Former analyst for the CIA, Ret. Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, told Martha MacCallum of Fox News that he believes the intelligence community from President Barack Obama’s administration are purposefully withholding information from President Donald Trump’s administration.
Shaffer said it is evident that there are people who are embedded in the current administration that have retained loyalties to past administrations. This causes them to “[judge] for themselves what they should or should not do regarding intelligence.”
“The problem is this, you have a lot of folks who are either career members of the intelligence community who are skeptical of the current situation or who were at one point political appointees who have burrowed themselves into the infrastructure who are now career intelligence officers,” he said.
“The same mentality where you’ve seen people leaking is the same mentality you see people holding information,” he said.
It is obvious that the current administration needs to do a little house cleaning.
“But, this is the bottom line and President Trump is correct about this,” Shaffer explained, “He is owed the best intelligence all the time, and what we’ve seen over the past eight years is a manipulation of the intelligence community. Much of that manipulation happened because of like-minded individuals to Jim Clapper, to the former Director of the CIA John Brennan, those people hire people like themselves, so as much as Jim Clapper can say now, ‘well, you know you need to protect the professionals,’ some of those professionals were selected because of their reliability, not because of their professional ethics.”
Shaffer then laid it out there, “I’ll say this on the record, I think that the previous administration, with Ben Rhodes, laid trip wires. They put things out there for things to go off like booby traps. I think the Mike Flynn thing was planned by the former administration for a long time because of all these anonymous leaks to NBC saying intelligence officials saw the transcripts. I don’t believe anything in those transcripts were illegal or telling — but it was the implication. It was like ‘I have a secret’ and that secret is bad.”
Those members of the intelligence community whose loyalty is not with the American people, not with the Constitution — but with the former administration, need to go.
