Clapper’s ODNI Rushed to Change Raw SIGINT Sharing Rules Before Trump Inauguration

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The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) obtained records that show that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), under Director James Clapper, was eager and actively pushing to get its new procedures in place increasing access to raw signal intelligence before the conclusion of the Obama Administration and before President Trump took office.

The documents the ACLJ obtained in one of our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits – this one against the ODNI and the National Security Agency (NSA) – confirmed what we suspected: the
ODNI rushed to get the new “procedures signed by the Attorney General before the conclusion of this administration.”

The documents also reveal that ODNI’s Robert Litt told Office of the Undersecretary of Defense’s Director of Intelligence Strategy, Policy, & Integration (and also USDI’s Liaison to ODNI):
“Really want to get this done . . . and so does the Boss.”

And, documents produced to the ACLJ by the NSA in this lawsuit show that NSA officials discussing that they

“could have a signature from the AG as early as this week, certainly prior to the 20th Jan.”

In other words, certainly before President Trump’s Inauguration.

It was not immediately clear just how significant these revelations were. Now we know and these records must be publicized.

Consider what we now know about the nature and degree of Deep State opposition to President Trump. With the public revelations about the infamous disgrace known as the Steele dossier, FISA abuse and the underpinnings of Crossfire Hurricane, as well as former-DNI James Clapper’s open hostility to President Trump and intentional leaking by senior law enforcement and intelligence actors – all of which appears to show a coordinated effort across agencies to oppose the Trump Administration – the picture is coming in to focus.

As part of the ACLJ’s government accountability project and FOIA practice, we went to work to uncover everything we could about the embedded “resistance” operating within our government. In this particular instance, it concerned us when we heard that, according to the New York Times, “[i]n its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.”

On December 15, 2016, after President Trump’s election, DNI James Clapper executed a document entitled “Procedures for the Availability or Dissemination of Raw Signals Intelligence Information by the National Security Agency Under Section 2.3 of Executive Order 12333.” On January 3, 2017, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch executed the document, indicating her approval.

According to the New York Times, “[t]he new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations.” Authority for these new procedures derives from Executive Order 12333, last amended by President Bush in 2008, which provided:

Elements of the Intelligence Community are authorized to collect, retain, or disseminate information concerning United States persons only in accordance with procedures established by the head of the Intelligence Community element concerned or by the head of a department containing such element and approved by the Attorney General, consistent with the authorities provided by Part 1 of this Order, after consultation with the Director.

The New York Times had first reported in 2014 that deliberations by Obama Administration officials on developing these procedures were occurring. But, apparently, the new procedures were not completed by the Director of National Intelligence and approved by the Attorney General until just weeks before the end of President Obama’s tenure.

As we cautioned at the time, this significant policy change appears to have a direct correlation to the exponentially increased number of intel leaks the Trump Administration has been dealing with. The ACLJ was concerned with what appeared to be a troubling step.

By greatly expanding access to classified information by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, the Obama Administration paved the way for a shadow government to leak that classified information – endangering our national security and severely jeopardizing the integrity and reputation of our critical national security apparatus – in an attempt to undermine President Trump.

While sharing information among intelligence agencies is not a new concept, and this isn’t the first time an Administration has made amendments to intelligence policy, the timing was just way to suspicious.

“referencing, connected to, or regarding in any way their approval of the procedures set forth in the document entitled “Procedures for the Availability or Dissemination of Raw Signals Intelligence Information by the National Security Agency Under Section 2.3 of Executive Order 12333,” which Director of National Intelligence Clapper executed on December 15, 2016, and which then-Attorney General Lynch approved on January 3, 2017.”
https://aclj.org/government-corrupti...s-inauguration

We sent these FOIA requests specifically “to find out why the Obama Administration waited until mere days before a new Administration took over to implement a significant change in intelligence policy.” After the ODNI and the NSA provided us with non-compliant responses, the ACLJ took these agencies to federal court in Washington. The case is styled, ACLJ v. U.S. National Security Agency, U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 16-cv-645-RC (D.D.C.).

Our team is continuing to review these documents in light of the revelations coming to light.

[anatta]

Executive Order 12333--United States intelligence activities

Source: The provisions of Executive Order 12333 of Dec. 4, 1981, appear at 46 FR 59941, 3 CFR, 1981 Comp., p. 200, unless otherwise noted.
Maximum emphasis should be given to fostering analytical competition among appropriate elements of the Intelligence Community.
https://www.archives.gov/federal-reg...12333.html#1.8

Why Is Obama Expanding Surveillance Powers Right Before He Leaves Office?
It could be to prevent Trump from extending them even more.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...powers/513041/
After this change, it doesn’t necessarily have to be an NSA analyst that makes that determination—that information can be shared with other parts of the intelligence community.

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Emails show unmasking of 100s of Americans in final days of Obama regime began with ‘anti-Trump’ Samantha Power
olomon, who said bigger news was coming on Wednesday, nevertheless could report that emails he’s reviewed thus far indicate that former UN Ambassador Samantha Power was at the center of those extremely unusual requests.
In 2016 alone, Hannity noted, there was a 350 percent increase in the unmasking of Americans, confidential sources, and other classified information that is normally very closely kept by intelligence agencies.

“Why was that?” he asked.

Solomon noted that he has obtained emails from Power around the time she reportedly requested to “unmask” more than 260 Americans whose identities were caught up in the surveillance of non-U.S. citizens.

He noted further that the government emails indicate the “same sort of anti-Trump bias” that was evident in text messages exchanged by ex-FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page as they were involved in the sham investigation into Hillary Clinton’s criminal mishandling of classified emails and the so-called “Spygate” probe involving the 2016 Trump campaign.

“I can tell you that Samantha Power and her colleagues were doing the same thing on the official State email system,” Solomon said. “And when you see her tomorrow, what she was saying about Trump at the same time these unmaskings were going on, I am certain it’s going to trouble the American public.”

Power’s name has come up a number of times since after POTUS Trump was inaugurated as having been tied to the unmaskings. In August 2017 the Washington Free Beacon reported:

Former United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power is believed to have made “hundreds” of unmasking requests to identify individuals named in classified intelligence community reports related to Trump and his presidential transition team, according to multiple sources who said the behavior is unprecedented for an official in her position.

Later, according to the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), Powers would testify before Congress that “others in the intelligence community used her name obtain this unprecedented unmasking.

“According to the Committee Chairman Representative Trey Gowdy, her only defense was it’s not me it’s my subordinates,” the legal group noted in a press release.

Gowdy told Fox News in 2018:

Her testimony is they may be under my name, but I did not make those requests . . . .

I think if she were on your show, she would say those requests to unmask may have been attributed to her, but they greatly exceed by an exponential factor the requests she actually made . . . . So, that’s her testimony, and she was pretty emphatic in it . . . .

So, we’ve got to get to the bottom of that. If there is someone else making requests on behalf of a principal in the intelligence community, we need to know that because we’re getting ready to reauthorize a program that’s really important to the country, but also has a masking component to it.”

Solomon and Hannity also both noted that Obama signed an order just weeks before he left the White House allowing the sharing of raw data across all 17 intelligence agencies — an unprecedented move that the former administration wanted to get in place before Trump was inaugurated.

As for Power, “think about this,” Solomon noted.

“The UN ambassador, who doesn’t really have an intelligence operation, was unmasking all the time under Obama.

And then in the final days of the administration, after two years of the intelligence community raising concerns about who should have access to this information, after the Obama administration went to the FISA court and belatedly disclosed hundreds of violations just before the [2016] election, they make the decision that they’re going to disseminate sensitive intelligence to more people, not less people, expand the universe of people who can gain it and potentially leak it at the beginning of the Trump administration,” Solomon continued.
https://thenationalsentinel.com/2019...amantha-power/