Tag: CIA

‘TREASONOUS’: President slams collusion accusors for their ‘evil’ acts

by Breck Worsham, posted in law, news, politics

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump came out swinging Monday against those who had for more than two years accused him of colluding with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

“There are a lot of people out there that have done some very, very evil things, very bad things, I would say treasonous things against our country,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “And hopefully people that have done such harm to our country — we’ve gone through a period of really bad things happening — those people will certainly be looked at. I have been looking at them for a long time. And I’m saying, “Why haven’t they been looked at?” They lied to Congress. Many of them — you know who they are — they’ve done so many evil things.”

“I will tell you, I love this country. I love this country as much as I can love anything: my family, my country, my God. But what they did, it was a false narrative. It was — it was a terrible thing,” Trump continued. “We can never let this happen to another President again. I can tell you that. I say it very strongly. Very few people I know could have handled it. We can never, ever let this happen to another President again.”

The president’s comments come just one day after an official report released by Special Counsel Robert Mueller failed to tie the president to any unethical activities relating to the 2016 presidential campaign.

Mueller’s investigation, which had gone on for nearly two and one-half years had encompassed the entire first half of Trump’s first term in office.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders on Monday called for congressional hearings to investigate many of the president’s most prominent critics including former CIA Director John Brennan, Former FBI Director James Comey and former U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

“The media and Democrats have called the president an agent of a foreign government,” Sanders said during an appearance on NBC’s “Today”. “That is an action equal to treason, which is punishable by death in this country.”

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REPORT: Brennan predicting indictments Friday of Trump’s Family

by Breck Worsham, posted in law, news, politics

WASHINGTON (Newsmax) — Former CIA Director John Brennan is predicting special counsel Robert Mueller could announce more indictments in the Russia probe Friday — and the list could include members of President Donald Trump’s family.

Speaking with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Tuesday night, Brennan — a frequent Trump critic — said he has no inside knowledge but thinks Friday would make sense for Mueller to reveal another round of indictments.

“I think Robert Mueller wants to be able to conclude his work and turn over the investigative threads to the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of Virginia, and other jurisdictions as appropriate, as we’re coming up to two years,” Brennan said. “So, I think he does want to conclude that.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if, for example, this week on Friday, not knowing anything about it, but Friday is the day the grand jury indictments come down. And also, this Friday is better than next Friday because next Friday is the 15th of March, which is the Ides of March. And I don’t think Robert Mueller will want to have that dramatic flair of the Ides of March when he is going to be delivering what I think are going to be . . . the final indictments, as well as the report he gives to the attorney general.”

Brennan added if Mueller were to indict a member of the Trump family, the president will likely shut down the investigation soon after.

“It would be the final act of Mueller’s investigation because Bob Muller and his team knows if he were to do something, indicting a Trump family member or if he were to go forward with indictment on criminal conspiracy involving U.S. persons, that would basically be the death knell of the special counsel’s office because I don’t believe Donald Trump would allow Bob Mueller to continue in the aftermath of those types of actions,” he said.

Mueller’s Department of Justice probe began in May 2017 over claims the Trump campaign might have worked with the Russians to win the 2016 election. Several indictments of both American citizens, Russian nationals, ​and Russian businesses have been handed down, but none of those cases pointed to collusion.

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‘HE’S A DISGRACE!’: Trump attacks former CIA director John Brennan as new director, Gina Haspel, is sworn in

by Breck Worsham, posted in law, news, politics

Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump on Monday attacked former CIA director John Brennan, saying the former intelligence head had disgraced himself and the entire intelligence agency.

Quoting a tweet by former Secret Service agent and current Florida congressional candidate Dan Bongino in which Bongino slammed Brennan for supporting a “hit job” against the president, Trump issued a barrage of lengthy criticisms against his former director of intelligence.

“John Brennan is panicking. He has disgraced himself, he has disgraced the Country, he has disgraced the entire Intelligence Community,” Trump paraphrased Bongino in a series of tweets. “He is the one man who is largely responsible for the destruction of American’s faith in the Intelligence Community and in some people at the top of the FBI. Brennan started this entire debacle about President Trump.”

“We now know that Brennan had detailed knowledge of the (phony) Dossier…he knows about the Dossier, he denies knowledge of the Dossier, he briefs the Gang of 8 on the Hill about the Dossier, which they then used to start an investigation about Trump. It is that simple,” Trump continued, paraphrasing Bongino. “This guy is the genesis of this whole Debacle. This was a Political hit job, this was not an Intelligence Investigation. Brennan has disgraced himself, he’s worried about staying out of Jail.”

Meanwhile, Brennan’s replacement, Gina Haspel, was confirmed Monday as the first female CIA director in U.S. history.

“She has earned the universal respect, admiration and trust of her colleagues here at the CIA, throughout the government and all over the world, Gina is truly respected,” the president said as he attended Haspel’s swearing in at Langley. “And today we also mark another proud milestone as Gina becomes the first woman ever to lead the CIA.”

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BREAKING: Senate confirms Gina Haspel as new CIA director

by Breck Worsham, posted in law, news, politics

Washington, D.C. — The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted to confirm President Trump’s choice for CIA Director Gina Haspel after weeks of rigorous debate by lawmakers.

Haspel was confirmed by a 54-44 vote on the Senate floor. The vote came despite protests by a hand full of senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who spoke out against her confirmation on Wednesday.

Haspel’s confirmation became all but a done deal on Wednesday despite the pushback when it became clear that she had enough votes to clear the intelligence committee for Thursday’s vote. A vote for yes by Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia tipped the scales in Haspel’s favor.

She will become the first female director of the CIA in U.S. history.

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NORTH KOREA ACCUSES CIA OF ASSASSINATION PLOT TO TAKE OUT KIM JONG UN AS THREATS OF NUCLEAR STRIKE CONTINUE

by Breck Worsham, posted in Uncategorized

PYONGYANG, NORTH KOREA — North Korean officials on Friday accused the United States of staging a CIA plot to assassinate dictator Kim Jong Un.

Accusing U.S. officials with working with South Korea to take out the North Korean leader with a “biochemical substance,” the rogue state vowed to “mercilessly destroy” those behind the plot.

According to a propaganda piece published by North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency, “a hideous terrorists’ group” directed by the Central Intelligence Agency and South Korean cohorts “ideologically corrupted” a North Korean dissident and paid the man, who was identified only only as “Kim”, over $20,000 to carry out the hit.

“The Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S. and the Intelligence Service (IS) of south Korea, hotbed of evils in the world, hatched a vicious plot to hurt the supreme leadership of the DPRK and those acts have been put into the extremely serious phase of implementation after crossing the threshold of the DPRK,” the KCNA said (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-usa-idUSKBN18113D?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=Social). “A hideous terrorists’ group, which the CIA and the IS infiltrated into the DPRK on the basis of covert and meticulous preparations to commit state-sponsored terrorism against the supreme leadership of the DPRK by use of bio-chemical substance, has been recently detected.”

“They hatched a plot of letting human scum Kim commit bomb terrorism targeting the supreme leadership during events at the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun and at military parade and public procession after his return home,” the statement continued. “They told him that assassination by use of biochemical substances including radioactive substance and nano poisonous substance is the best method that does not require access to the target, their lethal results will appear after six or twelve months.”

The North’s Ministry of State Security released a statement referring to the plot as “the last-ditch effort” of U.S. “imperialists” and a “pipe-dream” that could never succeed. “Criminals going hell-bent to realize such a pipe dream cannot survive on this land even a moment,” the statement read.

The National Intelligence Service has dismissed North Korea’s accusations as “groundless”.

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TAKING DOWN ISIS: TRUMP REVERSES OBAMA’S POLICY ON DRONE STRIKES; RETURNS LAUNCH AUTHORITY TO CIA

by Breck Worsham, posted in Uncategorized

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In yet another hit to the legacy of former president Barack Obama, president Donald Trump has again authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct drone strikes against suspected terrorists, a direct reversal to the policy once held under the Obama administration.

U.S. officials announced the change in policy on Tuesday in what the Trump administration says is a move to step up the fight against Islamic State and other militant groups.

Under the policies of the former Obama administration, the CIA used drones and other intelligence resources to locate suspected terrorists but only military agents were authorized to carry out an actual strike.

According to the feds, the agency first utilized its new authority to strike in late February in an attack on a senior al Qaeda leader in Syria, Abu al-Khayr al-Masri. The strike in northern Syria on Mr. Masri, a son-in-law of the late al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, had been reported, but the fact that the CIA was the agency behind the strike was not reported until this week.

Upon hearing the announcement, a spokesman for the ACLU was quick to criticize the president’s change in policy.

“There are a lot of problems with the drone program and the targeted killing program, but the CIA should be out of the business of ordering lethal strikes,” said Christopher Anders, deputy director of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union. “That decision on whether to strike or not to strike, and that order should be coming from through the military chain of command. The CIA should be a foreign intelligence gathering and analysis organization — not a paramilitary one,” he said.

Spokesmen for the Pentagon and the CIA declined to issue further comment.

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“THE ANSWER IS NOT KNOWN”; ASSANGE SAYS IT’S STILL UNCLEAR AS TO WHETHER CIA HACKED DOMESTIC TARGETS

by Breck Worsham, posted in Uncategorized

Two days after unveiling what he claimed to be the Central Intelligence Agency’s “entire hacking capacity,” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange says it’s still not clear if the CIA targeted Americans.

Speaking Thursday during a live web broadcast from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has remained in seclusion for the past five years, Assange said it is still unknown whether the CIA concentrated it’s spying activity on Americans or foreign interests.

“The answer is not known,” Assange said when asked about the matter. His group, he said, has a list of more than 22,000 Internet addresses, known as IP addresses, “corresponding to CIA activities within the United States.” At issue is the fact that he isn’t sure what exactly what was taking place at those addresses.

Assange also used to platform to call out a CNN reporter who asked whether or not the CIA’s actions would be considered legal “as long as these are overseas targets” as suspicious.

“There are many questions that might be asked by CNN. One that seems to defend the interests of the CIA, I think, is a bit problematic as being the first question to ask,” said Assange.

Tuesday’s leak of more than 8,000 documents sent the federal government, already hit several times by high profile leaks, into a tailspin as some of the spy agency’s most top secret and highly guarded cyber tools were revealed to the world.

Despite vows from the federal government to find the person responsible for leaking the documents to Wikileaks, Assange remained defiant, blaming the American government for allowing itself to be hacked.

“The Central Intelligence Agency lost control of its entire cyberweapons arsenal,” Assange said. “This is an historic act of devastating incompetence to have created such an arsenal and stored it all in one place and not secured it.”

WikiLeaks has carried out a global crusade in recent years to expose government secrets through a series of document drops. One such incident was credited with the downfall of former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign after a hack of the DNC revealed a series of embarrassing emails documenting chaos and backstabbing within the democratic party.

In a statement on Wednesday, CIA spokesman Jonathan Liu denied allegations that the agency had spied on Americans and said CIA spy techniques are reserved only for potential foreign threats.

“CIA is legally prohibited from conducting electronic surveillance targeting individuals here at home, including our fellow Americans, and CIA does not do so,” said Liu.

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MORE BOMBSHELLS TO COME: WIKILEAKS SAYS 99 PERCENT OF DIRT ON CIA NOT YET RELEASED

by Breck Worsham, posted in Uncategorized

As if the shocking revelations against the Central Intelligence Agency weren’t enough, Wikileaks, the anti government hacking group responsible for an 8,000 document drop, says there are many more to come.

The group says that it’s its full cache of stolen CIA files, which they have named “Vault 7,” will be dropped periodically over a series of releases.

Tuesday’s release, which revealed how CIA hackers convert smart phones, Samsung TVs and other electronics into covert microphones used for spying against U.S. citizens, was enough to throw the government into a tailspin.

Sources inside the FBI said the agency’s primary focus going forward will be to find the person or persons responsible for the leak and to stop further breaches from occurring (https://rebekahworsham.org/2017/03/08/we-will-find-them-fbi-hunts-source-who-leaked-treasure-trove-of-documents-to-wikileaks/).

As bad as Tuesday’s leak was, high ranking officials inside the government fear that the fallout from future leaks may be even worse. According to sources, preliminary reports indicate that upcoming document drops could have an even more significant impact than the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013, which revealed the extent of the NSA’s surveillance program.

Snowden, a former contractor for the NSA, now lives in Russia where he receives asylum from prosecution in the United States.

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‘WE WILL FIND THEM’: FBI HUNTS SOURCE WHO LEAKED TREASURE TROVE OF DOCUMENTS TO WIKILEAKS

by Breck Worsham, posted in Uncategorized

Sources inside the Central Intelligence Agency say the intelligence group has but one mission on it’s hands: finding a mole.

Just one day after the shadowy anti-government group Wikileaks released what it claimed to be the “entire hacking capacity of the CIA,” the focus Wednesday turned to finding the source behind the embarrassing expose.

“There is heavy s— coming down,” a veteran cyber contractor for the intelligence community told Fox News (http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/03/08/wikileaks-reveal-cia-hacking-trove-has-feds-on-mole-hunt.html). But even with highly trained intelligence officials on the case, finding the source of the leak will prove excruciatingly difficult considering the fact that the facility at the center of the breach has more than 5,000 employees, all of which have access to the information that was unveiled.

What may help are the forensics of the documents themselves.

“They’re going to try to do some forensic work because those documents probably have been changed [over time], so that enables them to narrow down the period to when they were taken,”Alex Yampolskiy, CEO of SecurityScorecard told Fox. “Once you say ‘this seems like it was a snapshot from this particular time,’ then they can look at audit logs of who had access to the document during that time frame.”

“They’ll run certain types of analytics – what websites did they access? What are the emails? How many people are still working there?” Yampolskiy added.

Regardless of the findings, this latest data breach is indicative of larger, more serious security problems belonging to the federal government.

“What’s clear to me — and this is true of pretty much every big data breach — the preventive controls were broken, or the detective controls were broken,” Brian Vecci, a technological evangelist for cybersecurity company Varonis told Fox. “Meaning, either too many people had access to the information, or the people that had access weren’t being recorded and analyzed. Or both.”

In the wake of leaks by Army private Chelsea Manning and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, the government had vowed to crack down to ensure that such incidents did not occur again.

That promise was short lived based on another hacking on the government by Wikileaks last fall when the organization obtained emails belonging to the DNC and made them public. The details of the emails proved humiliating to then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and many political analysts blame the revelations contained in the documents for the downfall of Clinton’s campaign.

“Anybody who thinks that the Manning and Snowden problems were one-offs is just dead wrong,’’ Joel Brenner, former head of U.S. counterintelligence at the office of the Director of National Intelligence told The Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-prepares-for-new-hunt-for-wikileaks-source/2017/03/07/28dcb9e0-0356-11e7-ad5b-d22680e18d10_story.html?utm_term=.2ba89a617be6).

“Ben Franklin said three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead,” added Brenner. “If secrets are shared on systems in which thousands of people have access to them, that may really not be a secret anymore. This problem is not going away, and it’s a condition of our existence.’’

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WIKIHACKED: ASSANGE UNVEILS ‘ENTIRE HACKING CAPACITY’ OF THE CIA

by Breck Worsham, posted in Uncategorized

In another embarrassing expose of the United States government, Julian Assange on Tuesday released what he claims to be the entire hacking capacity of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Released through his anti-secrecy website, Wikileaks, Assange dropped an 8,000-plus page disclosure that he described as “the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.”

“Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation,” Wikileaks stated on its website. “This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.”

According to Assange, the 8,761 documents and files, released as “Vault 7 Part 1” and titled “Year Zero”, were obtained from an “isolated, high-security network” at the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Va. The facility reportedly employs more than 5,000 people but it was not revealed which of those employees tipped off Assange.

Per a statement on the Wikileaks website, the argosy of documents had been “circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors,” one of whom “recently” made the archive available to Assange.

The wealth of documents allegedly includes information on CIA-developed malware with names such as “Assassin” and “Medusa”, that were specifically developed to target iPhones, Android phones, Microsoft, Mac and Linux operating systems and smart TVs. According to the leaked documents, an entire unit in the CIA has been assigned the duty of inventing programs that have the ability to hack Apple products.

In it’s statement, Wikileaks hinted that some of the technologies may play a role in high tech assassinations of political foes.

“It would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations,” the release stated.

Former NSA whistle blower, Edward Snowden, tweeted Tuesday afternoon about the WikiLeaks release.

“Still working through the publication, but what @Wikileaks has here is genuinely a big deal. Looks authentic,” wrote Snowden, who remains in Russia under political asylum as he seeks to avoid criminal prosecution in the U.S.

In response to a request for statement, a spokesperson for the CIA said, “The Central Intelligence Agency does not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents. There will be no further statement at this time.”

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