Leaked email also says ‘tasker’ in Obama White House assigned to ‘go after’ reporters
Investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson spotlighted Friday a 2010 email exposed by WikiLeaks that “says a lot” in light of the recent actions of former CIA director John Brennan.
The internal email from the address of the chief security officer of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, Fred Burton, said Brennan, then an Obama Homeland Security adviser, “is behind the witch hunts of investigative journalists learning information from inside the beltway sources.”
The email continued: “Note — There is specific tasker from the WH to go after anyone printing materials negative to the Obama agenda (oh my.) Even the FBI is shocked. The Wonder Boys must be in meltdown mode…”
Attkisson tweeted Friday: “Looking back, this leaked internal email from government intel firm says a lot, doesn’t it?”
Looking back, this leaked internal email from government intel firm says a lot, doesn’t it? pic.twitter.com/Q2MYNlJQRz
— Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) July 27, 2018
She commented on the Stratfor email in a September 2017 opinion piece for The Hill, noting that after the email, the Obama administration was caught monitoring journalists at Fox News and the Associated Press.
Attiksson also charged in a federal lawsuit that her computers her hacked while she worked as an investigative correspondent at CBS News.
CBS confirmed the breach Aug. 7, 2013, announcing Attkisson’s computer was hacked by “an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions.”
Trump targets Brennan’s security clearance
Brennan was in the news two weeks ago for accusing President Trump of “treason.” This week, the White House said the national security clearances for Brennan, fired FBI director James Comey and former DNI James Clapper were under review.
The announcement came only hours after Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he would meet with the president and ask him to remove Brennan’s clearance, based on Brennan accusing the president of treason.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that not only “is the president looking to take away Brennan’s security clearance,” he’s also looking at the clearances of Comey, Clapper, former DNI director Michael Hayden, former national security adviser Susan Rice and former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe.
McCabe was investigating the Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump campaigns while his wife, a candidate for office, was accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from friends of Hillary Clinton.
“They politicized and sometimes monetized their public service,” Sanders said.
And she said they’ve had very vocal differences with the president.
When people with security clearances do that, she said, it wrongly gives authority to their claims.
CNN reported Clapper called the move “very very petty.”
He also blamed the president, who repeatedly has been targeted and criticized politically by former officials with such clearances, for doing it for political reasons.
“Legally the president has that prerogative, and he can suspend and revoke clearances as he sees fit. If he chooses to do it for political reasons, I think that’s a terrible precedent, and it’s a really sad commentary and it’s an abuse of the system,” Clapper said.
Politico reported earlier that Paul said he would ask the president to cancel Brennan’s security clearance.
“Is John Brennan monetizing his security clearance? Is John Brennan making millions of dollars divulging secrets to the mainstream media with his attacks on @realDonaldTrump,” Paul tweeted.
Brennan now gets paid as an analyst for NBC and MSNBC.
The senator just days earlier raised questions about Brennan’s security clearance
At the time, Paul said, “If he has top-secret clearance as unhinged as he is now, he’s calling the president treasonous, saying he is for the death penalty of the president, this is alarming.”
Last week, former U.S. attorney Joe diGenova told the Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity Brennan is responsible for the sharing of false information about Trump and Russia with American intelligence agencies.
Hannity said he thinks Brennan knew all about the Democrat-funded “dossier” of unproven claims about Trump that was used to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign and helped prompt the special counsel investigation.
“I look at a guy like Brennan, it happened on his watch, I think he probably knew all about the dossier. His involvement in this is going to be very interesting,” Hannity said. “Do we really want to live in a country where the Senate leader on the Democratic side says you better not ever say anything bad about the Intel community?”
DiGenova responded: “Sean, I want to talk about two people. We only have so much time — John Brennan and Leon Panetta. John Brennan is a traitor and I will tell you why. He is the real traitor. What he did and what he has had recently about the president of the United States is despicable.”
The former U.S. attorney said Brennan “is personally responsible for the leaking of unmasked information, he was responsible for the sharing of false information to U.S. intelligence sources to get FISA warrants.”
“He is personally responsible for the sharing of false information with American intelligence agencies, and he – I challenge him to a debate at the National Press Club for one hour, two hours, three hours about his role in the entire pre-election.”
DiGenova isn’t the only one to react to Brennan’s treason charge.
Someone went into the Wikipedia site for Brennan and labeled him, shortly after his criticism of Trump, a “silly old fart.”
It was after Brennan tweeted: “Donald Trump’s press conference in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’ It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”
In a news conference a week ago after his meeting with Trump, Putin denied Russia interfered in the election, and Trump deflected a question from a reporter asking whether he believed Putin or the assessment of U.S. intelligence that Russia meddled in the 2016 campaign.
Trump emphasized there was “no collusion,” saying he didn’t even know Putin at the time of the 2016 election.
Asked which side is responsible for the poor relations, Trump said, “I hold both countries responsible.”
Brennan: Trump Cabinet should resign
Brennan also went on MSNBC to charge treason, urging Trump’s Cabinet to resign.
“I was just totally shocked at the performance of Donald Trump in Helsinki at a press conference with Vladimir Putin,” he told Brian Williams. “I just found that it was outrageous. And even when the press — and thank goodness the press asked the right questions — even when the press gave him an opportunity to hold Russia accountable for anything, he chose to talk about Hillary Clinton, about his election, about servers.
“He criticized American citizens, Secretary Clinton and others as opposed to really taking advantage of a world stage, with all the world’s eyes upon them, to point out how unacceptable Russia’s behavior and interference in our election and the elections of other democratic countries around the globe is. But he just shirked those responsibilities.”
Brennan said he could not understand “how the national security team can continue to abide by this” and how Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton and Chief of Staff John Kelly “can continue in their jobs.”
“This, I think, rises to the point of good American patriots resigning in objection to that performance by Donald Trump,” he said.
Scott Johnson at the Powerline blog charged Brennan with having “animus nakedly on display.”
“He is demented by hatred,” Johnson wrote. “Is this really the public role a former director of the CIA is to be playing?”
Not the first rant
Russia expert Paul Kengor earlier wrote in a commentary that Brennan, responding to FBI probes of corruption and other problems, also had “uncorked an epic Twitter rant against Trump.”
Brennan wrote at the time: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America. … America will triumph over you.”
Kengor highlighted Brennan’s shockingly radical background, noting the Obama CIA director voted for Communist Party candidate Gus Hall for president of the United States.
He wrote:
For those too young to remember, Gus Hall was the longtime hack and head of Communist Party USA, beginning in 1959 until his death in 2000. Not even Joe Stalin as a party general secretary came close to matching Gus Hall’s interminable tenure. Hall was unwaveringly dedicated to a global communist revolution and a truly Evil Empire that was ultimately and blessedly consigned to “the dustbin of history.”
Kengor noted claims that Brennan converted to Islam, but whether or not that’s true, Brennan has “made very positive statements about Islam and the ‘privilege’ of making pilgrimage to Mecca and paying homage to ‘the majesty of the Hajj.’”
“In fact, if one studies Brennan’s admission that he voted for Gus Hall, it looks like he also suggested that he might have been a member of the Communist Party in 1980. Yes, a formal member,” Kengor wrote.
He said one might “lend more credibility to Brennan’s crowing about Donald Trump if he had better judgment about presidents of the United States.”
Brennan once came under investigation for perjury because he had, under oath before the House Intelligence Committee, testified that the infamous anti-Trump “dossier” funded by the Democratic Party played no role in the intelligence community’s publicly released conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
Brennan further declared he did not know who commissioned the opposition-research document, even though senior national security and counter-intelligence officials at the Justice Department and FBI knew the previous year it was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., subsequently suggested that charges against Brennan might be appropriate.
Nunes released a memo Feb. 2 summarizing former deputy director Andrew McCabe’s testimony that the unverified dossier was essential to obtaining warrants in October 2016 to spy on a Trump campaign official. Nunes further found that in four separate applications for a warrant, FBI and Justice officials hid the fact that it was funded by the Democratic Party.
Reporter Paul Sperry at the time quoted an aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, stating: “John Brennan did more than anyone to promulgate the dirty dossier. He politicized and effectively weaponized what was false intelligence against Trump.”
Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino said Brennan’s testimony that he didn’t know who commissioned the dossier isn’t plausible because “the CIA has a central role in the verification of foreign assets and information we get from foreign assets.”
And after Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., accused the CIA of spying on members of the Senate by hacking into computers used by her intelligence committee’s staffers, Brennan said, “Let me assure you the CIA was in no way spying on [the committee] or the Senate.”
However, a CIA inspector general’s report found the CIA was spying on the Senate, and Brennan was forced to privately apologize to intelligence committee chairmen.
Brennan also claimed in a 2011 speech that there had not been “a single collateral death” from U.S. drone strikes because of their “exceptional proficiency [and] precision.’” However, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that one U.S. drone strike alone had killed 42 Pakistanis, “most of them civilians.”
In April 2017, citing an article in the Guardian of London, the American Spectator’s George Neumayr found confirmation that Brennan was “the American progenitor of political espionage aimed at defeating Donald Trump”
“One side did collude with foreign powers to tip the election – Hillary’s,” he wrote. “Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump’s candidacy.
“He used their phone intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people.”
WND Founder and CEO Joseph Farah wrote in a recent column about Brennan and included a three-minute video of a speech he gave in 2010 about the beauty of Islam.
Brennan describes in one part how he traveled through Indonesia, and felt the “tremendous warmth of Islamic cultures and societies.”
“I came to see Islam not how it is often misrepresented but for what it is; how it is practiced every day by well over a billion Muslims worldwide. A faith of peace and tolerance and great diversity.”