>>6660669 op
>OldFags,
>WRAY and HASPEL…. white hats?
Who Ran Crossfire Hurricane?
Barr’s investigators should focus on John Brennan and Gina Haspel.
by JED BABBIN
June 3, 2019, 12:05 AM
Gina Haspel’s confirmation hearing (CSpan screenshot/Wikimedia Commons)
“Crossfire Hurricane” — the melodramatic code name for the FBI/CIA spy operation on candidate Trump and his early presidency — was run for the FBI by then-FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, Special Agent Peter Strzok, and a few others.
Then-CIA director John Brennan ran it for the CIA. Brennan had to have help, but who was it? A lot of evidence points to the CIA’s then-chief of station in London in 2016-2017, and now the Director of Central Intelligence, Gina Haspel.
President Trump claimed that the FBI and CIA’s spying on his campaign and early presidency was treason. Attorney General William Barr said that, legally, it wasn’t.
Barr is correct. But note well that he didn’t say that crimes other than treason weren’t committed. On Friday, Barr said that since he became attorney general he had been asking why the counter-intelligence investigation was begun and hasn’t yet gotten a satisfactory answer.
The criminal investigation being conducted for Barr by U.S. Attorney John Durham is aimed at the intelligence community. As I wrote last week Trump’s recent executive order, which requires the intelligence agencies to cooperate with Barr and gives Barr the power to declassify anything he chooses, was probably necessitated by the stonewalling by the CIA and the NSA that Durham had already encountered.
There is every reason for the CIA to stonewall. Its current director, Gina Haspel, must have played a major role in conducting the CIA/FBI spy op on Trump.
One result of last week’s column was that one of my intelligence sources — a longtime veteran of the U.S. intelligence community — reappeared after about a year of silence. This person reminded me that he/she tried — unsuccessfully — to warn the White House against Haspel’s nomination to be DCI because of her longstanding close ties to Obama’s CIA chief, John Brennan.
Many people who objected to Haspel’s confirmation, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), based their objections on the fact that Haspel had run a CIA site in Thailand in which terrorist suspects were reportedly waterboarded. The waterboarding charge was sufficient to get the Senate — and apparently the White House — to overlook the real problem with her: the fact that, as Paul once implied in a tweet, Haspel is Brennan’s acolyte and protégé.
Brennan was — and still is — a hyper-partisan anti-Trumper. He was a relentless promoter of the Steele dossier allegations against Trump. Either he or James Comey (the two are disputing which) insisted on including information from the Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017, which said that the intelligence community had agreed that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump. We know that Brennan has lied to Congress on a host of topics, including events surrounding the spy op on Trump’s campaign and presidency.
Haspel’s longstanding loyalty to Brennan ranks her among the two or three worst personnel choices made by President Trump.
Her loyalty to Brennan is more than a little relevant to Durham’s investigation because, as noted above, Haspel was the CIA’s Chief of Station (COS) in London from 2014-2017. It was during the latter two years of her tenure there when all of the FBI/CIA spying operation on Trump and his campaign occurred.
https://spectator.org/who-ran-crossfire-hurricane/