Free Republic

* Former CIA official accuses govt of ignoring warnings of post-invasion violence in Iraq WASHINGTON: A former CIA official who coordinated US intelligence on the Middle East has accused the Bush administration of “cherry-picking” intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, The Washington Post reported Friday. The newspaper said Paul Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, also accused the administration of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein....

The recent appointment and ultimate withdrawal of Chas Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council has exposed much that is wrong with President Barack Obama’s first months in office, both in terms of policy and vetting, as well as the media coverage surrounding both. Many of Obama’s supporters said it was unfair to criticize Obama’s associations with people like the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers and the anti-Semitic preacher of hate, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and called it guilt by association. It is now becoming clearer why those sorts of associations matter.On February 26, Chas W. Freeman Jr. was named by...

This interview by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner is buckets of interesting and simultaneously very revealing. Playing along with the big club intelligence game as framed by Margaret Brennan, HPSCI Chairman Turner showcases his weasel nature and alignment with the worst actors in the Intelligence Community from the outset. Watch it closely and you will notice that Turner frames national intelligence activity as a political product. ..... Snip..... Representative Mike Turner really is one of the worst members of congress. I would rank Turner’s corrupt and Machiavellian status right next to SSCI Chairman Mark Warner. Turner will defend the...

Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe claimed many members of the intelligence community are fearful of a potential second Donald Trump term, saying Wednesday that some are even considering fleeing the country. McCabe, a CNN analyst, told "The Source" anchor Kaitlan Collins that there was an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty within the intelligence community over the prospect of Trump returning to the White House. According to the former FBI leader, officials believe Trump will seek retribution against his political enemies during his second term. "It’s terrifying. It’s frightening," McCabe declared of how some officials view Trump’s possible return to...

Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff (CA) on Sunday echoed John Brennan and said the Intel Community will sabotage Trump by withholding intelligence and ‘dumbing down’ his daily briefings this summer. President Trump will get intel briefings after he secures the GOP nomination this summer. Schiff said Trump can’t be trusted with classified information that reveals sources and methods. “We can’t trust that he will do the right thing,” Schiff said to NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker. WATCH: WATCH: Fmr. Intel Chair @RepAdamSchiff (D-Calif.) says he hopes the intelligence community will “dumb down” Trump’s briefings once he claims the nomination....

The real reason for Ric Grenell’s appointment as Acting DNI becomes clear. – As Democrats and their corrupt media toadies were scrambling to find some way, any way, to kill off the surging Bernie Sanders campaign, Acting DNI Ric Grenell was moving quickly behind the scenes to finally, at long last identify and rid the Trump Administration of all the Deep State snakes in the Intelligence Community. Trendy Footwear for Men & Women Huge sale on performance footwear at Ariat.com Deep State hack Adam Goldman and two other fake reporters at the New York Times published a panicked piece about...

Russia-Gate and CIA ties to Ukrainian death squads, along with killer drone program and worldwide surveillance apparatus, necessitates new investigations of U.S. intelligence agencies modeled after the Church Committee hearings of 1975.

President Biden on Friday made two new appointments to the President's Intelligence Advisory Board and one of them is among the 51 former intelligence officials who signed on to a letter suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop was a product of Russian disinformation. Jeremy Bash, the former chief of staff at the Pentagon and the CIA under President Obama, will now sit on a 16-seat board that serves to give the president advice on matters related to national intelligence. Bash became an outspoken national security pundit for MSNBC during the Trump years. The other appointment was Blair Effron, cofounder of Centerview...

The media loved every minute of the three years of Russiagate Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, once said "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." That’s exactly what Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff did during her run for the presidency in 2016. They broke into then-candidate Donald Trump’s network server hoping to discover a nefarious Trump-Russia connection. They didn’t find anything because there was never anything to find. But never mind, they would simply make something up. Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, once said "If you tell a lie big...

On September 26, 2021, Yahoo News published an extensive article about the CIA targeting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2017 and the extreme conversations that were taking place at the highest levels of the U.S. government about how to control him. There is a much bigger story transparently obvious when overlapped with CTH research files on the Intelligence Branch of government; specifically the motive missed by Yahoo News for the stunning activity they outline. What I am going to outline below, is a deep dive using the resources and timeline from within that article and the specific details we have...

Did several searches and could not find this. Not going to post the whole report because of formatting, but the link is direct to the report with no extraneous BS (other than the report). Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations. We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were...

DNI hints new declassification coming soon. Some want it to be a congressional complaint to the CIA inspector general questioning the Obama intelligence assessment on Russian intentions. By his own admission, ex-CIA Director John Brennan chafed at being questioned earlier this month by federal prosecutor John Durham about the Obama administration's intelligence assessment that Russia’s meddling in 2016 election was designed to help Donald Trump. Brennan "questioned why the analytic tradecraft and the findings of the ICA are being scrutinized by the Department of Justice, especially since they have been validated by the Mueller Report and the bipartisan Senate Select...

A spokesperson for former CIA Director John Brennan said Friday that federal prosecutor John Durham told the former intelligence chief in their interview that he is not the subject or target of a criminal probe. “Earlier today former CIA Director John Brennan was interviewed by U.S. Attorney John Durham on issues related to Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” spokesperson and former CIA Deputy Chief of Staff Nick Shapiro said in a statement. “Brennan was informed by Mr. Durham that he is not a subject or a target of a criminal investigation and that he is only a...

As facts about the Obama administration's spying and leaking are spilling out, media have a brief window of opportunity to salvage some credibility. As new details emerge about the Obama administration’s broad spying-and-leaking campaign against the incoming Trump administration, reporters have a choice to make about whether to cover this story honestly, at long last. There is a brief window of time afforded the media to get the story right. They should take advantage of it.Journalist Lee Smith already noted the seriousness of the problem facing legacy media after the implosion of the Russia collusion conspiracy theory they peddled. “Americans...

The majority of the United States' 17 intelligence agencies are in agreement. They believe that the coronavirus started in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Even though the intelligence community believes this virus started in a lab, they believe its leak was unintentional and the result of an accident, a senior intelligence official told the Daily Caller. Although all the agencies are not on board, a leaked intelligence report from the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance – made up of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand – shows that 70 to 75 percent of the U.S.' agencies believe...

Sara Carter held a pod-cast interview with HPSCI ranking member Devin Nunes.  At approximately 36:25 of the interview congressman Nunes discusses the testimony of Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson. The transcript from Atkinson’s House testimony has never been released.  Rep. Nunes states the reason HPSCI Chairman Schiff has kept the transcript hidden and classified is because the content is extremely damaging to the origin of the impeachment fraud.  Additionally, the testimony from Atkinson conflicted with evidence which surfaced later: “[Atkinson] is under active investigation. I’m not gonna go any farther than that because you know obviously he has a...

One of the animating chapters in the Trump-Russian collusion saga was the claim that Russia infiltrated the Democratic National Committee’s email server in the spring of 2016. That hack, according to collusion truthers, and the subsequent release of damaging emails exchanged between top Democratic Party officials was central to Vladimir Putin’s scheme to sway the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. But the evidence to support this widely accepted claim is sketchy at best and appears to be under appropriate scrutiny by prosecutors now examining the origins of the FBI’s pre-election investigation into the Trump campaign for “colluding” with...

Full title: Judicial Watch Sues Justice Department for Emails, Texts of Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson Seeks All Atkinson Communications Regarding Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Anthony Weiner, Twenty-Fifth Amendment and/or Presidential Impeachment, Including Emails and Text Messages with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and His Staff (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for communications records of Michael K. Atkinson – former Assistant Attorney General in DOJ’s National Security Division (NSD) from 2016 to 2018 and currently Inspector General of the Intelligence...

With Republicans poised to lose control of investigatory panels in the House of Representatives, President Trump is resurrecting a potentially powerful board capable of intimately reviewing intelligence agency conduct on his direct orders. The White House announced five appointments to the Presidential Intelligence Advisory Board on Tuesday evening, after selecting a chairman and vice chairwoman earlier this year. The dormant board created by former President Dwight Eisenhower has no formal powers, but derives significant authority directly from the president, operating as his surrogate to smooth over agency rivalries, investigate misconduct, and evaluate intelligence collection policies. xperts say Trump could roil...

Victor Davis Hanson, as he so often does, gives us an excellent and concise bird’s-eye view of where we stand with the intelligence community: [T]hose who are warning of Russian collusion efforts to warp an election now work for agencies that in the recent past were doing precisely what they now rightly accuse the Russians of doing. The damage that Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and others have done to the reputations of the agencies they ran will live on well after their tenures are over. For once, I think he underestimates the duration and intensity of the rottenness. It isn’t just...