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I get the first part of this story, not so much the second. The bit about Obama alumni targeting Flynn? Highly plausible if not likely. Flynn was a harsh Obama critic ever since O fired him from his position as DIA, and Flynn more than anyone else in the administration seemed prepared to guide Trump towards detente with the same Putin regime that had tried to sink Democrats’ chances during the campaign with the DNC and Podesta hackings. Flynn is also famously an Iran hawk, something which the Obama administration was, er, not. Did Team O have the means...

America is in the beginning stages of a new Cold War with Russia. And China. This time around, though, most of the Cold War will be fought along digital, technological lines, with each nation hacking the other for the purposes of espionage and sabotage. In the situation in which the American people and the incoming president find themselves, trusting the intelligence community has never mattered more. Unfortunately, trust must not only be needed; it must be earned. In that area, the intelligence community comes up short.As The New American has recently reported, the intelligence community’s inclusion of a spurious “dossier”...

In his first tweet of the day, Donald Trump said at 7:23am on Thursday that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had called him to effectively apologize and "denounce" the "false and fictitious" report containing numerous unverified allegations about the president-elect and Russia. "Made up, phony facts.Too bad!" Trump tweeted.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared on Public Television shortly before the presidential election for an extended interview with Charlie Rose. Mister Rose, like many of his peers these days, swings between hard news at dusk and bimbo chat at dawn. Indeed, Charlie is the very model of a Beltway double-dipper, a celebrity groupie who feeds at public and commercial troughs, PBS and CBS. On any given day, Rose might be seen giggling with celebrities in the morning and then lofting softballs to political touts in the evening. The Council on Foreign Relations was the venue for the recent...

National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney explains how the secretive agency runs its pervasive domestic spying apparatus in a new piece by Laura Poitras in The New York Times. Binney—one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history—worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution." In a short video called "The Program," Binney explains how the agency took part of one of the programs he built and started using it to spy on virtually every U.S....

The GOP chairman of a top committee in Congress on Saturday asked the nation's intelligence chief and defense secretary to appear and answer questions about reports that they recommended the ouster of the director of the National Security Agency.

CNN)Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the House Select Committee on Intelligence Thursday he had submitted his letter of resignation on Wednesday night. "(I) submitted my letter of resignation last night, which felt pretty good," he said before the panel of lawmakers, in response to the top Democrat on the panel joking he hoped he would stick around for another four years. "I have 64 days left and I'd have a pretty hard time with my wife going past that," Clapper told California Rep. Adam Schiff, who also paid his respects to Clapper's service as the hearing opened.

"(I) submitted my letter of resignation last night, which felt pretty good," he said.

James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, told reporters Monday that ISIS has terror cells operating in the UK, Germany and Italy. He also indicated ISIS was taking advantage of the migrant crisis in Europe.Clapper made the comments at a reporter’s breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. A reporter from the NY Times asked Clapper, “Do you believe that they operate, they have clandestine cells like they had in Brussels in places like Germany, England and Italy?” Clapper replied, “Yes they do. And that is a concern of, obviously, ours and our European allies.”“I assure you we are...

Video at link. The nation's top intelligence official confirmed Tuesday that the Islamic State has succeeded in making and deploying chemical agents in Iraq and Syria -- calling it the first such attack by an extremist group in more than two decades. The confirmation of mustard gas use came during Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he spoke to the Islamic State's growing sophistication online and in the battlefield. He did not elaborate on where and when the chemical attacks occurred, though there has been mounting evidence the terror group was experimenting...

Don't say he didn't tell you so. Speaking at a U.S. intelligence community conference back in September, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned Americans about the possibility of Syrian terrorists infiltrating the United States and other Western countries disguised as refugees. ...

US National Intelligence Director James Clapper on Thursday warned that America must be ready for a “large, Armageddon-scale” cyber attack, in remarks made at an annual conference of members of the US intelligence community in Washington DC. “Cyber threats to US national and economic security are increasing in frequency, scale, sophistication and the severity of impact,” Clapper warned. “Although we must be prepared for a large, Armageddon-scale strike that would debilitate the entire US infrastructure, it’s not our belief that that’s the most likely scenario.” […] In a sign of the rising concern over the trend of cyber warfare in...

Top U.S. intelligence officials are running out of patience with the State Department's reluctance to turn over emails from Hillary Clinton's private email server, which have already been shown to have included top secret communications, Fox News has learned. The Intelligence Community's Inspector General has requested some 30,000 emails from Clinton in order to conduct its own review. An intelligence source told Fox News the State Department has pushed back on the government intelligence watchdog's request, and that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is considering intervening. The flurry of activity came after Charles McCullough, the inspector general, notified senior...

Recently released emails detail then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's interest in arming Libyan opposition groups using private security contractors before the fall of Muammar Qaddafi in 2011 – though at the time, the opposition was not formally recognized by the U.S. or United Nations, which prohibited arming without following strict guidelines and oversight. The issue remains so sensitive that the emails recently released by the State Department redacted a key line on the matter. But the unredacted version of the same email, released to the congressional Benghazi Select Committee and first posted by The New York Times last Thursday, showed...

Republican Senator Ted Cruz skipped two Senate Armed Services committee hearings earlier this year in favor of speeches and TV appearances, a BuzzFeed News review has found. On February 26, the Texas senator missed an Armed Services committee hearing about worldwide threats, which featured testimony from National Intelligence Director James Clapper. The discussion covered an array of national security issues, including the threat of the Islamic State and the Iranian nuclear talks. Cruz mentioned many of the same issues when he spoke at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that afternoon.

The National Security Agency's massive data collection program has prompted lawsuits, internal reviews and a fierce congressional debate over whether to scrap it. But Director of National Intelligence James Clapper apparently forgot the program even existed during a key hearing two years ago. ....

BEIRUT: The U.S. has omitted Iran and Hezbollah from its list of terror threats, according to an annual security assessment published by the Times of Israel Monday. The unclassified report, titled ‘Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community’ was presented to the U.S. Senate by James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence on February 26. The report has excluded Iran and Hezbollah from its list of terror threats to U.S. interests, after both had been included as threats in previous years. In a 2014 report the National Intelligence director said that Iran and Hezbollah continue to directly threaten the...

The director of national intelligence for the United States says China is expanding and accelerating its buildup of outposts in the South China Sea. James Clapper tells the Senate Armed Services Committee that those outposts now include stationing for ships and potential airfields. …

For those left unsatisfied with the media’s uncritical and shallow coverage of the recently released Benghazi report from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, I wanted to pass along this just-published article, 10 major takeaways from the House Benghazi report that the media is completely ignoring, based on a careful read of the actual text of the report and appended documents. The media’s unwillingness to actually study the report given the political value of the “headline” takeaways, not to mention its uncharacteristic lack of skepticism at an investigation conducted by a committee led by Republicans almost completely absolving the...

White House: No diplomatic outreach in Clapper’s visit to North Korea By Kyle Balluck - 11/09/14 06:30 AM EST Director of National Intelligence James Clapper went to North Korea with the “sole purpose” of obtaining the release of Americans Kenneth Bae and Matthew Todd Miller, according to a senior administration official. The official spoke to reporters traveling with President Obama early Sunday morning before Air Force One took off for the president’s Asia trip. “It was not to pursue any diplomatic opening,” the official said, according to a pool reporter, adding that Clapper was selected for the secret mission because...