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President Obama has commuted the 35-year sentence of former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning for leaking classified information in 2010 to WikiLeaks.

Richard Armitage, who held top national security positions in the administrations of former Presidents George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, said he would vote for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over her likely Republican rival, Donald Trump. "If Donald Trump is the nominee, I would vote for Hillary Clinton," Armitage, who served as a deputy secretary of State under Bush and as an assistant secretary of Defense under Reagan, told Politico on Thursday. "He doesn't appear to be a Republican. He doesn't appear to want to learn about the issues. So I'm going to vote for Mrs. Clinton." Clinton...

President-elect Donald Trump, after growing suspicious that intelligence officials were leaking news about their classified briefings with him, says he conducted a sting operation to try to prove top spies were behind the leaks. Trump revealed the extraordinary scheme to try to entrap the senior spies in a furious press conference where he suggested the intelligence community had been behind salacious and totally unproven allegations against him. ‘I think it’s pretty sad when intelligence reports get leaked out to the press. First of all, it’s illegal. These are classified and certified meetings and reports,’ Trump said during a press conference...

President Barack Obama is seriously considering a pardon for former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, according to a new report from NBC News. Manning was convicted of violations of the Espionage Act and other charges in July 2013 after he stole nearly a million secret documents while working as an intelligence analyst, later giving them to WikiLeaks. The files detailed operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and revealed secret diplomatic cables, some of which were highly embarrassing to the US. A Justice Department source told NBC News that Manning was on the president's "short list" for commutations. The 29-year-old is currently...

In his Loyal Opposition blog, New York Times ed page editor Andrew Rosenthal goes after the Justice Department’s decision to prosecute former CIA officer, former Democratic Senate staffer and Huffington Post blogger John Kiriakou for leaking classified information — including the names of CIA operatives — to journalists. Rosenthal writes, That may seem simple: CIA officer, classified information disclosed, prison. But take a closer look. He’s been charged with revealing that two men accused of organizing the Sept. 11 attacks, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, were tortured. So the man who blew the whistle on torture may go to...

VATICAN CITY, July 1 (Reuters) - Former Pope Benedict says in his memoirs that no-one pressured him to resign but alleges that a "gay lobby" in the Vatican had tried to influence decisions, a leading Italian newspaper reported on Friday. The book, called "The Last Conversations," is the first time in history that a former pope judges his own pontificate after it is over. It is due to be published on Sept. 9. Citing health reasons, Benedict in 2103 became the first pope in six centuries to resign. He promised to remain "hidden to the world" and has been living...

On March 12, 2004, acting attorney general James B. Comey and the Justice Department’s top leadership reached the brink of resignation over electronic surveillance orders that they believed to be illegal. President George W. Bush backed down, halting secret foreign-intelligence-gathering operations that had crossed into domestic terrain. That morning marked the beginning of the end of STELLARWIND, the cover name for a set of four surveillance programs that brought Americans and American territory within the domain of the National Security Agency for the first time in decades. It was also a prelude to new legal structures that allowed Bush and...

An award-winning Iranian nuclear scientist, who disappeared last year under mysterious circumstances, has defected to the CIA and been resettled in the United States, according to people briefed on the operation by intelligence officials. Shahram Amiri, a nuclear physicist in his early 30s, went missing last June three days after arriving in Saudi Arabia on a pilgrimage, according to the Iranian government. The officials were said to have termed the defection of the scientist, Shahram Amiri, "an intelligence coup" in the continuing CIA operation to spy on and undermine Iran's nuclear program. A spokesperson for the CIA declined to comment....

podesta tweet about leakers

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...

Video Link -- Catherine Herridge on Fox reporting that Clinton leaked classified intel to Canadian bankers in one of her speeches.

Who is Paul Pillar? By Michelle Malkin   ·   September 27, 2006 11:14 AM Drip, drip, drip? In its original report leaking details of the National Intelligence Estimate on the Iraq war, the New York Times relied on anonymous, unnamed leakers to spin its contents and embarrass the White House. Today, the Times includes comments from some named sources. Pay attention to this one: What was most remarkable about the intelligence estimate, several experts said, was the unremarkable nature of its conclusions. “At one level it is unsurprising stuff,’’ said Paul Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A small group composed mostly of retired CIA officers is appealing to colleagues still inside to go public with any evidence the Bush administration is slanting intelligence to support its case for war with Iraq. Members of the group contend the Bush administration has released information on Iraq that meets only its ends -- while ignoring or withholding contrary reporting. They also say the administration's public evidence about the immediacy of Iraq's threat to the United States and its alleged ties to al-Qaida is unconvincing, and accuse policy-makers of pushing out some information that does not meet...

The FBI "really has no choice" but to recommend an indictment against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to former House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif., shown). His statement echoes Tom DeLay's claim last week that the FBI is "ready to indict." While much of the focus has been on the fact that Clinton passed classified information over an unsecured server, Issa pointed out that, as bad as that is, there is more to it: These are documents that are not only highly classified, but she took them from government. Let's not forget when she left government, she...

Big Brother is alive and well and will remove from the playing field anyone who fails to follow accepted political policy. Obama doesn’t need to worry about negative stories if his followers can stop criticism by low level analysts and flush it down the memory hole. The Daily Beast recently reported that U.S. Central Command forced two senior intelligence analysts out of their jobs because they told the truth about U.S. backed rebel groups in Syria. The analysts had expressed doubts about the rebel’s capability and commitment to U.S. objectives in the region. Their reports placed them at odds with...

EXCLUSIVE: One of the classified email chains discovered on Hillary Clinton's personal unsecured server discussed an Afghan national's ties to the CIA and a report that he was on the agency's payroll, a U.S. government official with knowledge of the document told Fox News. The discussion of a foreign national working with the U.S. government raises security implications – an executive order signed by President Obama said such unauthorized disclosures are 'presumed to cause damage to the national security." The U.S. government official said the Clinton email exchange, which referred to a New York Times report, was among 29 classified...

Late last week, after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton informed the White House of the likely fall-out from the WikiLeaks cable dump, the White House came back with a question: "What's our corrective action?" Clinton's undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy, had a simple suggestion: pull the plug on SIPRNet, the classified DoD network that PFC Bradley Manning reportedly used to download the cables from State's inhouse classified database. "The White House said do it," says a senior administration official. The publication by WikiLeaks of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables, many of them classified, is forcing an administration-wide intelligence retrenchment as...

President Obama’s nominee to head U.S. Central Command recently penned a memo to Defense Secretary Ash Carter demanding that the Pentagon stop discussing the operations of elite American troops. Foreign Policy, which obtained an excerpt of the memo, reported that Gen. Joseph Votel, currently the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command, wrote the December 8 memo to express concern about the Obama administration’s exposure of special operations forces’ activities. “I am concerned with increased public exposure of SOF activities and operations, and I assess that it is time to get our forces back into the shadows,” Votel wrote to Carter....

HAVANA(Reuters)-Philip Agee, a former CIA spy who exposed its undercover operations in Latin America in a 1975 book, died in Havana, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma said on Wednesday.Agee, 72, died on Monday night, the newspaper said, calling him a "loyal friend of Cuba and staunch defender of the people's struggle for a better world.".His widow, German ballet dancer Giselle Roberge, told friends he had been in hospital since December 15 and did not survive surgery for perforated ulcers.Agee worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for 12 years in Washington, Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico. He resigned in 1968 in...

February 1, 2013 State Dept. Publicized Names, Photos of Stevens' Benghazi Security Detail Before 9/11/12; Suppressed Their Identities Afterward Terence P. Jeffrey State Department Special Agent Mario Montoya instructs Libyan local guards in marksmanship in Benghazi in 2011 in a photo published in the December 2011 issue of the State Department's State Magazine. (State Dept. photo) (CNSNews.com) - The State Department took two dramatically different approaches to dealing with the identities of the Diplomatic Security (DS) agents it sent to Benghazi, Libya, to protect Amb. Chris Stevens and the small number of other temporary U.S. diplomatic personnel the department rotated...