Discover Top Posts Tagged with #classified intel

Classified Intel {Philip Graves x Reader}

word count: 2.1k

pairing: philip graves x f!reader

summary: You are General Shepard's daughter and work for intelligence at your father's base. You help guide the shadows through a mission over comms. but you and one particular shadow have taken a liking for each other.

warnings: mentions of gunshots, pet names (baby, doll, sweetheart, darling)

AN: This is going to be a hidden romance type of gig in this fanfic; so if you hate stuff like this, sorry babe but this fic ain't for you. Be sure to check out the MASTERLIST!

Please elaborate on the specifics of "hole maintenance".

how about i make you my very willing test subject instead?

#answered #bazz-b #i don't discuss work stuff with anyone #especially former enemies #classified intel

Declassifying intel on Iran via Twitter is pure Trump.

A total moron chronically not faithful to the country, unaware of his own stupidity, willing to do anything to get attention.

The double standard and misogyny encapsulates the moral/ethical failings of all conservatives.

#trump #iran #classified intel #moron #traitor #unfit

Trump is meeting with Russia’s Foreign Minister in the Oval Office — again.

Adversaries invited in. Allies locked out.

Last time, they laughed about Trump’s firing of Comey. Today, they can celebrate the success of Russian propaganda.

Reagan wouldn’t recognize this GOP.

— Adam Schiff @RepAdamSchiff

This morning, Trump meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

This will be the 2nd time in American history that a Russian official has ever been allowed into the Oval Office — both under Trump.

Trump shared classified information with Lavrov in their first meeting in the Oval office in 2017

Trump met with Russians on the same day Articles of Impeachment were released.

Trump 'flaunting his oath of office' by hosting Russian envoy and 'echoing Putin's propaganda'

US Intelligence Leaks Are Threatening National Security. Here’s What the White House Can Do.

Photo: White House

Classified information leaks to the media have often been framed as clash between the so-called “deep state” and President Donald Trump. However, Britain’s threat to stop intelligence sharing information with the United States demonstrates the larger problem.

The BBC first reported Thursday that British police will stop sharing information with the United States on the Manchester terrorist attack after someone in the U.S. intelligence community leaked classified photos of the bomb site to The New York Times, which outraged U.K. officials. Later Thursday, Britain said after assurance, it would resume information sharing.

This came as a major concern to the Trump administration.

“The president has made it very clear going back months that leaks threaten national security and that he is outraged at these allegations and he wants to get to the bottom of it,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Thursday.

Prosecuting only a small number of leakers would send a strong message in protecting classified information, said Jordan Sekulow, executive director of the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative government watchdog group.

“The deep state, or shadow government, is something this administration should know to expect retaliation from,” Sekulow told The Daily Signal. “We would strongly support impaneling a grand jury if one hasn’t been impaneled already, to investigate leaking of classified information.”

But such investigations aren’t simple and can bump up against the First Amendment, said Robert Ray, a former federal prosecutor, who was the independent counsel that completed Ken Starr’s investigation of former President Bill Clinton.

“It can be done but it is difficult and can be regarded as unseemly, which is not to disparage the importance of classified information,” Ray told The Daily Signal. “For proof leakers shared that information with the media, the reporter usually has to identify them. The press respects the anonymity process. To extract that information, as in the Valerie Plame case, it requires holding reporters in contempt, or even imprisonment, until the reporter yields, which can be terrible.”

Ray was referring to Valerie Plame, who worked for the CIA when her name was leaked to the media during the Bush administration. A New York Times reporter had to serve jail time for not revealing her source through the investigation.

Balancing matters with free press concerns should be handled with sensitivity, said Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and a former Justice Department lawyer. But, he said there is no constitutional right to not identify someone who illegally disclosed information that endangers national security.

“Using intelligence information to harm political opponents is one of the worst abuses,” von Spakovsky told The Daily Signal. “If a foreign intelligence cuts off information—as England is doing—that is not only someone breaking the law, that endangers national security.”

Earlier this year, the media published reports based on leaks of classified information about national security adviser Michael Flynn’s communications with Russian officials, which led to Flynn’s ouster from the job.

This month, The Washington Post first reported that Trump told Russian officials about classified information. The New York Times followed by reporting Israel was the source for the information Trump provided to Russia. After that, Spicer said there is “clearly a pattern” of agenda-driven leaks of classified information within the government to undermine the president. He didn’t give a definitive answer as to whether there was an investigation.

The leak on Britain likely began with a Trump-related leaker, said Steven Bucci, a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, who is a former Pentagon official and former Army Special Forces officer.

“Once you begin the process of feeling it’s cool to be a reporter’s inside source, then it takes a life of its own,” Bucci told The Daily Signal. “I would bet a month’s pay that a person who had leaked about Trump also leaked this information.”

“This was not a whistleblower exposing government misconduct,” Ron Hosko, a former assistant FBI director for the bureau’s Criminal Investigative Division, told The Daily Signal. “This is a bureaucrat saying to a reporter, ‘Look at me, look what I know,’ maybe hoping the reporter will make him look good later on … There was no positive purpose for this leak.”

The British leak is one with “destructive and negative impact” into the investigation of the Islamic State’s attack on the concert, he said, adding the leakers should be “aggressively investigated and exposed.”

“This leak could alert the subject of the investigation what law enforcement knows, maybe allowing them to destroy valuable evidence, and give them the to opportunity to flee the jurisdiction and avoid arrest,” Hosko added.

The British Embassy in the District of Columbia didn’t respond to an email inquiry from The Daily Signal Thursday.

Fred Lucas, The Daily Signal

#classified intel #national security #State Department #National Security

US Intelligence Leaks Are Threatening National Security. Here’s What the White House Can Do.

Photo: White House

This came as a major concern to the Trump administration.

The British Embassy in the District of Columbia didn’t respond to an email inquiry from The Daily Signal Thursday.

Fred Lucas, The Daily Signal

#classified intel #national security #State Department #National Security

4 Questions About Declassifying and Disclosing Government Secrets

Photo: White House

President Donald Trump did not violate the law when he reportedly revealed classified information about an Islamic State terrorist plot during a meeting last week with Russian officials, intelligence and legal experts say.

But the news that Trump shared intelligence with the Russians that was provided to the U.S. by a partner country in the Middle East—a nation that had not given the Americans permission to share the information with Russia—has raised questions about the legal issues and protocols that surround disclosures of classified information.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Israel provided the intelligence in question, potentially complicating the U.S. relationship with its important Middle East ally.

H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, would not confirm or deny if Trump shared classified information with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador during a meeting at the White House last week. He downplayed the seriousness of the information Trump disclosed, saying that Trump in the moment made the decision to reveal the intelligence to the Russians.

“What the president discussed with the foreign minister was wholly appropriate to that conversation and is consistent with the routine sharing of information between the president and any leaders with whom he’s engaged,” McMaster said at a White House briefing.

Below, The Daily Signal answers basic questions about how the U.S. obtains intelligence, what the process is for classifying and declassifying it, and what the consequences could be of breaking with protocol.

1.) Did Trump Have Legal Authority to Disclose the Information?

Legal, national security, and intelligence experts agree the president can declassify or disclose whatever information he wants as part of his constitutional powers as commander in chief.

“The president is his own declassifying authority,” said David Shedd, an acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama who also served in the George W. Bush administration’s National Security Council.

“He doesn’t have to ask anybody else whether he can declassify anything,” said Shedd, who is now a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, in an interview with The Daily Signal. “As a declassifying officer in his standing as president of the U.S. and commander in chief, no one else has that authority to divulge the information spontaneously—not to mention with information that wasn’t ours to begin with.”

Patrick Eddington, a policy analyst in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute and a former CIA analyst, agreed that Trump’s legal authority should not be questioned, although he said it’s fair to assess the president’s judgment.

Eddington told The Daily Signal:

What makes the whole office of the president different is that the rules just don’t apply. The only relevant questions are, did Trump break trust with a foreign power who supplied this information by not clearing it with them in advance, which would be bad form but not unprecedented. And two, in doing so, did he potentially compromise a genuine, perishable source?

Even if the president has unique authority, other people can be charged with crimes for revealing classified information.

Experts say a government official could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917, which prohibits the improper accessing, handling, or transmitting of “information respecting the national defense” with the intent of injuring the U.S. or aiding a foreign nation.

“Under the Espionage Act that person can be charged and probably would be unless the president authorized the disclosure,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, in an interview with The Daily Signal.

Government officials who reveal classified information in an unauthorized fashion could also lose their security clearance and job, Goitein said.

2.) What Information Did Trump Disclose, and Was It Appropriate to Do So?

The White House has said Trump did not divulge the source and method of the intelligence he shared with the Russians. The Washington Post reported the information Trump gave to the Russians had to do with an ISIS terrorist threat related to the use of bombs embedded in laptop computers on airplanes.

The U.S. government has already publicly disclosed the laptop threat and acted in response to it.

In March, the U.S. and Britain barred passengers traveling through airports in 10 Muslim-majority countries from carrying laptop computers, tablets, and other devices larger than cellphones aboard direct inbound flights. The Department of Homeland Security is also reportedly considering extending the ban to flights from Europe to the U.S.

Shedd said even if the broad contours of the laptop threat are publicly known, the president should be careful in revealing details related to it.

“Don’t confuse acting responsibly with authority,” Shedd said. “[Trump] has a responsibility like any president does to determine whether the information he wishes to release will have negative implications or a fallout. If you have a particular threat that pinpoints not just the fact of a laptop threat or something the [Transportation Security Administration] has already revealed, but add to it by saying [the threat] is out of this airport and this country, and this kind of airline, that starts to reveal the sourcing, or the method, or both. And that has consequences with how partners may share information in the future.”

3.) How Are the Rules for Declassifications and Disclosures Set?

The rules of classification are governed by an executive order—not by congressional statute—that is periodically updated by different presidents. The current version is Executive Order 13526, which Obama signed in 2009. Trump has not modified it yet.

Under the order, “original classification authorities,” such as the leaders of U.S. departments and agencies, can classify and declassify information “owned”—collected or received—by their organizations.

Those authorities can then permit the disclosure of the information to someone who has the proper security clearance and has a status that says they to “need to know” it. Because the president oversees all the agencies, he has full rights to these powers on his own.

Goitein said Obama’s executive order includes a section saying that when the U.S. obtains intelligence from a foreign partner, the American government should honor the restrictions the allied country puts on sharing the information.

“It also says in the executive order that an unauthorized disclosure of a foreign government’s intelligence is presumed to cause harm to [that country’s] national security,” Goitein said.

4.) How Does the US Rely on Other Countries for Intelligence?

John Hannah, senior counselor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said intelligence cooperation with allied countries—known as “liaison relationships”—are essential to U.S. national security.

“These relationships are some of the crown jewels of the intelligence business,” said Hannah, who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s deputy national security adviser for the Middle East in the first term of the George W. Bush administration.

“We can’t do this alone,” Hannah told The Daily Signal in an interview. “We have huge amounts of capabilities, but particularly in some difficult target sets, there will be players who have unique advantages that are very important to us, particularly in terrorism cases, where it can be very hard to get inside information on the plotting of an operation.”

Hannah called Israel—the reported source of the information that Trump shared with Russia—the U.S.’ most important intelligence partner in the Middle East, with one of the “top five or six most capable” intelligence gathering operations in the world.

Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, told The New York Times that the two countries would maintain a close counterterrorism relationship despite Trump’s disclosure to Russia.

“Israel has full confidence in our intelligence-sharing relationship with the United States and looks forward to deepening that relationship in the years ahead under President Trump,” Dermer said.

Hannah too maintained confidence in U.S.-partner relationships.

“If in fact an unauthorized compromise occurred, partners will be disappointed and could become more cautious in what they share,” Hannah said. “But at the end of the day, we are leaps and bounds the most capable intelligence service in the world, and the value-added we provide is tremendous. So the thought that this one incident—particularly if sources and methods were not compromised—would lead a country to rupture or fundamentally reassess its intelligence relationship with the U.S., I seriously doubt it. Our partners benefit too much from the reciprocal cooperation.”

Josh Siegel, The Daily Signal

#classified intel #government secrets #trump #Big Government #Donald Trump