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They wanted him dead. For years, a clandestine U.S. intelligence team had tracked a man they knew was high in the leadership of al Qaeda — an operative some believed had a hand in plotting the gruesome 2009 suicide attack in Afghanistan that killed seven CIA officers. Their pursuit was personal, and by early 2014, according to a source directly involved in the operation, the agency had the target under tight drone surveillance. “We literally had a bead on this guy’s head and just needed authorization from Washington to pull the trigger,” said the source. Then something unexpected happened. While...

On today’s Morning Joe, Scarborough said that President Trump “revealed himself as the jackass that leaked top secret Israeli intel,” adding that the intel that President Trump allegedly leaked was “about somebody on the inside of a terror organization that killed 20 little girls and their mothers last night.” Scarborough first observed that in denying that he had mentioned Israel in his meeting with the Russians, Trump was denying something of which he had not been accused. Scarborough said that was like a man who runs into a police station saying “my wife’s missing and it’s not my gun that’s...

The straw that broke the camel’s back for now-ousted FBI Director James Comey was the investigation he apparently wasn’t doing. President Trump’s much-reported frustration with Comey almost certainly arose from the G-man’s failure to get to the bottom of Obama aides’ illegal leaks of classified information — leaks aimed at undermining the incoming Trump administration. And top Republicans in Congress shared that concern. Under grilling last week, the director refused to say whether he had launched a probe into illegal leaks by the Obama team of highly classified intelligence intercepts of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and possibly other private US...

This could be the beginning of the end for embattled Sen. John McCain’s life in politics. According to White House officials, McCain is believed to have somehow gained access to the content of President Donald Trump’s private, classified telephone calls with world leaders. And he isn’t keeping quiet about what was talked about either. An analysis of McCain’s recent public statements by White House officials, coupled with information from intelligence personnel working with the Trump administration, paints a disturbing picture for McCain — or any elected U.S. politician. Officials believe the senator has inside knowledge of a number of President...

Last fall, Donald Trump did not lash out at the FBI when James Comey decided to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails mere weeks before the election. However, he’s terribly angry about a Thursday CNN report about how the FBI refused to bury Russia stories that did not present a good look for his administration (following a request from White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus). Even worse (in Trump’s eyes), the story about this refusal came from his least favorite cable news network, which Trump regularly accuses of being “fake news.” The story itself was a leak, which...

"The abrupt resignation of the national security adviser, Lt.-Gen. Mike Flynn, plunged the Trump administration into turmoil." Rarely can a much anticipated official visit have been so eclipsed by a convulsion taking place behind the scenes. People have poring over every word and gesture of the meeting in Washington between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump The encounter offered an opportunity to discover not just the new American policy toward Israel but also to get the measure of this unsettling president. However, the back story told rather more about Donald Trump than was on display at the love-in...

Saboteurs in the U.S. intelligence community posing as patriots have been working hard to drive President Donald Trump from the White House. Former National Security Agency intelligence analyst and former War College professor John R. Schindler bragged on Twitter last week about the spy-led plot his friends are conducting against the president. “Now we go nuclear,” he tweeted. “IC [intelligence community] war [is] going to new levels. Just got an [email from] senior IC friend, it began: ‘He will die in jail.'” “US intelligence is not the problem here,” Schindler added. “The President’s collusion with Russian intelligence is. Many details,...

This could be the beginning of the end for embattled Sen. John McCain’s life in politics. According to White House sources, McCain is believed to have somehow gained access to the content of President Donald Trump’s private, classified telephone calls with world leaders. And he isn’t keeping quiet about what was talked about either.

Former CIA operative and 2016 third-party presidential candidate Evan McMullin took to Twitter and CNN on Wednesday to defend rogue intelligence agents who break the law to leak classified information, saying President Donald Trump “presents a threat to the country.” In response to President Trump’s tweets earlier Wednesday, in which he alleged that elements of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency were engaged in “Russia”-style political operations, McMullin tweeted:

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S NATIONAL security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was forced to resign on Monday night as a result of getting caught lying about whether he discussed sanctions in a December telephone call with a Russian diplomat. The only reason the public learned about Flynn’s lie is because someone inside the U.S. government violated the criminal law by leaking the contents of Flynn’s intercepted communications. In the spectrum of crimes involving the leaking of classified information, publicly revealing the contents of SIGINT — signals intelligence — is one of the most serious felonies. Journalists (and all other nongovernmental citizens) can be...

The United States is much better off without Michael Flynn serving as national security adviser. But no one should be cheering the way he was brought down. The whole episode is evidence of the precipitous and ongoing collapse of America's democratic institutions — not a sign of their resiliency. Flynn's ouster was a soft coup (or political assassination) engineered by anonymous intelligence community bureaucrats. The results might be salutary, but this isn't the way a liberal democracy is supposed to function. Unelected intelligence analysts work for the president, not the other way around. Far too many Trump critics appear not...

Former U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) was a guest Tuesday on "Mornings with Maria" discussing how the intelligence community is seeming to upend President Donald Trump in the wake of Michael Flynn's resignation as national security adviser. The former Democratic presidential candidate and Fox News contributor said the bigger issue here is that the phone conversations between Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were intercepted and leaked to the media. {..snip..}

US. national security officials are reportedly ready to “go nuclear” after President Donald Trump’s latest attack on the intelligence community. In a series of tweets on Tuesday and Wednesday, Trump insisted that the “real scandal” was not that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn lied about his contact with Russia. Instead, the president blasted what he said were “un-American” leaks that led to Flynn’s ousting.

President Trump said Wednesday that new reports saying his associates had contact with Russian officials during last year’s campaign are “non-sense” and accused the U.S. intelligence community of illegally leaking information to news outlets. “This Russian connection non-sense is merely an attempt to cover-up the many mistakes made in Hillary Clinton’s losing campaign,” Mr. Trumptweeted. “Information is being illegally given to the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?).Just like Russia,” he also tweeted. He said the “real scandal” is that the intelligence community is giving out classified information “like candy.” “The real scandal here is...

President Trump on Wednesday suggested the U.S. intelligence community may be “illegally” leaking sensitive information to hurt his administration, effectively ending a brief detente with agencies he previously accused of working against him. Trump addressed the situation of government leaks Wednesday afternoon during his joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "Intelligence, papers are being leaked," Trump said. "Things are being leaked. It's a criminal action -- criminal act -- and it's been going on for a long time. Before me. But now it's really going on." He later emphasized that the "documents and papers" were "illegally --...