New documents were released to the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a conservative watchdog group run by President Trump’s lead attorney, Jay Sekulow which shows how Clapper’s DNI were rushing to get new raw intel-sharing procedures approved and signed by the attorney general shortly before Trump’s inauguration.
The newly unearthed documents obtained by the ACLJ through a FOIA lawsuit show just how aggressive the Obama Administration became days before Donald Trump was sworn into office.
Sekulow said that his team has been working for more than 2 years to obtain these documents. “We will continue to pursue new information about this strategy to embolden the Deep State,” Sekulow said.
It was already public knowledge that the Obama Administration expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share raw intel intercepted with the governments’s 16 other intel agencies, however, these new documents show how desperate Clapper and Lynch were to get this done in a hurry before Trump was sworn into office.
“[i]n its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections,” the New York Times previously reported.
On December 15, 2016, after Trump won the election, DNI James Clapper executed a document entitled “Procedures for the Availability or Dissemination of Raw Signals Intelligence Information by the National Security Agency Under Section 2.3 of Executive Order 12333.” On January 3, 2017, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch executed the document.
One of the documents reveals a DNI official telling the Undersecretary of Defense’s Director of Intelligence Strategy, Policy, & Integration, “Really want to get this done…and so does the Boss.”
“Boss” most likely refers to DNI Chief James Clapper — yes, the same James Clapper who leaked the January dossier briefing at Trump Tower New York to CNN’s Jake Tapper around the same time he was scrambling to execute these new intel-sharing procedures.
Via the ACLJ:
The documents the ACLJ obtained in one of our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits – this one against the ODNI and the National Security Agency (NSA) – confirmed what we suspected: the ODNI rushed to get the new “procedures signed by the Attorney General before the conclusion of this administration.”The documents also reveal that ODNI’s Robert Litt told Office of the Undersecretary of Defense’s Director of Intelligence Strategy, Policy, & Integration (and also USDI’s Liaison to ODNI): “Really want to get this done . . . and so does the Boss.”And, documents produced to the ACLJ by the NSA in this lawsuit show that NSA officials discussing that they “could have a signature from the AG as early as this week, certainly prior to the 20th Jan.” In other words, certainly before President Trump’s Inauguration.It was not immediately clear just how significant these revelations were. Now we know and these records must be publicized.
“By greatly expanding access to classified information by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, the Obama administration paved the way for a shadow government to leak classified information – endangering our national security and severely jeopardizing the integrity and reputation of our critical national security apparatus – in an attempt to undermine President Trump,” Sekulow said. “No president-elect or president should be targeted in this manner – and those responsible must be held accountable.”
Watch Jay Sekulow explain how the ODNI rushed to change the raw intel-sharing rules:
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