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>https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1230583035550146562
EXCLUSIVE: The Case For The Disestablishment Of The CIA
Angelo Codevilla, senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus of international relations, argues for the disestablishment of the CIA and the transfer of its authority to multiple other branches of government.
An author, and former U.S. Navy officer and staff member of the Select Committee on Intelligence of the U.S. Senate, Codevilla spoke Monday with the Daily Caller to further discuss his beliefs on the powerful intelligence agency.
So can you give a summary of the CIA’s role in the 2016 election, what led up to them being a more politically driven organization and what can be done to remedy that?
About that I don’t know more than anybody else, I know the CIA very well having superintended it for 8 years and continuing contact with it, for better or worse it really hasn’t changed very much, it has changed some, in the same direction. Look when I was involved in it, it’s interference in politics was through the policy process, you see, now they’ve gone directly to ad hominem involvement, which is something else, not that you couldn’t see this happening, but it really hadn’t happened yet.
So you’ve written that ‘senior intelligence officials were the key element in the war on Donald Trump’s candidacy and presidency.’ Could you expand on that?
Oh absolutely, yes of course. I mean look, the talk about the so called uncertainty about who sicced [professors] [Joseph] Mifsud and Stef Halper onto the Trump people is nonsense, both of these people were strictly CIA assets. I mean I’ve known Stef Halper for 40 years. This had to be done by Brennan. (RELATED: Mueller Claimed Joseph Mifsud Lied To The FBI About Papadopoulos Contacts, But He Wasn’t Charged)
Is this the first time the CIA has interfered in an election or taken action in a political matter that should be outside of their purview?
Oh no, heavens no. They do that all the time, they did it primarily through policy. Now I’ll give you … most recently what they tried to do to George W. Bush and ended up merely screwing poor Scooter Libby. I mean that was a straightforward direct interference in the presidency. Let me tell you how they worked into that from the policy angle. (RELATED: Former CIA Officer: Whistleblower ‘Is An Anonymous Source’ For House Democrats)
After 9/11, the practical question for the US government was ‘who do we hit … who in the Middle East do we hit and why?’
The Department of Defense, Rumsfeld and others and yours truly, strongly believed that that the regimes of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, from different standpoints, were responsible for anti-American terrorism coming from their jurisdictions and so we said look, tell these people you cut it out or we will get you, you personally, you the rulers. And CIA was totally opposed to that, hence George Tenet’s statement that Osama Bin Laden had done it, game, set and match. Parenthesis, by the way, to this day, no one knows what Osama Bin Laden did, that’s another long story. But The CIA wanted to preclude any and all retaliation against regimes. And so it went out of its way using its usual tools in the press and the bureaucracy to say look, these are rogue individuals, religiously driven, got nothing to do with regimes. Well, it so happened that Scooter Libby got Dick Cheney to take up the views of the Defense Department. And CIA fought against that, they swung from that into attacking Bush, hence the Valerie Plame affair.
Now the Valerie Plame affair was a straightforward attack, and by the way, many of the elements of the Valerie Plame affair were replayed in 2016, there was no crime committed, the whole Valerie Plame/Fitzgerald investigation was not premised on any crime. How do I know that? Because the Intelligence Identities Protection Act is something I helped to write and we damn well made sure- liberals, conservatives, everybody who was involved in writing that act made sure to exclude from the coverage of the act any disclosure made in the course of a political argument. But the CIA and the New York Times together deleted that and put pressure on poor, stupid, weak, dumb George W. Bush to appoint a special prosecutor who then … I don’t know if you know the story of Patrick Fitzgerald, but all of that followed. So the answer to your question is ‘no,’ this is not the first time that it was done, and no it was not the first time that a non-crime was the premise for the interference.
(Cont.)
https://archive.ph/E5RK3
https://dailycaller.com/2020/02/20/angelo-codevilla-claremont-cia-central-intelligence-agency-interview/
Strange scenes at Roger Stone’s sentencing raise even more questions about William Barr
Official Washington has been consumed over the past week with the drama at the Justice Department. Attorney General William P. Barr is increasingly embattled thanks to President Trump’s heavy-handed approach to DOJ business, in which Barr has unsuccessfully urged Trump to stop meddling.
The scenes in a courtroom Thursday — where Stone was ultimately sentenced to 40 months in prison — only heightened the drama. And they raised more questions about what in the world is happening inside Barr’s DOJ.
Barr intervened last week to overrule career prosecutors’ tough seven- to nine-year sentencing recommendation for Trump ally Roger Stone — shortly after Trump tweeted in opposition to the recommended sentence. That prompted the four prosecutors on the case to withdraw. Then came a more watered-down recommendation, which was signed by the prosecutor now leading the charge for the Justice Department, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Crabb. But at Stone’s sentencing hearing on Thursday, Crabb sounded a very different tone. He repeatedly appeared to push the recommendation in the direction of the initial prosecutors’ harsher one, arguing for enhancements that the more recent memo suggested were unnecessary or unsubstantiated.
For instance, Crabb pushed for an enhancement because Stone’s obstruction of justice succeeded. The latest sentencing recommendation, though, argued that such an enhancement would be duplicative because “it is unclear to what extent the defendant’s obstructive conduct actually prejudiced the government at trial.” The judge, Amy Berman Jackson, granted the enhancement.
In another instance, Crabb seemed to pretty explicitly argue that the initial recommendation was still in effect.
Perhaps the most remarkable moment, though, came when the judge eventually tried to reconcile Crabb’s performance with his name having been on the updated sentencing recommendation, which he didn’t seem to be pushing.
The scenes will heighten suspicions about what’s happening behind the scenes in the Justice Department. Some suggested that Crabb was perhaps making a statement by reverting to the arguments in the first recommendation. If that’s not the case, though, the fact that he did move in that direction suggests that this whole drama was somewhat pointless in the first place. If the Justice Department was just going to argue the same points from the first recommendation, why overrule the sentencing recommendation and make it look like Trump was dictating how his Justice Department prosecuted his ally? Jackson asked whether he had actually written the memo; Crabb again declined to elaborate on what has happened within the Justice Department. When she pressed, he even left open the possibility that he was directed to write it … by someone.
Cont.
https://archive.ph/oRUnb
http://washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/20/strange-scenes-roger-stones-sentencing-raise-even-more-questions-about-william-barr/?tid=pm_pop&itid=pm_pop
"nuclear war of fake videos"
https://twitter.com/GlennKesslerWP/status/1230544629789007872