The leftist Consortium News and the rightist Daily Caller are on the same page about the findings of the whistleblower investigation of Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa).
This week Grassley obtained CIA documents that show Charles McCullough III, who served as the Intelligence Community’s watchdog, informed Congress in 2014 that “routine counterintelligence” enabled the CIA’s security division to read emails exchanged between congressional staffers and the top official in the Intelligence Community Inspector General office that protects whistleblowers.
Daily Caller reports that
McCullough said that though the routine monitoring was legal, he was concerned “about the potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent ‘chilling effect’ that the present CI monitoring system might have on Intelligence Community whistleblowing.”
John Kiriakou, former CIA officer, writing for Consortiumnews, says former CIA director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper violated the law by classifying the notifications.
“As a result, Grassley knew of the hacking but couldn’t say anything while senators on neither the Intelligence or Judiciary Committees didn’t know,” KIriakou writes.
“It’s a felony to classify a crime. It’s also a felony to classify something solely for the purpose of preventing embarrassment to the CIA.”
The CIA’s ability to pre-empt whistleblowers and short circuit accountability was on display when it hacked the computer files of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigators probing the Bush-Cheney torture regime.
