GOP senator demands records on FBI’s contact with DNC lawyer over Russian meddling

A top Republican senator is demanding documents regarding the FBI’s 2016 interactions with a lawyer working for the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign who provided information on Russian meddling.

Fox News reported last week that Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann gave documents pertaining to the Russia probe to then-FBI general counsel James Baker, according to Baker’s own testimony. Perkins Coie is the same firm that, while working for the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign, hired opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig into then-candidate Donald Trump’s background – resulting in the controversial anti-Trump ‘dossier.’

In a letter being sent Friday to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., asked for “all communications and documents” surrounding the bureau’s interactions with both Sussmann and DOJ official Bruce Ohr (whose wife worked for Fusion GPS).

SOURCE: http://observer.com/2016/03/hillary-has-an-nsa-problem/

........one of the most controversial of Ms. Clinton’s emails released by the State Department under judicial order was one sent on June 8, 2011, to the Secretary of State by Sidney Blumenthal, Ms. Clinton’s unsavory friend and confidant (who was running a sub rosa private intelligence service for Ms. Clinton).

This email contains an amazingly detailed assessment of events in Sudan, specifically a coup being plotted by top generals in that war-torn country. Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from a top-ranking source with direct access to Sudan’s top military and intelligence officials, and recounted a high-level meeting that had taken place only 24 hours before.

To anybody familiar with intelligence reporting, this unmistakably signals intelligence, termed SIGINT in the trade. In other words, Mr. Blumenthal, a private citizen who had enjoyed no access to U.S. intelligence for over a decade when he sent that email, somehow got hold of SIGINT about the Sudanese leadership and managed to send it, via open, unclassified email, to his friend Ms. Clinton only one day later.

NSA officials were appalled by the State Department’s release of this email, since it bore all the hallmarks of Agency reporting. Back in early January when I reported this, I was confident that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from highly classified NSA sources, based on my years of reading and writing such reports myself, and one veteran agency official told me it was NSA information with “at least 90 percent confidence.”

We can confirm that the contents of Sid Blumenthal’s June 8, 2011, email to Hillary Clinton, sent to her personal, unclassified account, were indeed based on highly sensitive NSA information. The agency investigated this compromise and determined that Mr. Blumenthal’s highly detailed account of Sudanese goings-on, including the retelling of high-level conversations in that country, was indeed derived from NSA intelligence.

Specifically, this information was illegally lifted from four different NSA reports, all of them classified “Top Secret / Special Intelligence.” Worse, at least one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). GAMMA is properly viewed as a SIGINT Special Access Program, or SAP, several of which from the CIA Ms. Clinton compromised in another series of her “unclassified” emails.

Currently serving NSA officials have told me they have no doubt that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from their reports. “It’s word-for-word, verbatim copying,” one of them explained. “In one case, an entire paragraph was lifted from an NSA report” that was classified Top Secret / Special Intelligence.

How Mr. Blumenthal got his hands on this information is the key question, and there’s no firm answer yet. The fact that he was able to take four separate highly classified NSA reports—none of which he was supposed to have any access to—and pass the details of them to Hillary Clinton via email only hours after NSA released them in Top Secret / Special Intelligence channels indicates something highly unusual, as well as illegal, was going on.

Suspicion naturally falls on Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA senior official who was Mr. Blumenthal’s intelligence fixer, his supplier of juicy spy gossip, who conveniently died last August before email-gate became front-page news. However, he, too, had left federal service years before and should not have had any access to current NSA reports. There are many questions here about what Hillary Clinton and her staff at Foggy Bottom were up to, including Sidney Blumenthal, an integral member of the Clinton organization, despite his lack of any government position.

How Mr. Blumenthal got hold of this Top Secret-plus reporting is only the first question. Why he chose to email it to Ms. Clinton in open channels is another question. So is: How did nobody on Secretary Clinton’s staff notice that this highly detailed reporting looked exactly like SIGINT from the NSA?

got to protect those “foreign partner relationships” involving “key allies”:

10 Oct: The Hill: Olivia Beavers: Senate Homeland chair vents Mueller probe is preventing panel from receiving oversight answers
(FBI Director Christopher) Wray conceded that he wants to do a better job of producing documents, while also citing the “many oversight requests” the bureau has received from different congressional committees.

The FBI chief also defended not “ripping off the bandaid” and releasing these highly sensitive documents for review.
“I think the topics that we are talking about are extremely sensitive intelligence operations. I understand the attraction of the rip-off-the-band-aid approach, but I also understand that in many cases we are talking about foreign partner relationships, tradecraft and all kinds of other things that we need to be very careful about protecting,” Wray said...

His defense of protecting these materials comes after Trump initially authorized a series of classified Russia-probe related documents to be released last month. He later walked back the release, citing “key allies” who have expressed concerns about releasing documents such as the Page surveillance application...
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/410776-senate-homeland-chair-expresses-frustration-that-mueller-probe-has

This is an excellently written report of a truly murky area of intel and it's transmission.

***Sidney Blumenthal, an integral member of the Clinton organization, despite his lack of any government position***

Sid had no government position because, despite HRC's efforts, State refused to employ this rogue operative. Hildy used him anyway, in an ex officio capacity. Sid is a law into himself with no moral compunction and a ruthless determination to accomplish whatsoever he undertakes... i.e.: perfect for Hildy's nefarious schemes.

Do not get in Sid's way; he is a Stalinist, with all that implies. He was deeply involved in events leading up to the Benghazi fiasco, also sending confidential info from there over unsecured lines. It is doubtful that Sid will ever be deeply investigated... he is at the heart of all of HRC's murky - and poorly executed - schemes, and we know what happens to folk who embark too deeply along that path. Had HRC become Prez, Sid would have become her Lavrenti Beria, always operating in the dark and dirty gutters.

I suspect that Sid hoped to ascend to a position of trust and power the way Terry McAuliffe has done, with all the filthy lucre that attains to such, but... As sleazy as TMc is, he cannot hold a candle to Sid's stench. Sid works best in the shadows, and belongs there. Well, he belongs in the inferno, but for now he lingers among us. sigh

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