"'Everyone is talking"', really nice to see!
https:// twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/986218871991492608
https:// www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/apr/16/obamas-justice-dept-feuded-fbi-agents-quit-politic/
Acrimony between the FBI and the Justice Department was so bad in the waning days of the Obama administration that some agents quit the bureau in frustration, a former G-man says.
Fractures which began during the tenure of former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. deepened in the later years, and particularly in the run-up to the 2016 president election.
The depths of the antagonism were exposed in an inspector general’s report last week looking into former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired from the FBI earlier this year for misleading multiple investigations. While saying Mr. McCabe lacked candor in questioning, some of it under oath, the report went much deeper, describing the rift between the bureau and its political masters at the department.
Investigators details one instance in August when Mr. McCabe got a call from a senior Justice Department official who complained about the FBI’s “overt” actions probing the Clinton Foundation in the middle of the campaign.
Mr. McCabe said he got the sense the Obama-era Justice Department was telling him “to shut down” the probe. Later he called the exchange as “very dramatic” and said he’d never had a confrontation like that with the Justice Department.
The report describes the relationship between the two agencies as “being under great stress,” and said Mr. McCabe was caught in “an increasingly acrimonious fight for control between the Justice Department and FBI pursuing the Clinton foundation case.”
Former agents said the acrimony started before the election.
One said the relationship fractured under Mr. Holder as agents in field offices across the country did not trust Justice Department lawyers, whom they saw as Washington bureaucrats trying use investigations for political advantage.
The Justice Department, meanwhile, had become frustrated at the rank-and-file agents not always following orders and, at times, strongly disagreeing with superiors.
“I know from talking to some agents in the FBI at that time that there conflicts between the Holder DOJ and its priorities and how the FBI wanted to work cases,” said Danny Defenbaugh, a 33-year FBI agent who retired in 2002.
“The FBI had always taken pride in following the evidence to where it would lead and never allowing politics into their investigation decisions,” Mr. Defenbaugh continued. “But then the DOJ at times would say, ‘we don’t want you to do this.’”
One source of disagreement was Mr. Holder’s pressure on the FBI to investigate local police agencies for civil rights violations.
The department opened more than 20 civil rights investigations into local police departments between 2009 and 2014, more than doubling the number of reviews from the previous five years.
Some in law enforcement, including the FBI, were demoralized by the probes, believing they were risking their lives without any support from Main Justice in Washington, said a former Justice Department lawyer.
“Eric Holder waged an anti-police campaign that he believed in,” said J. Christian Adams, who served as an attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division from 2005 through 2010. “He was so successful in merging his ideology with the Justice Department some people there didn’t even realize he was doing it.”
The battle intensified in 2014 as the Justice Department and the FBI field office that would later investigate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to war over the death of Eric Garner in New York City. Mr. Garner died in July of that year after a New York City Police Officer confronted him for selling untaxed cigarettes. The officer was seen on video using a chokehold, prohibited by the New York Police Department, to subdue him.
FBI agents took over the case and opposed charging the officer, a recommendation supported by New York federal prosecutors. Attorneys at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division claimed there was clear evidence to the charge the officer.
Then-Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch removed the FBI agents investigating the case, replacing them with agents from outside New York. The move was described as “highly unusual.” Ultimately, a federal grand jury decided not to indict the officer, Daniel Pantaleo.
Stress from the Garner skirmish was still fresh at the FBI and Justice Department when the Clinton investigations began. It had FBI officials worried about how much Washington would interfere with their work.
“Holder and Lynch totally politicized the Justice Department,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department attorney who now works with The Heritage Foundation. “There was no compunction about interfering with a criminal investigation.”
But others say tensions are a result of cultural differences endemic to both organizations, with one side tending toward the hard-charging crime-stoppers and the other the more cautions legal wranglers.
One complication is that FBI agents typically deal with local U.S. Attorneys Offices, which are more aggressive and make decisions fairly quickly, said Ron Sievert, a former Justice Department attorney and current University of Texas professor.
Mr. Sievert estimates that those local prosecutors end up handling about 90 percent of FBI investigations, while officials at department headquarters in Washington chiefly get involved in political corruption, national security or interstate drug trafficking cases.
“For years, Main Justice had a reputation for being overly cautious,” Mr. Sievert said. “What you can do with one supervisor’s signature in the field you have to do with three or five in Washington because everyone is thinking about the political and legal ramifications of each case.”
Mr. Sievert recalled his own difficulty getting a program approved during his time at the Justice Department. It took about fourth months to secure support from each supervisor in the chain of command.
When his project was finally green-lit by the attorney general himself, Mr. Sievert was told that he now had to seek approval from the Treasury and Commerce departments along with the intelligence agencies — a process that would take about four more months for each department.
“At the U.S. Attorney’s Office, if you have a great idea that makes sense and legal, they will tell you to just go for it,” he said.
Mr. Adams said it could take years to repair the division, and it could require a housecleaning of leadership at both the FBI and Justice Department.
“The problem is so vast and deeply imbedded in the Justice Department, it will be an extremely difficult thing to dislodge,” Mr. Adams said.
Lew Schiliro, the former head of the FBI’s New York field office, said Attorney General Jeff Sessions needs to take the reins.
“It has to be Sessions,” he said. “The bureau reports to him and the Justice Department reports to him, yet he’s been silent on the issue. He needs to be a strong attorney general.”
Copyright © 2018 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
http:// freebeacon.com/national-security/ex-cia-chief-says-obama-rejected-cyber-action-russia-election-meddling/
Ex-CIA Chief Says Obama Rejected Cyber Action Against Russia for Election Meddling
Obama instead issued veiled warning to Moscow
Despite an unprecedented Russian intelligence operation to influence the 2016 presidential election, former President Barack Obama rejected a plan to conduct retaliatory cyber action against Moscow during the campaign, according to former CIA Director John Brennan.
Brennan disclosed Saturday that Obama opposed a plan to carry out "a cyber event" against the Russians because the former president feared the action would lead to more aggressive interference by Moscow.
"There was consideration about rattling their cages with some type of cyber event," Brennan said during remarks to a journalism conference at the University of California Berkeley.
But based on Obama's fears, the planned cyber action was shelved in favor issuing vague warnings to Russian officials. Brennan did not elaborate on the cyber retaliation plan.
"President Obama was the ultimate decision-maker on that," Brennan said of the lack of response.
The former CIA director defended the Obama administration's handling of what is widely viewed as a significant counterintelligence failure during the presidential election.
After the election, Obama ordered the expulsion of 35 Russian intelligence officers.
Both the FBI and CIA are charged with the conducting counterintelligence–detecting and thwarting hostile intelligence operations. Both agencies failed to halt the Russians in 2016 either in the United States or abroad.
U.S. officials have said the targeting of U.S. and foreign elections by Russia is continuing.
President Trump in February criticized his predecessor in a Tweet for failing to act. "Why didn't Obama do something about the meddling? Why aren't Dem crimes under investigation? Ask Jeff Sessions!" he tweeted.
The disclosure that Obama scrapped a cyber plan to retaliate against Moscow for election interference comes as a former senior counterintelligence official, Michelle Van Cleave, revealed in congressional testimony last week that the Obama administration weakened American counterintelligence programs by downgrading a top counterspy office.
Brennan said he had "great confidence" the Russian influence operation was authorized and directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB intelligence officer. The Russian intelligence services also "know what the mission is, know what their capabilities are, and will apply them to issues that are of interest to Russian national security," he said.
Brennan called the meddling "unprecedented in terms of its scope and intensity, and made full use of the digital domain."
The first indications of Russian interference were spotted in late 2015 and early 2016 and the operation was mentioned in press reports in the spring of 2016. By the summer of 2016 the operations were confirmed, he said.
Obama also made clear to the CIA that he did not want the agency doing anything "in reality or in perception" that would have advanced the Russian disinformation and propaganda campaign, Brennan said.
"We were really trying to strike the right balance between doing everything we could to prevent and thwart as well as to uncover and understand what the Russians were doing without doing anything that would almost advance their interests in trying to disrupt our election," he said.
Obama also was afraid any U.S. action against the Russians might be perceived as an outgoing Democratic president working to influence the election outcome.
"So if we did more things and stood at the hilltops and cried out, ‘the Russians, the Russians are trying to help Trump get elected,' and if President Obama who is the titular head of the Democratic Party were to do that, I think that there would have been a lot of people would believe, I think with some justification, that the President of the United States was trying to influence the outcome of a presidential election," Brennan said.
Brennan also said the Obama administration opposed aggressive action because of the president's belief that any effort to punish the Russian might produce stepped up activities.
Russian hackers had been detected navigating inside state election voter registration roll computers and other election-related networks.
Russian hackers had been detected navigating inside state election voter registration roll computers and other election-related networks.
"They had things that they could have done that they didn't do," Brennan said of the Russians.
Intelligence agencies concluded in a report issued in early 2017 that Russian civilian and military intelligence agencies conducted an aggressive operation to sow social discord during the 2016 election by opposing Hillary Clinton while seeking to boost Donald Trump's campaign.
The Russian operation included the use of advertising on social media platforms like Facebook, and cyber attacks involving the cyber theft of emails and postings online using covert internet personas.
In February, 13 Russians were indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for running a St. Petersburg, Russia-based internet troll farm that carried out influence operations during the elections.
So far, no action has been taken against the Russian hackers engaged in email thefts.
Kenneth deGraffenreid, former deputy national counterintelligence executive, said Obama's inaction was a major counterintelligence failure.
"If Brennan’s claims are true, the Obama administration’s inaction in the face of this Russian cyber aggression represents a serious counterintelligence failure that has had terrible consequences," deGraffenreid said.
"Good counterintelligence requires an active element beyond collecting and analyzing the secret information that has been uncovered–namely countering this serious foreign intelligence threat in an effective way. The U.S. has the sophisticated tools to do this."
"There simply is no excuse for not doing so," he added. "Our national security depends on American leaders taking the action required."
Despite signs the operation had been underway since 2015, Brennan said he was the first U.S. official to protest the matter during an Aug. 4, 2016, telephone to Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russia's FSB security service.
"I told him rather directly that if the Russians were to go down this road, they would pay a significant price," Brennan said. "I told him that all Americans would be outraged by a Russian effort to try and interfere in our election."
A month later at the G-20 summit in China, Obama confronted Putin about the election interference, according to Brennan.
Weeks later, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson issued an official statement accusing the Russian government of interfering with the election campaign.
Brennan said he believes the softline Obama policy dissuaded Moscow from intensifying the campaign and that he had no regrets.
Additionally, the former CIA chief said he has spoken to Obama who he asserted is "very comfortable with what we did and didn't do."
"I would argue that I think by pushing them back a bit and confronting them with it, both privately as well as publicly, I think we did dissuade them from even going further," he said.
Brennan also said the CIA was told by Obama not to take any action on the Russian intelligence operation over concerns any action would appear the administration was trying to support the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.
Since leaving office, Brennan has been a Trump critic, taking to Twitter to call the president a "charlatan," "demagogue," and "snake oil salesman."
Brennan said that criticism has cost him financially as "a number of opportunities were rescinded."
s Hall, during the height of the Cold War.
April 16, 2018
From 'global warming' to 'climate change' to 'climate restoration
The Left, in the form of the think thank RAND, has gone full Luddite:
Since the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, society has organized efforts to limit the magnitude of climate change around the concept of stabilization – that is, accepting some climate change but holding it within acceptable bounds. This report offers an initial exploration of the concept of climate restoration – that is, approaches that seek to return atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases to preindustrial levels within one to two generations. Using a simple integrated assessment model, the analysis examines climate restoration through the lens of risk management under conditions of deep uncertainty, exploring the technology, economic, and policy conditions under which it might be possible to achieve various climate restoration goals and the conditions under which society might be better off with (rather than without) a climate restoration goal. This report also explores near-term actions that might help manage the risks of climate restoration.
"Luddite" is a good term, for it connotes opposition to the Industrial Revolution, which was (and remains in its "Information Age" version) dependent on the combustion of carbon-based fuels for electrical generation and transportation. The longing for some imagined paradise of living in harmony with nature is even more pervasive in modern history.
Of course, anyone even slightly familiar with the history of the Earth's climate knows there is no one climate to be restored. We have had ice ages that covered much of the land on which Americans now live in glaciers. Is that the climate we wish to be restored?
Proponents claim they merely want to get rid of the "pollutants" – i.e., CO2, which is necessary for life and is used by plants to grow. (Higher levels of atmospheric CO2 already are increasing crop yields.) But buried in this phraseology is the hidden assumption that the atmosphere, not solar activity, controls climate. This is a ridiculous assumption on its face, since the ultimate source of our energy – atmospheric and carbon-based deposits – is the Sun.
By the way, solar activity is crashing now.
"Climate restoration" is the "New Coke" of climate alarmism.
The increase in the atmospheric trace gas of CO2 has so far failed to deliver the catastrophic consequences predicted by the alarmists like Al Gore. The headlines about "the end of snow" are now an embarrassment after a winter of abundant frozen precipitation. At least a decade ago, the fraudsters relabeled their purported peril "climate change," allowing any unusual weather to be blamed on mankind's use of fossil fuels.
https:// constitution.com/ig-report-proves-andrew-mccabe-criminal-going-prison/
The IG Report Proves that Andrew McCabe is a Criminal – So When is He Going to Prison?