At a minimum, take their security clearance!

In Real Clear Investigations, Lee Smith reports,

President Trump has been criticized for politicizing the intelligence community by threatening to strip the security clearances of former top officials including John Brennan and James Clapper. But numerous past and present senior intelligence officials say that the Obama administration started the politicization -- and that revoking the clearances of those who abuse the privilege for partisan purposes may help right the ship.

“As is often the case with the Trump administration, the rollout of the policy is bad, but the idea driving the policy is sound,” said one senior intelligence official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke to RealClearInvestigations only on condition of anonymity. “Under some Obama-era intelligence chiefs, intelligence was used as a political weapon. We need to root that out, not reward it.”

Some sources say former CIA director Brennan, ex-director of national intelligence Clapper and others with security clearances were emboldened to pursue political agendas through the anti-Trump media, in a climate of impunity created by the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute leaks attending Donald Trump’s election. Notable among the leaks, they said, was a top unnamed official’s “unmasking” of Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn in a January 2017 Washington Post column by David Ignatius, sourced to classified intercepts of Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador. Leaking such classified information is a felony.

...Revoking security clearances would curtail the ex-officials’ ability to use for partisan ends the resources and institutions of the federal government, including classified intelligence. Published reports show that Obama-era intelligence officials embarked on this course even while they were in government.

Brennan and Clapper’s government records are tarnished by improprieties and abuses that they have been reluctant to acknowledge. Brennan was compelled to apologize to the Senate Intelligence Committee after it was discovered the CIA searched the computers of Senate staffers. The Obama administration used the foreign intelligence surveillance system to spy on congressional critics of the Iran nuclear deal as well as pro-Israel activists.

Clapper has denied that he misled Congress in 2013 when he said the National Security Agency does not collect data on American citizens.

According to the House Intelligence Committee’s March 2018 Russia report, Clapper also gave inconsistent testimony about his contacts with the press, including his future employer CNN, regarding the Clinton campaign-funded dossier alleging Trump’s ties to Russian officials. Clapper at first denied discussing it with the media and then admitted that he had.

...The Obama administration is notable for having aggressively prosecuted leaks that it perceived as dangerous to national security. Reporters Sharyl Attkisson, James Rosen, and a team at the Associated Press were among those the previous White House put under surveillance.

It was a different matter when leaking served the Obama administration’s political interests.

The Washington press corps is dependent on leaks, including classified intelligence, for stories. The Obama administration tweaked the ecosystem and encouraged officials to leak against the incoming Trump administration.

As the Obama team left office, it spread intelligence products regarding the Trump administration’s alleged ties to Russia to ensure that reports proliferated throughout the government. Multiplying the number of potential media sources increased the likelihood that intelligence would be leaked to the press.

It appears that’s what happened with the Flynn leak. As a veteran reporter on the national security beat told RCI: “After the Washington Post broke the Flynn story, a colleague called an Obama administration source and got an explosive story like that confirmed in 15 minutes. Even reporters at second-tier publications got the story confirmed, and quickly, because so many people in the administration knew about it.”

But where that leak started is a different issue. "There are only a few people the leak could have come from,” one senior U.S. official told RCI. “The Flynn intercept doesn't go to rank-and-file FBI agents. It goes through the top rungs up to Comey, and from there it can only go across. To top DOJ personnel, and the White House. It could also go to John Brennan and James Clapper."

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