily demanded prompt explanations from the United States over new spying allegations leaked by former US security contractor Edward Snowden. French daily Le Monde and German weekly Der Spiegel said in separate reports published Monday that the US National Security Agency (NSA) secretly monitored tens of millions of phone communications in France and hacked into former Mexican president Felipe Calderon’s email account. The allegations come on top of revelations already leaked by Snowden and published in June that the US had a vast, secret program called PRISM to monitor Internet users, which French prosecutors...

The European Commission will redouble efforts to promote EU-based cloud services this fall—including the urgent drafting of a new charter—amid mounting evidence that the US PRISM spying scandal may damage the global market share of US-based tech companies involved in the cloud computing sector. In June and July 2013, the Cloud Security Alliance, an industry group, surveyed members and other cloud computing stakeholders about their reactions to the US PRISM spying scandal. One in ten of non-US residents responding indicated that they had canceled a project with a US-based cloud computing provider in the wake of PRISM, and 56% said...

A recent article by David Samuels at the New York Times Magazine, based on an interview with Obama's foreign policy guru Ben Rhodes, purported to explain how, and about what, the Obama administration lied to get public support for the Iran Scam. According to the article, the principal Obama lie involved who was the Iranian president when the negotiations with Iran began. It's much deeper and worse than that. As Paul Harvey would say, “Here’s “the rest of the story.”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uogp40PeddI Iranian President Rouhani was elected on June 15, 2013 and assumed office on August 3d. According to Rhodes, negotiations started...

THE UK GOVERNMENT is facing demands to reveal the details of a secret flight through Scottish airspace which was at the centre of a plot to capture whistleblower Edward Snowden. The plane, which passed above the Outer Hebrides, the Highlands and Aberdeenshire, was dispatched from the American east coast on June 24 2013, the day after Snowden left Hong Kong for Moscow. The craft was used in controversial US ‘rendition’ missions. Reports by Scottish journalist Duncan Campbell claim the flight, travelling well above the standard aviation height at 45,000 feet and without a filed flight plan, was part of a...