RUTHFULLY YOURS

Saboteurs in the U.S. intelligence community posing as patriots have been working hard to drive President Donald Trump from the White House.

Former National Security Agency intelligence analyst and former War College professor John R. Schindler bragged on Twitter last week about the spy-led plot his friends are conducting against the president.

“Now we go nuclear,” he tweeted. “IC [intelligence community] war [is] going to new levels. Just got an [email from] senior IC friend, it began: ‘He will die in jail.’”

“US intelligence is not the problem here,” Schindler added. “The President’s collusion with Russian intelligence is. Many details, but the essence is simple.”

In a column Feb. 12, Schindler cited wild, unproven, conspiratorial theories about Trump’s ties to Russia to justify his comrades’ seditious push to remove Trump from power.

[T]he still-forming Trump administration is already doing serious harm to America’s longstanding global intelligence partnerships. In particular, fears that the White House is too friendly to Moscow are causing close allies to curtail some of their espionage relationships with Washington—a development with grave implications for international security, particularly in the all-important realm of counterterrorism.

People like Schindler think they know what’s best for America in terms of national security and foreign policy. Allowing an outsider like Donald Trump to do the job Americans elected him to do is unthinkable to them. So Trump must go.

People of Schindler’s ilk are using government resources in an effort to overthrow the nation’s duly elected government. While smiling on TV and assuring the public his administration was fully cooperating with the Trump transition team, President Obama gave members of the intelligence community permission to wage war against then-incoming President Trump.

Before leaving office President Obama cleared the way for his confederates in the intel world to ramp up their use of dirty tricks to kick the legs out from under the incoming Trump administration by changing intelligence-sharing rules. The goal is to prevent Trump from rolling back Obama’s poisonous legacy.

The most famous victim so far of what could be called Obama’s shadow government is National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, an anti-Islamofascist hardliner who was forced out of his post Feb. 13 by what appears to be a deep state cabal centered around the sleazy former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes. As Flynn’s replacement, Trump has appointed “warrior-scholar” U.S. Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.

Rhodes and other former Obama administration officials were part of an intrigue that led to the downfall of Flynn, investigative journalist Adam Kredo reported at the Washington Free Beacon.

Flynn’s resignation was “the culmination of a secret, months-long campaign by former Obama administration confidantes to handicap President Donald Trump’s national security apparatus and preserve the nuclear deal with Iran, according to multiple sources in and out of the White House who described to the Washington Free Beacon a behind-the-scenes effort by these officials to plant a series of damaging stories about Flynn in the national media.”

Kredo isn’t the only one crying foul.

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William G. “Jerry” Boykin said Flynn was targeted. It was “because they were concerned about where Flynn was going to go in terms of what he was going to recommend to President Trump.”

The intelligence community “itself has been politicized,” he told Laura Ingraham. “And I think this is one of the results — this is one of the things that you’re seeing come out of that politicization.”

“You’re seeing a guy that is key in the Trump administration being targeted, and they have used the tools that they have available to them to bring this guy down,” Boykin said.

Leaks of Trump’s telephone conversations with the leaders of Mexico and Australia have found their way into the media ecosystem. One gossipy news website published the ridiculous, unverified “golden showers” dossier that claims Trump is a urophiliac, of all things, who hired prostitutes in Moscow to inundate his hotel bed. There is also the wholly unsupported blanket claim that Russia somehow “hacked” the election, interfering to help Trump, along with the more specific but unproven assertion that Russia hacked documents from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and gave them to WikiLeaks.

In addition to leaking, U.S. intelligence operatives have been engaging in a gross, seditious form of insubordination that may be endangering national security. These people have been withholding sensitive intelligence from the president because they claim to be worried the data could be leaked or compromised if it reaches the White House, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.

Why they think they are allowed to withhold such information from their ultimate overseer, the democratically elected official whom Article II, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution empowers to protect the nation as “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States,” is unclear.

But these “spooks” who operate in the shadows don’t have to bother with excuses because they are unaccountable. They defy our new president’s directives and make public whatever policy they disagree with in hopes of undermining it. They are the “deep state,” which, according to one website, is “a body of people, typically influential members of government agencies or the military, believed to be involved in the secret manipulation or control of government policy.” The deep state doesn’t give up its power when a president leaves office. It stays behind to clandestinely exert its dark influence regardless of which party controls the White House.

These deep-state dwellers leapt into action in the final weeks of Obama’s presidency.

As the clock ticked, Obama green-lighted a disturbing relaxation of the rules regulating the National Security Agency’s ability to circulate globally intercepted personal communications among the other 16 intelligence agencies, some of which are more politicized than the NSA, before applying important longstanding privacy-protection protocols. Before the policy was altered, the NSA screened out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information before passing intercepted communications along to other agencies like the CIA or the FBI’s intelligence units.

Put another way, 17 days before President Trump was sworn in, NSA was unleashed against his embryonic administration, newly empowered to share raw intelligence gathered from telephone calls and emails that go through network switches outside the country, as well as messages between people outside the U.S. that go through domestic network switches.

New rules were issued under section 2.3 of Executive Order 12333 (Dec. 4, 1981) after Obama administration officials Loretta Lynch, then the attorney general, and James Clapper, then the national intelligence director, signed off on them on Jan. 3 this year and Dec. 15 last year, respectively. These rules came in the form of an unclassified document titled “Procedures for the Availability or Dissemination of Raw Signals Intelligence Information by the National Security Agency.”

“Now intelligence agencies can search directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by the NSA and then apply such rules as required for minimizing privacy intrusions,” Harry G. Hutchison writes at the American Center for Law and Justice website.

This means “the contents of the conversations engaged in by members of the Trump Administration and by President Trump himself are now under an increasing risk that they will be exposed to the public for purposes of embarrassing the Trump Administration and in order to impede the effectiveness of his policies.”

The policy change allowed “far more agents and officials to search through raw intelligence data,” and accordingly, “it appears that the prospect of intel leaks grew exponentially.”

Whatever investigation of Flynn took place was tainted from the start: U.S. intelligence operatives appear to have spied on him without any reasonable justification. There was no reason for the FBI to carry out the grilling Flynn reportedly received because it already possessed the intercepted alleged communication. “There appears to have been no foreign-intelligence or criminal-investigative purpose served by the FBI’s interrogation of General Flynn,” former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy writes.

A retired lieutenant general in the U.S. Army, Flynn fell on his sword for making contact with Kislyak and then lying to Pence about it, according to the White House.

It’s not as if we know what actually happened with Flynn and the Russian or Russians at this point, or if there really was any contact at all. News reports have not quoted any on-the-record sources so it is entirely possible the allegations against Flynn were conjured out of thin air by Obama holdovers determined to undermine the Trump administration.

This is the form that what Michael Walsh calls “a rolling coup attempt” against the Trump administration has taken.

Faceless operatives whose highest loyalty is to their jobs and their twisted realpolitik ideology don’t care what American voters think.

This, too, is part of the Obama legacy.