Wednesday, February 26, 2025

That Was Quick

The post above, reporting on Director Gabbard's announcement on the Jesse Watters show at 10:45 PM, followed the one below, timestamped 3:26 PM. It appears that someone sent Christopher Rufo, co-author of Monday's City Journal article that broke the story, this screen shot of an NSA trans chat thread from this past December 20. If they didn't see this coming, they certainy should have. As someone who's written corporate policies on authorized use of IT resources, the apparent NSA policy reported in the City Journal article is pretty standard:

According to an NSA press official, “All NSA employees sign agreements stating that publishing non-mission related material on Intelink is a usage violation and will result in disciplinary action.”

A firing for this sort of thing by a non-government employer would probably stand up in court. A difficulty here might arise if the fired NSA employees claimed this use was specifically authorized:

[T]hey did so with the full support of NSA leadership, which declared that DEI was “not only mission critical, but mission imperative.”

On the other hand, anyone in NSA leadership who said this would be fired himself. It looks like similar purges will be under way in the FBI:

FBI leadership is starting an investigation into the origins of the agency’s plan a decade ago to infiltrate the campaign of presidential candidate Donald Trump using two female undercover “honeypot” agents.

The off-the-books investigation, launched in 2015 by FBI Director James B. Comey, was revealed by an agency whistleblower in a protected disclosure to the House Judiciary Committee last year and first reported exclusively by The Washington Times in October.

In the intelligence community, a honeypot commonly refers to an undercover operative, usually a woman, who feigns sexual or romantic interest to obtain information from a target.

. . . The whistleblower agent “personally knew” that Mr. Comey ordered an FBI investigation into Mr. Trump and that Mr. Comey “personally directed it,” according to the disclosure.

The investigation did not appear to target a specific crime but was more of what agents would describe as a fishing expedition to find anything incriminating against Mr. Trump.

. . . “The case had no predicated foundation, so Comey personally directed the investigation without creating an official case file in Sentinel or any other FBI system,” according to the whistleblower’s disclosure. “The FBI has multiple methods of protecting highly sensitive investigations, so Comey did not have a legitimate reason not to officially create an official investigation file or have a file number.”

. . . The investigation was eventually closed because a major newspaper obtained a photograph of one of the undercovers and was about to publish it, but the FBI press office told the outlet that the photograph was an FBI informant who would be killed if the photograph was publicly released.

In fact, it was a photograph of the FBI undercover employee.

The FBI whistleblower employee noted in the disclosure that one of the undercovers agreed to be transferred to the CIA so she would not be available as a potential witness.

. . . The other undercover employee was rewarded for her activities through a promotion in the bureau and is now a high-level FBI executive in a major field office.

The whistleblower employee observed one or more employees in the FBI being directed to never discuss the operation with anyone ever again, including other people involved in the 2016 Trump campaign infiltration operation.

It looks like Trump's appointees are moving very quickly over cases like this. And if one set of FBI executives can tell employees never to mention it, a new set can tell them to explain it all, in detail. This should be juicy.

Many visitors have probably noted that Blogger put up a flag on yesterday's post warning users that it had sensitive content. It seems that this only demonstrated the Streisand effect yet again:

Streisand effect, phenomenon in which an attempt to censor, hide, or otherwise draw attention away from something only serves to attract more attention to it. The name derives from American singer and actress Barbra Streisand’s lawsuit against a photographer in 2003, which drew attention to the photo she was suing to have taken off the Internet.

It spiked my traffic yesterday and today. Maybe Blogger will do it some more -- I hope so!

posted by test @ February 26, 2025   0 Comments