New York Times: John Durham is Probing How John Brennan Put Together His Coup Effort, and That Is a Dangerous and Unamerican Violation of the CIA's Privacy!!!!

That's pretty much the spin.

The sourcing from this obviously comes from Brennan or other CIA figures involved in cooking up the plan to use the dossier as a pretext to open a criminal file on Trump.

The New York Times dutifully relays their Message: That unaccountable bureaucrats should be unaccountable forever, and anything less than full unaccountability is anti-American and just playing into Putin's hands.

On the plus side: That means that someone's scared and trying to shut down the investigation.

So the investigation may actually not be completely worthless.

Excising as much of the Times' "You know who also investigated John Brennan? Adolph Hitler, that's who" spin, and excerpting just the actual news...

Mr. Durham appears to be pursuing a theory that the C.I.A., under its former director John O. Brennan, had a preconceived notion about Russia or was trying to get to a particular result -- and was nefariously trying to keep other agencies from seeing the full picture lest they interfere with that goal, the people said.

...

The Durham investigation has rattled current and former intelligence officers. Little precedent exists for a criminal prosecutor to review the analytic judgment-making process of intelligence agencies, said Michael Morrell, a former acting C.I.A. director who left the government in 2013.
“This whole thing is so abnormal,” Mr. Morrell said.

Mike Morrell was the CIA officer who let his boss testify to Congress that the FBI, not the CIA, "edited" the Benghazi talking points -- even though he knew the CIA had edited them, because he himself had edited them.

The station chief sent a detailed e-mail Sept. 15, the day before national security adviser Susan Rice said on Sunday talk shows that the attack evolved from a spontaneous protest. The White House has since admitted the protest never happened and it was a terrorist attack.

Morell deleted references to extremist threats linked to al-Qaeda in versions of the talking points and said he did so because he believed the information provided by intelligence community analysts and the Defense Department over the CIA's own station chief in Libya.

So of course he then permitted a lie to be uttered to Congress without correcting the record.

He then resigned from the CIA to work for the Hillary Clinton/Jon Podesta connected Beacon Security Group.

He's the guy the New York Times turns to for the skinny on what's "abnormal."

Okay.

This seems to be about unmasking, though it's written so damned obscurely that I can't say for sure:

A second fight that Mr. Durham is focused on, the people said, centered on a certain data set. The nature of the data and of the dispute remains unclear, though one person suggested that the disagreement concerned whether N.S.A. analysts could see the raw information or whether the C.I.A., before sharing it, needed to filter the data to mask names and other identifying details about Americans and American organizations.

Also interesting: Investigators want to look at the deleted Hillary emails -- which, as everyone suspected, had in fact been accessed by foreign countries and which the US could look at.

But no -- US investigators are not being allowed to see them.

Why not?

Because Barack Obama is exerting Executive Privilege.

Officials also differed over access to unclassified emails of American officials that the Russian government had previously hacked, including at the White House and State Department.

A foreign ally’s intelligence service had obtained its own copy of the stolen messages and provided drives with another reproduction of them to the United States government. Investigators, including at the F.B.I., wanted to look at those files. They argued that the Russian hackers’ chosen focus while the Kremlin’s election interference operation was gearing up might shed light on that operation.
But an index of the messages compiled by the unnamed foreign ally showed that they included emails from President Barack Obama as well as members of Congress. Mr. Obama’s White House counsel, W. Neil Eggleston, decided that investigators should not open the drives, citing executive privilege and the possibility of a separation-of-powers uproar if the F.B.I. sifted through lawmakers’ private messages.

Weird how invoking Executive Privilege is an impeachable offense when Trump invokes it, but when old slippery-assed Barry does? Then it's all for the good of America.

Let's go to the penultimate paragraph. Let's see if this provides any clues as to who the people pushing this story could possibly be:

But Mr. Durham has not interviewed the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, his onetime deputy Andrew G. McCabe or Mr. Brennan. Mr. Durham has requested Mr. Brennan’s emails, call logs and other documents from the C.I.A. to learn what he told other officials, including Mr. Comey, about his and the C.I.A.'s views of a notorious dossier of assertions about Russia and Trump associates.

More: Here's Nick Arama of RedState:

From the New York Times:

Trump administration officials investigating the government's response to Russia’s election interference in 2016 appear to be hunting for a basis to accuse Obama-era intelligence officials of hiding evidence or manipulating analysis about Moscow's covert operation, according to people familiar with aspects of the inquiry.

Hmm, another non-spin way to write that might be "Durham is looking into the question of whether Obama-era intelligence officials hid evidence about Russian meddling.”

See what I mean about the thing being 99% Brennan Talking Points?

posted by Ace at 12:07 PM

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