CONNECTICUT

MINNESOTA

CLEARANCE CANNED

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It seems to be “long overdue stuff” week in the Trump administration. It started with the canning of Cooter Strzok over at the FBI and now the train has rolled into Brennan Station.

As everyone living above ground now knows, corrupt former CIA Director John Brennan has finally had his TS/SCI (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information) clearance revoked, ensuring that he’s not able to use any credentials on an official site in order to gain access to classified info.

And yes, he earned it.

No one is entitled to a TS clearance, especially not someone like Brennan. JB has been so overzealous in his partisan hackery that he could hardly be described as just another American using his First Amendment Rights to speak his mind. This is a man who held one of the most powerful intelligence positions in the country — one with contacts still on the inside — presenting himself as someone who’s ready, willing and able to take down a duly elected POTUS any way he can.  

In March, Brennan tweeted: “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.”

Again, this isn’t Joe from the block. When a former CIA Director implies that there is some information that could be damaging to the POTUS, that screams of an egregious abuse of power. He’s even gone so far as to tweet vague threats such as “Stay tuned.” I can hardly think of anything more inappropriate for a man in his position to say. 

Then there is his continued presence as one of the chief Russia truthers on Twitter, never mission chance to speculate on how Vlad Putin has compromising information on PDT, thereby explaining PDT’s desire to improve relations with Russia. It’s as bizarre as it is stupid, but coming from a former CIA director, it’s much worse than that. It’s subversive and chilling. 

That is just stuff from the past year. Let’s not forget that time his agency spied on members of Congress while lying about it vigorously for months, before ultimately having to “apologize.” Imagine being able to spy on Congress and then getting away with a simple statement of remorse. I guess you can do that sorta thing when you’re “Obama’s most trusted security aide,” as he’s been described in many reports.

Suffice it to say, PDT had very good legs to stand on to take his clearance, not that he needed them. The POTUS has near absolute informational power. He could take his clearance anytime he pleased for whatever reason he pleased. Just a fact. 

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WHY DID HE STILL HAVE A CLEARANCE IN FIRST PLACE? 

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I  think the better question would be, “How did he ever get a clearance in the first place?”

When a TS clearance is in the process of investigation, the clearance-seeker must take a polygraph. Depending on the position, one may receive what’s called a “national security poly,” which is just a polygraph of basic questions related to espionage/loyalty to country, a “lifestyle poly,” which is a polygraph of very probing personal questions, or both.

Everyone gets the national security poly no matter what. The most basic question asked is, “Do you seek or have you ever sought to overthrow the government of the United States?” Brennan supported the Communist Party at the height of the Cold War. Part of their platform was the overthrow of the U.S. government and its Constitution. That fact alone should make for a very interesting polygraph.

But as to his current clearance, this is how it (usually) works. Most clearances are good for 5 years at the time. If the clearance-holder remains in the intel community when his/her clearance is nearing lapse, a follow-up investigation is conducted in order to ensure fitness to handle classified info. 

Often, when a cleared person leaves office, the mission, or whatever else tethers them to the intel community, his “blue badge” is taken and deactivated, along with all of his access to whatever programs he’d been “read on” to. That blue badge and mission access is the lifeblood of a clearance. If you don’t have it, you can’t even get into the building. Not alone, anyway. And if you’re granted an escort to walk around without a badge, that escort yells “RED BADGE!” to every room which you’re about to enter. It’s highly annoying to those busy working mission and often embarrassing to the red badgee, if you will.

So the mere fact that a person’s clearance expired doesn’t mean he has access to whatever he wants. On the contrary, he doesn’t have clearance for anything whatsoever unless his blue badge is reactivated, he’s read on to a new mission and given need-to-know access. Need-to-know is a very important term in the intel community because compartmentalization is our fundamental operating principle. That means unless the information you seek is related to the mission you’re working, you don’t get it.

Theoretically, of course. 

The simple answer for why he still has a clearance is that clearances themselves aren’t automatically revoked once a person leaves their work environment. The clearance remains until it expires, but the means of using it are *supposed* to be disabled. Kind of like having a driver’s license but no car. Or road, for that matter.

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Now, having said all that, Brennan is not your everyday case. First off, he was the CIA Director, not some rank and file analyst. Brennan couldn’t analyze a real-world intelligence product if his commie life depended on it. Nevertheless, the compartmentalization principle doesn’t apply to him as stringently as it would to someone like myself. Leaders must have at least somewhat of a bird’s-eye view of operations in order to be effective.

Sometimes, people in Brennan’s position are allowed to maintain clearances so that they may advise the POTUS and/or his staff should the need arise. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that PDT will get along fine without Brennan’s counsel.

Predictably, Dims and NeverTrumpers are jumping onto the OMG DICTATOR narrative, painting a picture of PDT as some Nixonian figure in the Oval Office crossing names off his enemies list. Some have even gone so far as to call Brennan “upstanding” and “patriotic,” causing one to wonder if they’ve ever actually read anything about the man.

It’s a losing bet on their end. They can hitch their wagon to that dumpster fire if they like, but it’s not going to turn out well in the long run.

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Frankly, I don’t believe we can see the big picture here, and that’s a good thing.

What I mean is there is more going on than just a standard clearance revocation for bad behavior.

There is a near 100% chance that a counterintelligence operation is and has been underway for quite a while now into Brennan and his cohorts. I believe that PDT has received a great deal of information from it, though his information isn’t solely coming from that probe.

We’ve been talking for months about how Brennan doth protest too much. His panicked, hyperbolic declarations against the POTUS are the product of one of two things: instability or fear. I don’t believe he’s unstable, not at all. He’s afraid of what will be exposed, as he should be. 

The most open secret in the intelligence community is that Brennan is the source for much of CNN’s garbage, especially as it pertains to the PutinGate narrative. As CIA director, he knew full well that the pee-pee dossier was being briefed to PDT in early 2017 as part of a PDB (presidential daily brief). Was he the one who tipped off CNN?

Probably. But the ‘who’ in that scenario is much less important than the ‘why.’ That dossier was briefed to the POTUS for a reason: legitimacy. They needed the dossier to be legitimized in any way possible, and there’s hardly a better way than including it alongside the most critical national security information a POTUS receives. 

Brennan knew the dossier was being briefed and, more importantly, he knew why. And that tells us that he knows a hell of a lot more than that. I think he knows just about everything, in fact, and that’s why he was Barry’s “most trusted security aide.” Because trust in the Obama administration didn’t mean reliability in doing the right thing for the country. It meant reliable support for whatever scheme the Obama administration cooked up, no matter how illicit.

And he’s not the only one. The Trump administration seems to have its ducks in a row regarding this situation. In addition to Brennan, Sarah Sanders made it known today that several others are on the chopping block. They include former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Leakin’ James Comey, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden, former Deputy AG Sally Yates, Susan ‘Dirty’ Rice, Deep State Andy McCabe, counterintel agent Cooter Strzok, his mistress Lisa Page and DOJ official/dossier middle-man Bruce Ohr.

PDT isn’t just throwing darts at a board and picking names. And no, he’s not just looking to see who’s been talking trash in the media. There is a lot more happening here.

PDT had ample justification to revoke Brennan’s clearance, but I’m fairly certain we’ve yet to learn the most damning details.

In the words of Brennan: “Stay tuned.”

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SPEAKING OF WHICH

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Right on cue, Brennan’s deep state buddies show up to remind us just how badly we need a housecleaning at the highest levels of Justice and Intelligence.

The incomparable Sara A. Carter is reporting tonight that a “trove of emails and handwritten notes” from Bruce Ohr further exposes the extent to which he was working with Fusion GPS and their hatchen man Christopher Steele in order to surveil the Trump campaign.

Not only do the notes prove Ohr’s *collusion* with Steele, they reveal that he was in steady contact with Steele’s boss at Fusion, Glenn Simpson. Both of them, of course, are the underlings of Hillary Clinton, whose campaign paid for the whole shebang. 

And oh gee by the way, we now know that Simpson lied through his teeth before Congress regarding the extent of his own communication with the DOJ. Now ask yourself, why would a man who claims to have simply been carrying out his “patriotic duty” want to hide his communications with the Justice Dept? Shouldn’t he be touting them? Isn’t his entire case that he was “just doing what any good American should do when encountering information of that sort”? 

Why would a whistleblower want to hide their own whistleblowing?

Curious indeed.

Now let’s get to the heart of these new revelations, and I use that term loosely.

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THE FBI KNEW STEELE WAS SHOPPING THE DOSSIER TO THE MEDIA: 

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You’ll likely recall that my calling the firing of Christopher Steele as an FBI source due to his contacts with the media were “window dressing.” It’s not a difficult conclusion to reach, given that Ohr kept in constant contact with Steele even after his “firing.”

You tell me which is more likely. Did Ohr go behind the FBI’s back and risk his job to communicate with Steele, or did the group of guys and gals on the infamous 7th floor know full well what he was doing? We all know the answer to that. Ohr was the bag man between Clinton world and the bureau. Of course they knew.

Taken from Sara Carter’s report:

The House Intelligence Committee revealed in their Russia report earlier this year that Steele–who was working for the FBI as a Confidential Human Source (CHS)–had shopped his dossier to numerous news outlets in the summer of 2016.  According to the report, the FBI terminated Steele after discovering that he was leaking to news outlets, breaking a cardinal rule by the bureau to not reveal ongoing investigations and information to the media.

However, there is growing concern that the FBI was well aware that Steele was in contact with media outlets about his dossier before the FBI applied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for its first warrant in the fall of 2016 to conduct surveillance on former Trump campaign volunteer advisor, Carter Page.

“There are indications that the FBI knew that Steele was in contact with the media before the bureau submitted the first FISA application and that question needs to be resolved,” said a congressional official with knowledge of the investigation.

This isn’t some revelation within the bureau. The only “growing concern within the FBI” is who has been exposed and to what extent.

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 STEELE BECAME VERY NERVOUS WHEN GRASSLEY BEGAN ASKING QUESTIONS:

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Not only were Ohr and Steele in constant communication in the lead-up to, during and after the use of the dossier to spy on American citizens for political purposes, they remained in contact when Congress began snooping around and asking the right questions.

Again, from the Sara Carter report:

In one of Ohr’s handwritten notes listed as “Law enforcement Sensitive” from May 10, 2017, he writes “Call with Chris,” referencing Steele. He notes that Steele is “very concerned about Comey’s firing, afraid they will be exposed.” This call occurred months after FBI Director James Comey testified before the House Intelligence Committee and revealed for the first time that the FBI had an open counterintelligence investigation into President Donald Trump’s campaign and alleged collusion with Russia.

Steele is also extremely concerned about a letter sent from the Senate Judiciary Committee asking Comey for information on his involvement with Steele. Grassley sent 12 questions to Comey regarding the bureau and Steele’s relationship and wanted all information on any agreements they had during the investigation into alleged Russia-Trump collusion. Grassley also wanted to know if the FBI ever verified any of the information in Steele’s reports.

In Ohr’s notes from May 10, 2017, he goes onto write that Steele is concerned about a letter from the Senate Intelligence Committee, writing:

“Asked them 3 questions:

1. What info (information) did you give to the U.S. govt (government)?
2. What was the scope of yr (your) investigation?
3. Do you have any other info that would assist in our question?”

SaraACarter.com first reported this week text messages between Steele and Ohr, revealing that Steele was anxious about Comey’s testimony and was hoping that “important firewalls will hold” when Comey testified.

Those text messages in March 2017 were shared only two days before Comey testified to lawmakers.

It continues on: