Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard inadvertently hampered the Justice Department’s investigation into former CIA director John Brennan by withdrawing the security clearances of potential witnesses who could have testified against him, according to a report.
Gabbard announced a probe into Brennan and other Barack Obama-era security officials in July after accusing them of meddling in a 2017 intelligence assessment about the extent of Russian hacking in the previous year’s U.S. presidential election to emphasize the opinion that it was carried out to Donald Trump’s advantage.
Calling the intervention evidence of a “years-long coup” to undermine Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton and his legitimacy in the White House, Gabbard referred Brennan, ex-FBI director James Comey, and her predecessor James Clapper to the DOJ. This move saw the president celebrate by posting a shocking AI video of Obama going to jail.
Now, Axios cites four anonymous officials from the Trump administration as saying that the investigation into Brennan, who has denied any wrongdoing, has hit a bump in the road because Gabbard announced on August 19 that she was revoking the security clearances of 37 “current and former intelligence professionals who have abused the public trust by politicizing and manipulating intelligence.”
She justified the decision at the time by alleging that the people concerned had engaged in “leaking classified intelligence without authorization.”
However, nearly a dozen staffers from that total have been listed as potential witnesses in the Brennan case and, according to Axios, Gabbard failed to notify either the DOJ or David Metcalf, the federal prosecutor leading the investigation, before proceeding.
“Some of these people are my witnesses and this is going to make it really difficult to prosecute now,” Metcalf reportedly told a senior administration official, one of the site’s sources said.
Another official commented that Gabbard’s actions had created “a major complication... a self-inflicted wound. It’s an unforced error if you want to talk baseball, an own goal if you want to use soccer.”
Lawyer Mark Zaid, an outspoken critic of the administration who represents six of the intelligence personnel whose clearances were revoked, used the same analogy when he said: “This seems to be, as usual, an unforced error by Trump administration officials who don’t think things through in the long game in favor of a quick-pass completion.
“If I were the defense counsel [for Brennan], I would raise the revocation in an attempt to undermine the credibility of the witnesses.”
The Independent has reached out to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for comment.
The withdrawal of the security clearances poses a problem because the witnesses may no longer be in a position to discuss classified material, because they may now feel less inclined to a cooperate with a government that has openly discredited their work and tarred their reputations and because Gabbard’s accusations against them enable Brennan’s attorneys to question their credibility, using her own words against them.
That said, another source insisted the blunder would not fatally imperil the investigation, commenting, “The clearance gives you only the ability to see new material. It doesn’t... require you to forget what’s already in your head, or... allow/prevent you from talking to someone about what you know. That’s based on the recipient’s clearance and need-to-know, not whether you hold a clearance.
“If the DOJ has the legal right to ask about what the interviewee knows, then the interviewee’s clearance status is irrelevant.”
It was also pointed out that a federal grand jury could still issue a report into the affair, even without indictments being handed down to any of the accused Obama officials.
At the very least, the development appears to serve as further evidence of the ongoing communication breakdown between Gabbard, other agencies, and the White House, which both The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian have recently reported on.
Since the publication of the Mueller Report in 2019, investigating the extent of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Kremlin operatives, the president and his allies have bemoaned the matter as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” and sought to retaliate by attempting to root out biased “deep state” bad actors.
“Tulsi is the right person for the job with the wrong team,” a senior administration official told Axios in defense of the intelligence chief.
“They’ve treated this like a PR operation to get on Fox, and not a serious intel reform process envisioned by the president.”
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