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Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats said Friday that his agency has not found any evidence of any direct interference in the midterm elections. Coats said he has submitted a required report to President Donald Trump that says the intelligence community has not uncovered any compromise of election infrastructure that would have disrupted balloting or changed results. Coats said the intelligence community did find a continuation of previously disclosed “influence activities” and “messaging campaigns” by countries such as Russia, China and Iran ahead of the election. He said in a statement issued Friday that the intelligence community did not assess...

A former National Security Agency contractor was indicted on Wednesday by a federal grand jury on charges he willfully retained national defense information, in what U.S. officials have said may have been the largest heist of classified government information in history. The indictment alleges that Harold Thomas Martin, 52, spent up to 20 years stealing highly sensitive government material from the U.S. intelligence community related to national defense, collecting a trove of secrets he hoarded at his home in Glen Burnie, Maryland. The government has not said what, if anything, Martin did with the stolen data. Martin faces 20 criminal...

A US president does not have to be on friendly terms with his spy agencies. On the contrary: US history demonstrates — not only since the services provided false evidence of alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which were cited as a main reason for waging war against that country — that a healthy dose of skepticism, better still, a well-founded mistrust of the intelligence services, is necessary. This applies to US intelligence agencies in their entirety, but also in particular to the current Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, who has built up a reputation of occasionally bending...

Donald Trump is working on a plan that would restructure the CIA — cutting staff at the agency’s headquarters in Langley and moving more agents to field posts across the globe, a report says. “The view from the Trump team is the intelligence world [is] becoming completely politicized,” a source close to the President-elect told the Wall Street Journal. The insider is one of the few people familiar with Trump’s planning and said his advisers were also working to scale back the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as well. “They all need to be slimmed down,” the source...

President-elect Donald Trump, a harsh critic of U.S. intelligence agencies, is working with top advisers on a plan that would restructure and pare back the nation’s top spy agency, people familiar with the planning said, prompted by a belief that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has become bloated and politicized. The planning comes as Mr. Trump has leveled a series of social media attacks in recent months and the past few days against U.S. intelligence agencies, dismissing and mocking their assessment that the Russian government hacked emails of Democratic groups and individuals and then leaked them last...

US president-elect Donald Trump's recently-appointed national security adviser was investigated for inappropriately sharing highly-classified intelligence with Australian forces. Retired US three-star lieutenant general Michael Flynn, a maverick who spent more than 33 years in US Army intelligence, worked alongside Australian forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. An outspoken believer in assisting allies on the battleground despite red tape preventing the flow of information, Lt Gen Flynn said the sharing of intelligence with Australian and British forces that left him in hot water was done "with the right permissions". "I'm proud of that one," Lt Gen Flynn told The Washington Post. "Accuse...

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.

"There is no stipulation anywhere that requires a security clearance for a presidential candidate. The fact that they're a candidate qualifies them," says James R. Clapper Jr., the director of National Intelligence. Donald Trump will begin to get intelligence briefings now that he is the official GOP candidate for president. Both Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton will get briefings as soon as next week, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of National Intelligence, said Thursday during the Aspen Security Forum. Although Trump is a notorious tweeter and Clinton has been on the hot seat for her email server, Clapper...

The Obama administration has asked Britain, Germany, Australia, and other allies to consider criminal charges against Julian Assange for his Afghan war leaks. Philip Shenon reports. The Obama administration is pressing Britain, Germany, Australia, and other allied Western governments to consider opening criminal investigations of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and to severely limit his nomadic travels across international borders, American officials say. Officials tell The Daily Beast that the U.S. effort reflects a growing belief that WikiLeaks and organizations like it threaten grave damage to American national security, as well as a growing suspicion in Washington that Assange has damaged...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/foreign_policy/ THE AGENDA • FOREIGN POLICY THE AGENDA FOREIGN POLICY President Obama and Vice President Biden will renew America’s security and standing in the world through a new era of American leadership. The Obama-Biden foreign policy will end the war in Iraq responsibly, finish the fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, secure nuclear weapons and loose nuclear materials from terrorists, and renew American diplomacy to support strong alliances and to seek a lasting peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Afghanistan and Pakistan Afghanistan: Obama and Biden will refocus American resources on...

Classified National Intelligence Estimate found that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks...

OLD JOESen. Joe Lieberman has already turned down two jobs offered by President Bush, so why not go for a trifecta? Lieberman again tops a list of folks being considered for head of the new national intelligence directorate, a job that Lieberman might actually have to seriously consider. He smartly turned down the Homeland Security chief job, and the U.N. ambassadorship just wasn't big enough for him, even if he would have been given an opportunity to work on the Middle East peace process a bit. But Lieberman did take on a large role in shaping the national intelligence legislation,...

<p>House Republicans on Friday unveiled a "comprehensive" measure to overhaul the U.S. intelligence community -- but the bill is a bit too comprehensive for some Democrats and moderate Republicans.</p> <p>The bill would create a national intelligence director with budget and personnel authority and a national counter-terrorism center, as recommended by the Sept. 11 commission. But it would go beyond that, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said at a brief news conference today, including provisions he said would aid the government in the "prevention and prosecution" of terrorism.</p>