thebigp

by Jerry Dunleavy
| February 16, 2020
Federal prosecutor John Durham is scrutinizing the intelligence community’s interagency turf war over viewing secretive foreign intelligence and the government restricting access to President Barack Obama's emails that were hacked by Russians but obtained by a foreign ally, sources claimed.
Durham, selected by Attorney General William Barr last year to lead the Justice Department’s inquiry into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation and the conduct of the U.S. government in dealing with the Kremlin’s interference, apparently is focused on at least two clashes over sensitive information, according to sources cited by the New York Times.
The first internal Obama administration squabble, described by the article in vague terms, related to restrictions placed upon yet-unknown foreign intelligence by one intelligence agency, speculated to be the CIA directed by John Brennan. Other agencies, speculated to include the National Security Agency, wanted access to the material. One source suggested that the CIA wanted to mask American identities in the data set before allowing the NSA to view it.
The second squabble was about the White House preventing the FBI from viewing U.S. emails hacked by the Russians but obtained, copied, and given to the United States by an unnamed foreign intelligence service. The Russians had hacked the Obama White House and State Department — as well as Congress — in 2014, and the FBI wanted to examine the reproduced emails to understand the Russian active measures campaign in 2016.
“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,” the New York Times reported. “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 FBI sifted through lawmakers’ private messages.”
“The analysts could have been engaged in standard bureaucratic behavior like obeying the filtering process or hoarding sensitive information. Or perhaps they were trying to cover something up,” the New York Times wrote.
The hack was carried out by a Russian group known as Cozy Bear — the same group that analysts believe hacked the Democratic National Committee as well.
The Washington Post reported in 2017 that “the NSA was alerted to the compromises by a Western intelligence agency” and that “the ally had managed to hack not only the Russians’ computers, but also the surveillance cameras inside their workspace, according to the former officials.” The officials said the foreign ally “monitored the hackers as they maneuvered inside the U.S. systems and as they walked in and out of the workspace, and were able to see faces.”
The foreign intelligence now being scrutinized by Durham likely came from the Netherlands.
An article by the Telegraph in 2018 detailed how the Dutch “penetrated the systems of the Russian cyber unit known as Cozy Bear in mid-2014 and monitored them for at least a year” and “informed the CIA and helped remove Cozy Bear from U.S. State Department computers they had hacked into in late 2014” while they “also monitored the Russian hackers as they tried to undermine unclassified computer systems in Congress and the White House.”
A piece by Dutch outlet de Volkskrant claimed in 2018 that Dutch intelligence “became witness to the Russian hackers harassing and penetrating the leaders of the Democratic Party, t***sferring thousands of emails and documents” and “provided crucial evidence of the Russian involvement in the hacking of the Democratic Party.” The outlet claimed the Dutch information was “also grounds for the FBI to start an investigation into the influence of the Russian interference on the e******n.”
Durham “asked questions that appear aimed at understanding how analysts reached their conclusion and who drove that process … and whether and how information from foreign governments or the CIA played any role in stoking suspicions at the FBI about Trump campaign links to Russia,” sources cited by the New York Times said.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s recent report on the Obama administration’s slow response to Russian meddling “found that the U.S. government was not well-postured to counter Russian e******n i**********e activity with a full range of readily-available policy options.” The report concluded that Obama’s policymakers “were not concerned with Russian e*******l interference directly targeting the United States” until they were told about still-classified information from Brennan and the CIA.
The Senate report’s section on “The U.S. Intelligence Community's Awareness," including when and how the CIA may have first learned about Russia's e******n i**********e efforts, is almost entirely redacted.
Durham, who is scrutinizing this as well as Brennan’s other actions in 2016, may wrap up his investigation by the spring or summer.
SOURCE-Dunleavy, JERRY—NYT-COZY BEAR—WASH POST—TELEGRAPH—DE VOLKSKRANT-