Bolton Calls Former Aide to NSC to Help Drain the Swamp

Originally posted on Frontpage Mag

National Security Advisor John Bolton, a Baltimorean who is no stranger to political street fights, has brought on board as his chief of staff former FoxNews political analyst Fred Fletiz.

No sooner had the announcement hit the wires, than the pit bulls of the Left went on the attack.

New York magazine called him, an “anti-Muslim wingnut.” The Council on American Islamic Relations, which has been identified in federal court documents as the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, demanded his immediate removal. The Southern Poverty Law Center, itself identified as a hate group for its vilification of anything conservative, fumed that his appointment was “alarming” and identified him as the Vice-president of an “anti-Muslim hate group,” a referenced to the Center for Security Policy, which the SPLC has long vilified for its work to expose the advocates of Sharia law in America.

So much vitriol, so quickly, should tip us off. Why are these harridans of the Left so hysterical over the appointment of a man well-known to FoxNews viewers for his measured and well-informed views?

Simple. Because Fred Fleitz understands the bureaucracy. He knows where the bodies are buried. And he knows how the Deep State operates.

I have had the pleasure of knowing Fred for nearly fifteen years. When John Bolton was serving as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, Fleitz was detailed to his office from the CIA, where he had long served as an analyst specializing in weapons of mass destruction.

As I wrote in Shadow Warriors: Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender (Crown Forum, 2007), Fleitz helped unmask a disgraceful effort by partisan staffers at the State Department’s Intelligence and Research to feed Bolton false intelligence on a little-known biological weapons program in Castro’s Cuba.

Leading this effort was a certain Christian Westermann, whom Fletiz unmasked as promoting pro-Castro intelligence analysis fed into the system by Ana Belen Montes, a convicted Cuban spy.

Westermann famously accused Bolton of “waging his finger at me” during an office confrontation over the bogus intelligence, a crime so heinous that then-Senator Joe Biden felt it was enough to torpedo Bolton’s nomination to become the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

Fletiz also played a key role during the 2005-2006 negotiations between the Bush State Department and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that ultimately led to United Nations Security Council resolutions condemning Iran for violating its commitment under the Treaty for the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Later, while on staff with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Fleitz co-authored a report exposing the flaws of the infamous 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities.

The NIE speciously asserted that information the CIA received from a recent defector caused it to re-evaluate its long-standing conclusion that Iran had an active program to develop nuclear weapons and instead to assert that Iran had shut down that program in 2003.

That information was so highly classified that no one outside of the intelligence community could verify it. But as I discovered from Iranian sources, the defector cited in the report, Gen.  Ali Reza Asghari, actually told the CIA exactly the opposite from what the CIA asserted in the NIE.

While the HPSCI report did not examine the classified sources, it ripped apart the NIE’s unclassified conclusions and ultimately led the CIA to redo the assessment. Based on Fletiz’s analysis, then House intelligence committee chairman Pete Hoekstra called the 2007 NIE “a political document” whose aim was “to embarrass President Bush.”

John Bolton is right to call on Fred Fleitz to help President Trump defeat the Deep State. This cabal of anti-Trump operatives, still alive and well in the bowels of our intelligence agencies and yes, even in the White House bureaucracy itself, needs to be ripped out root and branch.

President Trump has vowed repeatedly to drain the swamp. Now he has another skilled hand to help him succeed.