Michael Ellis, a former Republican political operative, resigned Friday as the National Security Agency’s top lawyer, having been sidelined for three months after President Biden took office.
The NSA director, Gen. Paul Nakasone, had placed Ellis on administrative leavethe day President Donald Trump left the White House — just as Ellis was taking up the position. The reasons: a pending Pentagon inspector general probe, an official told The Washington Post at the time, and a security inquiry into Ellis’s handling of classified information, according to a letter from Ellis’s attorney to Nakasone, a copy of which was obtained by The Post.
Nakasone had agreed to install Ellis as general counsel just days earlier under orders from Trump’s acting defense secretary. The role does not require Senate confirmation. Continue reading.
The White House is seeking reauthorization of a law that lets the N.S.A. gain access to logs of Americans’ phone and text records — while acknowledging that the program has been indefinitely halted.
WASHINGTON — Breaking a long silence about a high-profile National Security Agency program that sifts records of Americans’ telephone calls and text messages in search of terrorists, the Trump administration on Thursday acknowledged for the first time that the system has been indefinitely shut down — but asked Congress to extend its legal basis anyway.
In a letter to Congress delivered on Thursday and obtained by The New York Times, the administration urged lawmakers to make permanent the legal authority for the National Security Agency to gain access to logs of Americans’ domestic communications, the USA Freedom Act. The law, enacted after the intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden revealed the existence of the program in 2013, is set to expire in December, but the Trump administration wants it made permanent. Continue reading “Trump Administration Asks Congress to Reauthorize N.S.A.’s Deactivated Call Records Program”
Red Square and the Kremlin in Moscow. Credit: Yuri Kadobnov, AFP, Getty Images)
Russian hackers have recently been linked to cyberattacks targeting critical infrastructure in other countries, raising concerns about the nation’s ability to target U.S. utilities.
Security firm FireEye this week said a Russian-linked research institute likely helped develop malicious software that was used to shut down a Saudi petrochemical plant last year. And research firm ESET said earlier this month that it uncovered a new hacking group, allegedly tied to Russia, that targeted companies in Ukraine and Poland.
Officials have been warning for months of a Russian campaign on the U.S. power grid. The new reports reveal the extent of the Moscow-tied hackers’ work, and the threat they pose to critical U.S. infrastructure.
The following article by Joe Conason was posted on the National Memo website May 28, 2018:
The National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, pictured from the air in this image taken on January 29, 2010. Saul Loeb/AFP
As Trump and his minions poured out mesmerizing disinformation last weekend about the origins of the Russia probe, a bracing slap of reality was delivered by Observer.com, a news website owned by the Kushner family (and once known as the New York Observer, a weekly newspaper where I formerly worked.)
Observer columnist John Schindler, a former National Security Agency analyst and professor at the Naval War College, is a controversial figure who worked for years in U.S. counterintelligence. He is a #NeverTrump conservative with deep ties in the intelligence community, whose devotion to official secrecy he shares.
In his latest column, Schindler not only debunks Trump’s “Spygate” charges against the FBI, but reminds us of a crucial clue about how the Russia probe began. The FBI counterintelligence investigation of Donald Trump and his campaign’s troubling connections to the Kremlin actually was initiated when alarms were set off by signals intelligence, or what spooks call “SIGINT” — meaning messages and conversations intercepted by the NSA and its allies in foreign intelligence agencies.
Schindler reminds us that “multiple SIGINT reports” gathered by NSA and allied agencies as early as 2015, involving interactions between Trump and his circle and “known or suspected Russian agents,” set off suspicions in U.S. intelligence agencies. Amplifying NSA’s own data collection, such reports came from agencies in Australia, Germany, Estonia, Poland, France, and the Netherlands. Some of the most incriminating information first came from NSA’s most trusted partner, the United Kingdom’s innocuously named Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.
Concerning those British contributions, Schindler quotes the Guardian, which reported on the Trump-related intercepts last year. “GCHQ was at no point carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or his team or proactively seeking information. The alleged conversations were picked up by chance as part of routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets. Over several months, different agencies targeting the same people began to see a pattern of connections that were flagged to intelligence officials in the U.S.”
But the Western intelligence agencies weren’t “wiretapping” Trump, as he has ludicrously claimed. They were instead listening to the Kremlin and its spies, as usual, and finding repeated conversations and connections implicating Trump.
According to Schindler, a senior NSA official recently told him that when the Republican convention ratified Trump’s nomination in July 2016, “We knew we had a Russian agent on our hands.” Classified above top secret and available only to a handful of officials, the damning reports on the Republican nominee clearly indicated that the Russians felt they controlled Trump, that they were seeking to turn the election in his favor — and that Trump and his children were well aware of these nefarious machinations.
Whether and how Robert Mueller will be able to use such highly classified data in a criminal investigation remains to be determined. But there is little doubt that if those reports exist, the former FBI director has seen them.
High points of the intelligence briefing of Congress today, March 20, 2017, from Matthew Rosenberg, Emmarie Huetteman and Michael S. Schmidt update at 11:01 AM and posted on the New York Times website:
■ The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, publicly confirmed an investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election and whether associates of the president were in contact with Moscow.
■ Mr. Comey also said the F.B.I. had “no information” to support President Trump’s allegation that Barack Obama wiretapped him.
■ The hearing’s featured witnesses: Mr. Comey and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency.
The White House is seeking reauthorization of a law that lets the N.S.A. gain access to logs of Americans’ phone and text records — while acknowledging that the program has been indefinitely halted.
