PrairiePundit

 Washington Times: The FBI revealed how the bureau uses the CIA and National Security Agency to probe the private lives of Americans without a warrant in its updated rulebook, which is the first version made public since the Obama administration. The handbook, rewritten in 2021, confirms a decade-old leak showcasing the bureau’s collaboration with the CIA and NSA for FBI probes that may involve surveillance without court orders against people not accused of any crimes. Such probes are known as “assessments” at the FBI . The revelations will fuel critics who have long accused the FBI of abusing its national security surveillance powers. The FBI ’s partnership with U.S. intelligence agencies that are focused on foreign threats is expected to get intense scrutiny from the new Republican-run Congress. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and House Judiciary Committee are digging into how intelligence agencies target Americans. Plans include a new panel to examine...

  Nick Arama: New Report Raises Even More Questions About NSA Spying on Tucker Carlson I suspect the unmasker was a Biden partisan who was unhappy with Tucker's take on the administration on his popular show.  It looks like a replay of Obama's abuse of power in unmasking Trump associates doing their job. 

 Red States: Yesterday, allegations made by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that the NSA had gathered his communications and that they were going to be leaked for partisan gain were confirmed. While we don’t know exactly who leaked the emails, which simply showed Carlson attempting to set up an interview with Vladamir Putin (who NBC News had interviewed just two weeks prior), we know it had to be someone involved in unmasking him. That leaves the Biden administration as the most likely source. (see Tucker Carlson Responds to Bombshell Spying Revelations ) Of course, before yesterday, a litany of figures called Carlson a liar for even claiming what he claimed last week. Now, those same people are attempting to spin their way out of the corner they painted themselves in by making a variety of stupid, obtuse claims. ... Here’s the thing – the NSA’s denial was an entire paragraph of lies. It was carefully crafted, just as many of us pointed out (and were called conspiracy theorists at the t...

  Cockburn: Tucker Carlson is at war with the National Security Agency, and it makes great TV. Two nights running, the Fox News host has delivered marvelously inflammatory monologues, straight to camera, accusing the NSA of spying on him and possibly intending to conduct a smear campaign against him in order to cancel his show. He has a source, whom he believes, and like all good hacks he possesses a healthy distrust of officialdom, spies and the establishment. Carlson wants an answer to this very simple question: has the NSA been spying on his private emails without his permission? And he’s not getting it. Yesterday, after his show repeatedly tried to contact the NSA director, Gen. Paul Nakasone, the agency issued what Carlson called ‘an infuriatingly dishonest statement’ on Twitter: Cockburn has seen enough tumescent non-denials to read between those lines. What’s implied is that security services actually have monitored Carlson’s emails, hence the evasive line that he ‘has neve...

  Washington Examiner: NSA denies leaking scheme to take Tucker Carlson off the air There is a distrust of intelligence under the Biden administration.  While the NSA denies responsiblity we have seen no explanation of how someone has accessed Carlson's text messages.  See, also: Twitter Explodes With Reaction After Biden’s NSA Gets Caught Spying On Tucker Carlson Carlson says the alleged denial is misleading : The National Security Agency (NSA) issued a statement on Tuesday claiming that Tucker Carlson was never the target of an NSA investigations in response to allegations that the agency was spying on the Fox News host . Carlson discussed the statement on air on Tuesday night, along with a phone call he'd had with the NSA about his allegations that they were spying on him. "Minutes before air tonight, the NSA sent us an infuriatingly dishonest formal statement, an entire paragraph of lies written purely for the benefit of the intel community’s lackeys at CNN and MSNB...

  Washington Examiner: Fox News host  Tucker Carlson  accused the Biden administration of "spying" on him in an attempt to take his show off the air. He told his audience on Monday a government whistleblower told his team the National Security Agency is "spying" on their electronic communications and is "planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air." Carlson offered no evidence other than to say the whistleblower, whom he did not identify, repeated back information on a story the host's team is working on that came directly from his own text messages and emails. "The Biden administration is spying on us," he said after asserting "it is illegal for the NSA to spy on American citizens." Accusing the NSA of covertly picking up his electronic communications, Carlson insisted there is "no other possible source of that information." Carlson, whose show  averages millions of viewers , said his team filed a Fr...

Conservative Tree House: BIG PICTURE – Sidney Powell Discusses Weissmann/Mueller Special Counsel Destroying Evidence of Their Conduct… This is a long piece but is worth it if you are up to digging into it.  There is substantial evidence that the Obama-Biden administration was using NSA material to spy on their political opponents including Trump.   This abuse of intelligence information for political purposes should not go unpunished and Biden should be called to account on it.

Washington Examiner: The former director of the National Security Agency is the latest to sit down with U.S. Attorney John Durham in the widening inquiry into the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation. Adm. Mike Rogers, who retired in 2018 after four years as NSA chief and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, has met with Durham, who is working at the behest of Attorney General William Barr, multiple times and is cooperating voluntarily in Durham's deep dive into the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation related to the Trump campaign and the Russian government, according to the Intercept. Rogers is likely being talked to because of his key intelligence perch, experiences uncovering Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act violations, and his role in the intelligence community's assessment of Russian interference. ... In 2016, Rogers helped expose FISA flaws of a different kind by the NSA and the FBI. That October, as the bureau received its first Page surveilla...

National Review: Former National Security Agency director and retired Adm. Michael Rogers has met multiple times with U.S. attorney John Durham as part of an ongoing probe into the origins of the counterintelligence investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign, The Intercept reported Friday. Rogers, who served as NSA director under Obama and Trump, “has cooperated voluntarily,” according to sources. Durham, who did not agree with DOJ inspector general Mike Horowitz’s report on the predication of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, is also looking into what role former CIA director John Brennan played in the 2017 intelligence community assessment that detailed Russian interference in the election. The assessment , compiled by the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, stated that Vladimir Putin “ordered an influence campaign” that “aspired to help” Trump and discredit Clinton. While the FBI and the CIA had high confidence in the conclusion, Rogers’s NSA reported a moderate confidence an...

DiGenova says the matter is much broader than the FISA court abuse and includes illicit access to the NSA database to spy on political enemies of the Obama administration. You can find more on this subject at Conservative Treehouse.

George Parry: ... Recall that, in early 2016, NSA head Admiral Mike Rogers became aware of “ongoing” and “intentional” violations and abuse of FISA surveillance, which he subsequently exposed in testimony before Congress. Thereafter, pressure mounted within the Obama administration to fire him. The week after the presidential election, when he was facing removal from his post, Rogers visited the president-elect at Trump Tower. On November 19, 2016, Reuters reported that Rogers’ decision “to travel to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday without notifying superiors caused consternation at senior levels of the [Obama] administration.” The day following Rogers’ visit, the president-elect’s transition team vacated Trump Tower and moved its operations to New Jersey . Was this because Rogers had warned Trump that he and his transition team were being subjected to illegal government surveillance? While that is unknown, it is clear that Rogers was not and had never been an Obama team ...

Sara Carter: A controversial NSA surveillance program used to monitor foreigners was also being used by the FBI as ‘backdoor’ to gain warrantless access to American communications, according to numerous former U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials with knowledge of the program. The whistleblowers, who recently disclosed the program’s process to Congressional oversight committees, say concern over the warrantless surveillance mounted when it was disclosed earlier this year that Obama officials had accessed and unmasked communications of members of President Trump’s 2016 campaign, allegedly without clear justification. The process, known as ‘reverse targeting,’ occurs when intelligence and law enforcement officials use a foreign person as a legal pretense for their intended target, an American citizen, the officials stated. The program, as it exists, failed to prevent terror attacks and in many cases made incorrect connections between a foreign target and an innocent American...

The Hill: The Department of Justice announced Friday that a former National Security Agency (NSA) employee pleaded guilty to removing classified information from the agency's offices. Nghia Pho, a 67-year-old living in Maryland, was a developer for the NSA's hacking corps — Tailored Access Operations (TAO). Authorities found classified documents throughout his home, according to court documents, which Pho took from work between 2010 and 2015. The New York Times reports that Pho is the NSA employee that was targeted in a reported incident where Russian spies hacked NSA tools using Kaspersky Lab software. That incident is believed to be among the reasons the Trump administration banned the use of Kaspersky software. Media reports described that employee as taking classified hacking tools to work from a home computer that was loaded with Kaspersky Antivirus. According to the same reports, spies used the file scanning function of Kaspersky Antivirus to search for classified docu...

NY Times: Security Breach and Spilled Secrets Have Shaken the N.S.A. to Its Core A serial leak of the agency’s cyberweapons has damaged morale, slowed intelligence operations and resulted in hacking attacks on businesses and civilians worldwide. There was a time when people joked that the NSA was so secret its initials stood for No Such Agency.  Now it is in the news routinely for catastrophic failures to maintain its own security when it comes to digital operations.  Was the agency breached by the Russians, Chinese North Koreans, or Iran or all of the above?  Who is responsible for all of the damage done with the results of the breaches?  I am not sure they even know. Then there is the fact that Democrats in the Obama administration used teh NSA to spy on the Trump campaign and released classified material to the media in those attacks.  So far, no one has even been accused of the crimes much less prosecuted.  As long as teh DOJ is looking at adding...

James Freeman: Did Obama Know about Comey’s Surveillance? The media is less interested in Obama Administration wiretapping than in how Trump described it. What we are most likely to get from the media are more tendentious "fact checking" quibbling over Trump's wording than the substance of what really happened. As Sharyl Attkisson points out : Many in the media are diving deeply into minutiae in order to discredit any notion that President Trump might have been onto something in March when he fired off a series of tweets claiming President Obama had “tapped” “wires” in Trump Tower just before the election. According to media reports this week, the FBI did indeed “wiretap” the former head of Trump’s campaign, Paul Manafort, both before and after Trump was elected. If Trump officials — or Trump himself — communicated with Manafort during the wiretaps, they would have been recorded, too. But we’re missing the bigger story. If these reports are accurate, it mea...

The Hill: The National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation violated specific civil liberty protections during the Obama years by improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts, according to newly declassified memos that provide some of the richest detail to date on the spy agencies’ ability to obey their own rules. The memos reviewed by The Hill were publicly released on July 11 through Freedom of Information Act litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union. They detail specific violations that the NSA or FBI disclosed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or the Justice Department's national security division during President Obama’s tenure between 2009 and 2016. The intelligence community isn't due to report on compliance issues for 2017, the first year under the Trump administration, until next spring. The NSA says that the missteps amount to a small number — less ...

She was acting rude and unprofessional and deserved to be chastised by the chairman of the committee.  It wasn't with just this one witness.  She did the same thing with the head of the NSA.  It seemed as though she viewed the witnesses as props for her liberal diatribe.

Washington Times: A 25-year-old federal contractor was criminally charged Monday in connection with leaking classified information to a news organization — marking the first leak prosecution under the Trump administration. Reality Leigh Winner, of Augusta, Georgia, was arrested over the weekend after prosecutors said she printed a copy of a classified report and mailed it to an online news outlet, the Justice Department announced Monday. Court documents filed in the case do not identify the outlet or describe the type of information leaked. But the details of the case appear to correspond to information included in an article published Monday afternoon by the Intercept. The article relies on an anonymously-provided National Security Agency document to detail Russian attempts to hack U.S. voting systems in the days before the 2016 presidential election. According to the Justice Department, Ms. Winner is a contractor with Pluribus International Corporation and held top-secret securi...

NY Times: Kushner Is Said to Have Discussed a Secret Channel to Talk to Russia A back channel between Jared Kushner, a White House adviser, and Moscow was proposed to discuss Syria, but never pursued, in the weeks before Donald J. Trump’s inauguration. So why is the following story the lead at the Times ? Trump Returns to Crisis Over Kushner as White House Tries to Contain It Stephen Crowley/The New York Times President Trump with his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, at the White House in March. President Trump arrived home Saturday to face reports that his son-in-law is under scrutiny in inquiries into possible ties between Russia and associates of Mr. Trump. It appears that the facts don't fit the narrative of collusion with the Russians, but the media is rolling out the story to continue its efforts to distract the administration and put it on the defensive.  The alleged meeting to discuss the proposed back-channel was also well after the e...

Andrew McCarthy: During the Obama years, the National Security Agency intentionally and routinely intercepted and reviewed communications of American citizens in violation of the Constitution and of court-ordered guidelines implemented pursuant to federal law. The unlawful surveillance appears to have been a massive abuse of the government’s foreign-intelligence-collection authority, carried out for the purpose of monitoring the communications of Americans in the United States. While aware that it was going on for an extensive period of time, the administration failed to disclose its unlawful surveillance of Americans until late October 2016, when the administration was winding down and the NSA needed to meet a court deadline in order to renew various surveillance authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The administration’s stonewalling about the scope of the violation induced an exasperated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to accuse the NSA of ...