Daniel Gallington: Intelligence procedures were abused by the Obama administration for political purposes

Daniel Gallington joins Secure Freedom Radio to discuss the dangerous implications of the weaponization of US intelligence capabilities. Mr. Gallington is the Senior Policy and Program Advisor at the George C. Marshall Institute and formerly served in senior national security policy positions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Justice, and as bipartisan general counsel for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

I think the weaponization of US intelligence capabilities is political warfare. If you look at the way the Obama administration behaved, even if you focused on the period of time between the election and the inauguration, you see a pattern of abuse of the requirements and regulations for targeting intelligence topics. You also see the DNI and the Attorney General agreeing on totally new procedures to allow the release of US person identity in what we call a raw SIGINT information. This was done on January 5- 15 days before the election. This virtually assured all this information would end up leaked to the press and that is exactly what happened. So, when Hillary Clinton talked about the opposition, she was serious about it. They continued to fight with the deep state leaked information.

Were these procedures abused by President Obama?

Obama knew about it, there is no doubt about it. The extent to which he participated in the discussions and actually made decisions, we don’t know or won’t know for a while. But what we do know is that the Attorney General and the DNI did participate and they did allow these abuses of Attorney General procedures, they allowed these things to go on. So, it isn’t that President Obama did not know about these things, he obviously did.

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