clapper, James DNI

---

see retaliATE

===

---

an 11 25

Far-right influencers are looking to Miami as a venue to pursue "long-promised charges of a 'grand conspiracy'" against President Donald Trump’s perceived adversaries, according to a New York Times report.

The influencers have even found a federal prosecutor there— Jason A. Reding Quiñones, Trump-appointed United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, who was sworn into office in August 2025 and is currently a central figure in a high-profile investigation into a 2017 intelligence community assessment regarding Russian election interference.

As for their alleged 'grand conspiracy,' the Times explains that its theory is "still unsupported by the evidence."

"A cabal of Democrats and 'deep-state' operatives, possibly led by former President Barack Obama, has worked to destroy Mr. Trump in a yearslong plot spanning the inquiry into his 2016 campaign to the charges he faced after leaving office," the Times explains.

Last week, however, Reding Quiñones issued over two dozen subpoenas, including to officials who took part in the inquiry into ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter, the Times writes.

Among the recipients include familiar Trump foils: James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence; Peter Strzok, a former F.B.I. counterintelligence agent who helped run the Russia investigation; and Lisa Page, a former lawyer at the bureau.

The Florida investigation currently focuses on a "January 2017 intelligence community assessment about Russian interference in the 2016 election, particularly the role played by John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, in drafting the document," the Times says.

The Brennan investigation started "after criminal referrals to the Justice Department by top Trump intelligence officials," the Times writes, and was assigned to David Metcalf, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, "who was given special authority to scrutinize and possibly prosecute Mr. Brennan, according to four people with knowledge of his actions who requested anonymity to discuss an open matter."

Metcalf held senior Justice Department positions during the first Trump administration.

The Brennan case, however, was transfered from Metcalf to Reding Quiñones, "as part of a decision to greatly expand the scope of the Brennan investigation into other, unspecified activities, according to two people with knowledge of the situation," the Times explains.

The Florida subpoenas, the Times explains, "seek documents or communications related to the intelligence community assessment from July 1, 2016, through Feb. 28, 2017, according to people familiar with them. It commands the recipients to provide them to prosecutors in Miami by Nov. 20."

Despite the dubious nature of these investigations, the Times says, they do have one thing on its side.

"Reding Quiñones, a military veteran, has pursued his mandate to hunt down Mr. Trump’s foes with a gung-ho attitude that has endeared him to the president and the small but influential cadre of loyalists pushing hardest for prosecutions," notes the Times.

---

AN 7 25

Atlantic writer Shane Harris reports President Donald Trump has removed dog owner James Clapper, 84, from the graduation ceremony for his bomb-sniffing dog, "Susan."

Clapper, who had sponsored Susan through a nonprofit organization that helps place service dogs, was thrilled when Susan completed a CIA training program designed to save lives. But Clapper, who was the former director of National Intelligence in the Obama administration, could not attend the ceremony.

“The day before the event, in late May, he received an email from the nonprofit dog-training group: Clapper’s name had been scratched from the guest list, per an executive order from the president of the United States,” writes Harris.

Harris said Trump accuses Clapper and other members of the “deep state” of concocting the “Russian hoax” story against him. Plus, Clapper has bemoaned Trump’s lack of class on cable-news appearances over the past five years.

IFrame Content

“After Trump returned to the White House, payback for Clapper was swift and personal,” said Harris. “Via executive order, Trump stripped his security clearance along with those of more than four dozen other former intelligence officials.”

The CIA declined to respond to questions, but Harris said CIA officials interpreted Trump’s executive order to mean Clapper should be barred from setting foot on agency property. The agency conveyed that message to the nonprofit, which had invited Clapper to attend the ceremony, according to a nonprofit representative.

“The upshot is that an octogenarian Air Force retiree who spent half a century in his nation’s service was not allowed to attend a party for a dog he essentially donated to the government and named after his dead wife,” said Harris. “… This was not a classified event. Attendees didn’t need a security clearance. There are photos from the ceremony on Facebook, showing happy people proudly posing with happy service dogs. One presumes that graduates were showered with scritches, kisses, and lots of treats, and not given the nuclear codes.”

This is a story, said Harris, that might seem trivial, but “it illustrates how powerfully this administration seeks retribution.”

Read the full Atlantic report at this link.

---

TRUMP RETALIATION

AN 1 25

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has denied the Department of Justice’s request to share Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on his investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents with Congress. Her order came just hours after now-President Trump signed an executive order to hold former government officials accountable for “unauthorized disclosure” of “sensitive” information, and “for election interference.”

Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee whose rulings have been highly criticized, refused to allow members of Congress to review Smith’s final report. Trump was investigated for alleged unlawful removal, retention, and refusal to return sensitive, classified, and top secret documents, reportedly including nuclear and defense secrets. The FBI executed a lawful search warrant on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and residence to retrieve some of the documents.

Part of her reasoning, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports, is that Congress “hasn’t asked for it and it’s not clear they need it, she says.”

“The ruling will make it easier for Trump to bury the report on the special counsel’s criminal probe,” Politico adds.

Late Monday night, one of the reportedly dozens of executive orders President Trump signed also addressed sensitive and classified information.

In it, he revoked the security clearances of dozens of former federal government officials, including some who had worked in his first administration, like former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton, whom he criticized.

The list includes the 51 former U.S. intelligence officials who signed a letter reportedly stating that the disclosure of emails purportedly from Hunter Biden’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

“Many of the former officials are long retired and no longer hold active clearances — meaning that the move may have limited practical impact on their careers — but the order nevertheless suggests that Trump intends to act on threats he’s made to penalize national security and intelligence professionals whom he deems to be his enemies,” CNN reported.

“They should be prosecuted for what they did,” Trump had said.

“National security is … damaged by the publication of classified information,” the executive order reads. “Former National Security Advisor John R. Bolton published a memoir for monetary gain after he was terminated from his White House position in 2019. The book was rife with sensitive information drawn from his time in government. The memoir’s reckless treatment of sensitive information undermined the ability of future presidents to request and obtain candid advice on matters of national security from their staff. Publication also created a grave risk that classified material was publicly exposed.”

In 2023, Bolton commented on the classified documents criminal case against Trump, at the time 37 felony charges, most of which were under the Espionage Act.

“Trump appeared to have a ‘pattern’ of wanting to collect materials ‘of interest to him,’ including classified documents,” Bolton said, as The Hill reported. He also “knocked Trump’s behavior as ‘very disturbing.'”

Bolton told MSNBC, “there were some [documents] that we did get back. Others, the most famous, to me, it demonstrates why I don’t need to read the indictment or believe its allegations are true, although I’m pretty confident they are — was the famous tweet that he did after getting an overhead picture of a failed Iranian missile launch, which he was shown during an intelligence briefing. [He] didn’t give [it] back, and it was tweeted before the intelligence officials got back to their office.”

Bolton was “referring to a 2019 tweet from the then-president.”

Trump’s order on Monday also stated: “It is the policy of the United States that individuals who hold government-issued security clearances should not use their clearance status to influence U.S. elections.”

Among the intelligence professionals the order revokes security clearance from are well-known cable news commentators, and political and national security experts.

In addition to Bolton, some on the list include: James Clapper, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, Jeremy Bash, and Nada Bakos.

Margaret Brennan, CBS News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent and “Face the Nation” moderator noted that Trump revoking “the security clearances of a long list of former intelligence officials … makes it hard for his own team to seek informed counsel from them.”

Mark Zaid, an attorney who specializes in national security issues, including security clearances, noted, “no President has ever done this before.”

Watch video of Trump below or at this link.

===

---

an 519 no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/former-director-of-national-intelligence-makes-it-clear-that-trump-would-not-have-won-without-russias-help

Former director of national intelligence makes it clear that Trump would not have won without Russia’s help

Former director of national intelligence makes it clear that Trump would not have won without Russia’s help Kremlin

written by Mark Sumner / Daily Kos May 26, 2019

375

When Donald Trump produced the first list of names for his death list this week, he didn’t include that of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. But Clapper appears to be out…

When Donald Trump produced the first list of names for his death list this week, he didn’t include that of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. But Clapper appears to be out to remedy this oversight by pointing out the fact that the Trump campaign didn’t just cooperate with Russia—it’s extremely unlikely Trump would have been elected without Russian support.

As Newsweek reports, Clapper’s just-released memoirs don’t shy away from drawing the obvious conclusion about the impact of the Russian interference and the benefits to Trump. As Clapper writes, “Surprising even themselves, [Russia] swung the election to a Trump win. To conclude otherwise stretches logic, common sense and credulity to the breaking point. Less than eighty thousand votes in three key states swung the election. I have no doubt that more votes than that were influenced by this massive effort by the Russians.”

Not only did the intelligence community have the information they needed to see that Russian interference was more than sufficient to cover Trump’s narrow margin of electoral victory—Trump knows it. Because the information Clapper is referencing was included in the first presentation that the intelligence community gave to Trump in January 2017.

Clapper is also clear in exactly why there wasn’t a larger effort in 2016 to fight back against Russia launching a military operation to interfere in a U.S. election.”House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said they would not support a bipartisan statement that might hurt their nominee for president,” wrote Clapper. “It seemed they had decided by then that they didn’t care who their nominee was, how he got elected or what effects having a foreign power influence our election would have on the nation, as long as they won.”

Trump has referenced Clapper dozens of times in Twitter and in his rally speeches. At first he claimed that the DNI had absolved Trump of any collaboration with Russia, though that wasn’t what Clapper said. Then that Clapper had written a “beautiful letter” praising Trump. But by the time that the Mueller investigation began, Trump listed Clapper among the “liars” who were conspiring against him, including FBI Director James Comey and CIA Director John Brennan. The former DNI also became a frequent target of attacks on Fox News, including by Trump favorites Hannity and Fox and Friends.

---

https://www.projectcensored.org/climate-change-and-national-security-through-the-lens-of-key-federal-publications

Susan Maret for Project Censored...

2016 annual volume (ODNI Clapper), the Assessment dramatically shifts in its discussion in connecting

extreme weather, climate change, environmental degradation, related rising demands for food and water, poor policy responses, and inadequate critical infrastructure will probably exacerbate and – and potentially spark – political instability, adverse health conditions, and humanitarian crises in 2016....

===

NB trump and putin: tit for tat, [cohn, roy, roger: deny all, attack]throw out emabassy ppl, demand to interroget mcfaul, kusner security clear leads (belatedly to :

https://www.alternet.org/sarah-sanders-trump-exploring-mechanisms-remove-security-clearances-brennan-clapper-comey-mccabe-and

...White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday said Donald Trump's administration is consideringrevoking the security clearances for former CIA director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, Former DNI James Clapper and former national security adviser Susan Rice.

Sanders accused the former officials of "monetizing" thier security clearances and using them to play poltiics.

clapper

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/they-swung-election-trump-win-msnbcs-maddow-stunned-ex-intel-directors-revelation

teaser? trms? 5/18