By Cliff Kincaid
November 29, 2024
[DISCLAIMER: The opinion in this article is the sole opinion of the author and is not necessarily the opinion of NewsWithViews.com, it’s employees, representatives, advertisers or other contributing writers.]
After my group, America’s Survival, Inc. (ASI) published Blood on His Hands: The True Story of Edward Snowden, President Trump weighed in, declaring that the former NSA and CIA contractor should be executed if caught. He said, “I think Snowden is a terrible threat, I think he’s a terrible traitor and you know what we used to do in the good old days when we were a strong country, you know what we used to do to traitors right?”
He was referring to the execution of atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Snowden stole thousands of documents, turned them over to our enemies, and moved to Russia, after he received a Russian passport and Russian citizenship and swore an oath of allegiance to Putin’s Russia.
Yet, President-elect Trump has now nominated a disciple of Edward Snowden to the post of Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Her name is Tulsi Gabbard, a protege of MAGA who had been promoted by Trump’s own son, Donald J. Trump, Jr., Stephen K. Bannon, and Tucker Carlson.
After Hillary Clinton accused Gabbard of being a Russian asset, based largely on Gabbard’s secret trip to Syria and friendly meeting with the Russian-backed Syrian dictator Assad, Gabbard filed suit for defamation, only to drop the suit on the pretext that she had to devote more time to “defeating Donald Trump in 2020, rather than righting the wrongs here.”
The first Hindu member of Congress, she was allegedly associated with a branch of a New Age eastern religious organization that some describe as a cult.
Like Kamala Harris, Gabbard supported Obamacare and wanted it expanded. In fact, she demanded “a mandatory single payer system,” saying it “would be even better.” That was the Bernie Sanders or socialist approach once embraced by Kamala.
As a member of Congress and former co-chair of the Democratic National Committee, she backed Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, before suddenly becoming pro-MAGA and endorsing Trump during the 2024 campaign.
In the case of Snowden, and his illegal disclosures, former CIA officer Bob Baer had said, “ISIS has been reading Snowden,” a process that enabled the terrorist group to evade NSA monitoring, capture and behead Americans, rapidly expand, and then take over large areas of territory in the Middle East. A study of terrorist communications found changes after the Snowden disclosures.
The innocent Americans killed by ISIS were James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig, and Kayla Mueller.
Trump, during his first term, had to deploy American military forces to destroy ISIS. On October 27, 2019, Trump announced the death of ISIS Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, saying, “He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.”
Trump called al-Baghdadi “a sick and depraved man, and now he’s gone. Baghdadi was vicious and violent, and he died in a vicious and violent way, as a coward, running and crying.”
Nevertheless, Gabbard sponsored a congressional resolution in 2020 “expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Federal Government should drop all the espionage charges against Edward Snowden.”
In a major speech several years ago, former Republican Senator Jon Kyl called Snowden “this generation’s Alger Hiss,” a reference to the State Department official who was convicted of perjury in 1950 for denying he was a Soviet spy and served 44 months in prison.
Kyl said, “As with Hiss, many in the public seem to be confused about whether Snowden is a ‘hero’ or a ‘traitor,’ with many, especially young people, more worried about the National Security Agency than Edward Snowden. Much of this confusion is the fault of the same media that is reaping large financial windfalls from publishing highly damaging news articles and stories.”
Rejecting claims by some conservatives and libertarians that Snowden is a whistleblower for stealing and releasing classified information, Kyl, who retired from the Senate after the 2012 election, said, “Heroes and whistleblowers don’t admittedly steal thousands of classified documents about some of NSA’s most sensitive collection activities, give copies of them to the media, flee to that bastion of personal and political freedom, the People’s Republic of China, and, in an irony to end all ironies, seek political asylum in Russia.”
As Senator Kyl indicated, Snowden has been embraced by some on the right because he poses as an enemy of the same “Deep State” targeting Trump but he is today living in Russia, after having traveled through Chinese Hong Kong. He did so with the assistance of his enabler, Glenn Greenwald, a former gay pornographer who poses as a libertarian and is now close to Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham of Fox News, and the MAGA crowd.
What is developing right before our eyes in the case of Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination is another scandal for Trump’s new administration, on top of the nomination of a George Soros hedge fund operative, Scott Bessent, as Secretary of the Treasury.
On my new America’s Survival Rumble TV program, Trevor Loudon and I discuss why Tulsi Gabbard is a security risk and why her nomination as Director of National Intelligence will backfire on President Trump, leading to another Russia-gate scandal, this time for real.
Gabbard is backed by people who note that she is an Army National Guard officer with security clearances giving her access to highly sensitive and classified information. But Trevor Loudon is not impressed, asking, “Wasn’t Benedict Arnold a high-ranking military officer?”
Loudon notes that standards for access to top-secret information in the military are notoriously low, as evidenced by the case of Bradley/Chelsea Manning, a homosexual Army analyst turned transgender who provided stolen documents to WikiLeaks. Obama commuted his 35-year prison sentence.
What is happening in Mar-a-Lago to explain this disastrous nomination? The answer, according to Trevor Loudon, is that a communist-inspired “influence operation” has targeted Trump’s inner circle, making another Russia-gate scandal entirely possible, even probable.
Loudon devotes one chapter of his book, White House Reds, to Gabbard, who was then running for the Democratic presidential nomination, and has been studying her career for many years. His KeyWiki page documents how her career was nurtured by communists and how she has a pattern of defending anti-American regimes from Venezuela to Syria.
Trevor says he knows many of the people in MAGA who are pushing Gabbard and is now publicly warning them about the nomination, posting on X that Gabbard is a national security risk.
He explains, “Friends, I am generally very pleased with President Trump’s nominees for his administration. However, I have significant concerns regarding Tulsi Gabbard, the proposed Director of National Intelligence, one of the most sensitive posts in the U.S. Government. Considering Tulsi Gabbard’s history and current affiliations, she would fail even the most basic security clearance screening.”
He promises more installments of what he calls the “Tulsi Files” in the days and weeks ahead.
It looks like another Russia-gate is in the making. This scandal is real, it is of MAGA’s own making, and could seriously damage the next Trump presidency.
© 2024 Cliff Kincaid – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Cliff Kincaid: kincaid@comcast.net
- Cliff Kincaid is president of America’s Survival, Inc. usasurvival.org
