Trump breaches intelligence security for political purpose

The Nunes Memo Release Is an "Extraordinary Event" in the History of Intelligence Oversight ~ TIME interview by Lily Rothman

(Sculduggery goings on in the intelligence agencies? Who knew? The problem is the lack of oversight.....summarized Loch K. Johnson in this interview. "...the problem is distraction. When members of Congress are spending four to six hours a day making phone calls to raise money for the next election, they’re not doing a lot of oversight work."

James Madison (1751-1836) ~ 

Madisonian ~ "power is a very dangerous thing"

When House of Representatives released the so-called “Nunes memo” (MaineWriter: aka "Nunesburger"), the news was one more step in a wave of controversy that has called into question the relationship between U.S. intelligence and the nation’s elected officials.

The GOP memo, produced by the House Intelligence Committee under committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes, contains allegations that suggest misconduct in the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. 

The decision to release it, against the wishes of the FBI and some politicians in both parties, represents a major shift in intelligence oversight, the process through which Congress and others are able to check the actions of agencies such as the FBI.

But the world of intelligence oversight wasn’t always so fraught. For much of the nation’s history, intelligence gathering proceeded largely with bipartisan support and little questioning. That began to change in the last several decades.

Some of that change was witnessed firsthand by Loch K. Johnson, in roles that included staff director of the Subcommittee on Intelligence Oversight for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He was also special assistant to the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and then a staff aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the mid-1970s, just as the Church Committee was investigating possible misdeeds in the course of federal intelligence-gathering.

He’s now Regents Professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia and the author of the new book Spy Watching: Intelligence Accountability in the United States. 

Johnson spoke to TIME shortly before the memo was declassified on Friday about why the release of the controversial document is such big news.

An edited transcript of the Johnson conversation follows:

JOHNSON: It is an extraordinary event to have the majority on the [House Intelligence] Committee decide to release a document with classified material in it, especially in light of the fact that the FBI has cautioned against releasing it. It does raise a question of great importance, a broader question, of when Congress should have the right to release classified information. This has been debated off and on.

I’ll tell you a story from the Church Committee days, in 1975: We did an assassination report, which was highly classified and very controversial, and Senator Church, Democrat of Idaho, decided to take it to the floor as an informational exercise. But when he got to the floor, many Senators, particularly Republicans, said, ‘You can’t release this information without a formal vote!’ And Church and a few others said, ‘We’re not here to take a vote. We’re here to make sure the Senators are not blindsided by the media and they know what this report is.’ So that was one approach, I think a rather brazen one, on behalf of Frank Church, even though I was his aide. I’m not sure that that report should have been released without a more formal procedure.

Another aspect of this, which I think is significant, is that the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee objected to the Democrats releasing a rebuttal, which also had some classified information in it. As you may recall, back when [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein was investigating the torture report, she at least made it possible for the opponents to release a dissenting report.

Many people, including the President, have bemoaned the politicization of this process. Was it ever really apolitical?

From 1947, when the CIA was created, up until about 1992 — so that’s quite a sweep of time — when it came to intelligence, there was pretty much bipartisan unity. There were a couple of episodes during the ’50s and ’60s in which Mike Mansfield and a couple of others introduced proposals to reform the oversight process and make it more formal, but they were quickly defeated by both the House and the Senate. It used to be that people were so proud that [intelligence] was above the partisan fray, with the exception of the efforts of the Reagan Administration to conduct covert action in Nicaragua despite the Boland Amendment [limiting such actions]; that led to the initial friction, but since then it’s become commonplace. I think part of what happened there is that Newt Gingrich came along and his theory was to so denigrate the Democrats that maybe the American public would finally turn to the Republicans and make them a majority. And in fact it worked, but unfortunately it made Washington a horrible place to be, and there’s so much hostility now.

You point to 1992, which is interesting to me, since it seems to me that the 1970s were when so much was changing in this world — you have the Church Committee, you have FISA, you have leaks, you have the post-Watergate disenchantment with the idea that government can be trusted…

Here’s the distinction I would make. Given the Watergate backdrop as well as the mendacity that accompanied the Vietnam War, there was a turn against the government by the public, and also the representatives in Congress. And the Church Committee made it clear that accountability and safeguards would apply not only to the open part of government but to the secret part of it to. But having said that, even after the Church committee there was a lot of bipartisan agreement on intelligence matters. For example, the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978] was passed almost unanimously.

So the ’70s are a turning point, but not toward politicization.

Yes. A turn toward bringing the secret side of government into the actual government, and the framework that Madison and the Founders back in 1787, created.

Speaking of the Founders, one clear thread in your book is the tension between intelligence agencies and democratic ideals. Is that tension inevitable?

I don’t think it’s inevitable. I think it boils down really to two models of governance in a democratic society, or two ways of approaching how we’re going to govern ourselves. One, one could call the Cheney approach or the Hamiltonian approach. The idea is that you need a strong, fast-moving, secretive executive branch in order for the United States to survive and perform well in a very hostile world. I think that flies in the face of the founding principles of this nation, which I would sum up by calling them the Madisonian principles. Madison’s idea, embraced by the other Founders by and large, was that power was a very dangerous thing. We’d learned that from George III.

A lot of it depends on what you think is true here. Do you think that intelligence agencies can be effective in a hostile world and still obey the dictates of a Madisonian system? As you can tell from my book, I’m firmly on the Madisonian side, and I think most American people are too, if they think about it.

Does technology change that calculation in any way?
Only in the sense that it makes accountability more difficult because members of Congress, and to some degree their staff, are by and large not as technically oriented as the intelligence agencies. So Congress, in order to keep pace with the technology that the National Security Agency and other places are thinking about, is going to have to bring in more technical people. It just requires a different kind of vigilance.

Is there anything about the evolution of this subject that you think the average person would be surprised to learn?

I think one thing that’s worth pointing out is that the executive branch all too often is not faithful to the new rules about oversight. For instance, we have something called the “Gang of Eight rule,” and when there’s a covert action, which is an effort by the CIA under White House orders to manipulate events abroad — it sounds like the Russians in our country, but we do that too of course — in times of emergency, you don’t have the report immediately to the Senate and House intelligence committee. What’s happened is the executive branch, and this would apply to Democrats and Republicans alike, has ignored the provision that follows, which is that after two days you have to report to the full committees.

Then, on the legislative side, the problem is distraction. When members of Congress are spending four to six hours a day making phone calls to raise money for the next election, they’re not doing a lot of oversight work.

You spoke to several people who have been Director of Central Intelligence about this topic. Did you learn anything from them that surprised you?

One thing that was surprising, and a little disheartening in a way, is that there’s a wide continuum of attitude by the nation’s spymasters, our top leaders in the intelligence community, about this Madisonian model I’ve suggested to you.

If you could go back in time and make people do something differently, is there anything about the evolution of intelligence accountability that you’d change?

I’d go back — do you think this is far enough? — to 1787, and I’d remind the Founders that they did a fabulous job constructing American government. It was a novel experiment and rather bold given that every other country in the world was a dictatorship or a monarchy at the time, so high marks for them. 

But I would have reminded them not to make an exception of intelligence. I wish the Founders and those who followed them would have realized that the hazards of putting intelligence as an exception to the Madisonian rules would lead to Operation Chaos and COINTELPRO and the assassination plots and other examples of lack of supervision, and to the great trouble that got this country.

MaineWriter summary ~ Donald Trump obviously disregarded the concept of both Hamilton and Madison by creating a political pulpit out of what he determined to be "intelligence", according to him. Unfortunately, Lily Rothman didn't ask Loch K. Johnson (at least it wasn't reported) about where Donald Trump fell on the spectrum between Hamiltonian or Madisonian understandings about national intelligence and security agencies. I suspect, Mr. Johnson has an opinion, but it wasn't published in this report. 

Rep. Devin Nunes is sneaky

In any case, Rep. Devin Nunes, and his outrageously political behaviors, fall out of the spectrum altogether. He's like a sneaky ghoul who is undeserving of political office. 

Republicans are now the political party of transparency? You've got to be kidding.

Opinion | EDITORIAL ~ echo 

We’ve Got the Memo. Now What About Trump’s Tax Returns?

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD FEB. 2, 2018


CreditAnthony Russo

Seriously? That’s all they’ve got?

The four-page memo (Nunesburger!) that promised to reveal the biggest political scandal in a generation has finally been released. 

For all the pregame hype, the memo looks less like the next Watergate and more like the next “unmasking”-gate, the 2017 pseudo-scandal that alleged — wrongly — that Obama administration officials had mishandled classified information. 

That dust-up was orchestrated, coincidentally, by Representative Devin Nunes, the California Republican who heads the House Intelligence Committee and whose staff prepared the document released on Friday.

The memo opens darkly, raising “concerns with the legitimacy and legality” of Justice Department and F.B.I. interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). 

What sort of illegality are they talking about? 

The memo doesn’t say.

Its central assertion appears to be that investigators who sought and received a warrant from the FISA intelligence court to do surveillance of the Trump campaign adviser Carter Page misled the court by failing to reveal the biased evidence they were relying on. 

First, they included in their warrant application a dossier prepared by Christopher Steele, a former British spy, without telling the court that Mr. Steele’s research was partly funded by the Clinton campaign. Second, they did not reveal that Mr. Steele had told a Justice Department official that he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.”

The memo also notes that Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the F.B.I. who stepped down this week, testified to the Intelligence Committee in December that investigators would not have sought the warrant without the information contained in the dossier.

This is all potentially interesting information. How significant is it in context? For starters, what other evidence did the intelligence court rely on in finding probable cause to issue the warrant? 

The memo doesn’t say. What about the court’s rationale for issuing three separate extensions, each of which required investigators to present new evidence beyond the dossier? 

The memo doesn’t say. Was any significant piece of information in the dossier found to be inaccurate? 

The memo doesn’t say. Did the court assume bias on the part of Mr. Steele or the funders of his research, as courts regularly do when considering evidence supporting a request for a warrant? 

The memo doesn’t say.

You know what would help to answer questions like these? 

Even more transparency. It would be useful, for instance, if we could see all of the supporting evidence in the warrant application — with necessary redactions, of course, to protect sources and methods. Also helpful would be the 10-page response memo prepared by Representative Adam Schiff, the committee’s ranking Democrat, who, unlike Mr. Nunes, has actually seen the intelligence underlying the application. 

Surely, Mr. Nunes, House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republicans who, in the days leading up the memo's release, expressed a new found enthusiasm for transparency in government would support releasing this missing information, wouldn't they? Transparency in government is the life blood of democracy, after all ---- the bulwark against abuses of power by public officials. As Mr. Ryan said in defending the House's decision to release the memo, "Transparency can reign supreme".  

Since Republicans are now on board with greater transparency, they will no doubt push Donald Trump to release his tax returns, as every other major party presidential nominee has done for the past four decades, won't they?

How about the White House visitors logs which the Trump administration started hiding from the public last year? Or, say the names of all government officials who have stayed ~ at their own or at taxpayers expense ~ at Donald Trump's Washington hotel, or at his Mar-a-Lago resort or at his golf courses and his other businesses with which the Trump Organization has a financial relationship, especially in countries where America has sensitive foreign policy interests, like China, India, Russia, Turkey or Saudi Arabia? 

And, of course, Americans should have complete confidence now that Congressional Republicans will demand complete transparency from all members of the Donald Trump campaign, transition team and administration, in describing their dealings with representatives of a foreign power that tried to swing our election ~ as well as from the special counsel who is investigating those efforts.

The party that demonstrated the release of Hillary Clinton emails as a central plank of the 2016 presidential campaign must support all of this and more. Right?

*It has been said that the Republican Party is the most dangerous organization on the planet; well DJT is their WMD. High time to for the...  Paul Smith 14 minutes ago*