Obama Held ‘Russia Meetings’ in the White House and Invited John Kerry but Not NSA’s Honorable Admiral Rogers

Guest post by Joe Hoft

The Obama White House held special meetings related to the Russia investigation in 2016.  The odd thing is that crooked John Kerry from the State Department was invited and good guy Admiral Rogers from the NSA was excluded.

Yahoo News reported in March the following related to former President Obama’s Russia fake news actions in 2016  –

For the usual interagency sessions, principals and deputies could bring staffers. Not this time. “There were no plus ones,” an attendee recalled. When the subject of a principals or deputies meeting was a national security matter, the gathering was often held in the Situation Room of the White House. The in‑house video feed of the Sit Room — without audio — would be available to national security officials at the White House and elsewhere, and these officials could at least see that a meeting was in progress and who was attending. For the meetings related to the Russian hack, Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, ordered the video feed turned off. She did not want others in the national security establishment to know what was under way, fearing leaks from within the bureaucracy.

Rice would chair the principals’ meetings — which brought together Brennan; Comey; Kerry; Director of National Intelligence James Clapper; Defense Secretary Ash Carter; Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson; Treasury Secretary Jack Lew; Attorney General Loretta Lynch; and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — with only a few other White House officials present, including White House chief of staff Denis McDonough; homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, and Colin Kahl, Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser. (Kahl had to insist to Rice that he be allowed to attend so that Biden could be fully briefed.)

Rice’s No. 2, deputy national security adviser Avril Haines, oversaw the deputies’ sessions. White House officials who were absent from the meetings were not told what was being discussed. This even included other NSC staffers — some of whom bristled at being shut out. Often the intelligence material covered in these meetings was not placed in the President’s Daily Brief, the top-secret document presented to the president every morning. Too many people had access to the PDB. “The opsec on this” — the operational security — “was as tight as it could be,” one White House official later said.

One Internet sleuth highlighted the questionable actions noted above and posted on Reddit –

The National Security Agency was not allowed to be part of a “national security matter,” but John Kerry was at these meetings, aka the State Department, whose agency is not an investigative agency:

“At the State Department, only a small number of officials were cleared to receive the most sensitive information on the Russian hack; this group included Secretary of State John Kerry; Tony Blinken, the deputy secretary of state; Dan Smith, head of the department’s intelligence bureau; and Jon Finer, Kerry’s chief of staff.”

Rice said, she feared leaks and therefore she hid the discussions from these meetings from the NSA; however, out of all the leaks that have made their way into the press, not a single one can be found that came from the NSA. Mike Rogers ran a pretty tight ship. Rice did not want Rogers at these meetings because the Obama team did not trust Rogers to conceal their crimes.  

As reported previously, when Rogers took over the NSA he ordered an audit of the FISA program –

On April 26, 2017, an unsealed FISA Court Ruling unveiled a number of criminal activities that Barack Obama’s FBI, NSA and DOJ participated in during his time in office. The FISA Court Ruling shows widespread abuse of the FISA mandate. According to the report, Obama’s FBI, NSA and DOJ performed searches on Americans that were against their 4th Amendment rights. This went on for years. One paragraph in the report states that 85% of the Section 704 and 705(b) FISA searches made during the time of the audit (a few months in 2015) were non-compliant with applicable laws and therefore criminal.

In addition, Obama’s DOJ and FBI were illegally searching Americans against their rights.  Unbeknownst to most Americans, Obama’s FBI was providing this information to outside contractors who had no business or legal cause or claim the information.

A further review of the report by Jeff Carlson shows on page 19 that the Court stated that James Clapper’s NSA had an institutional “lack of candor”.

So the Obama gang held meetings regarding the Russia scandal from the White House and kept the NSA out when they should have been a part of the team but allowed creepy Secretary of State John Kerry to attend when he had no business being there.  Huh!

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Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016. In 2023, The Gateway Pundit received the Most Trusted Print Media Award at the American Liberty Awards.

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Thanks for sharing!