https://twitter.com/JammieWF/status/847070154118905860
Bombshell?
Evelyn Farkas, who left her position as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia in the Obama White House in 2015, was on “Morning Joe” earlier this week where she talked about her personal knowledge of Obama national security officials rushing to preserve as much intelligence as they could before Trump took office and directed that information to Congress:
Former Obama official discloses rush to get intelligence on Trump team https://t.co/ZTC6gv0Irp pic.twitter.com/l2waqhOKiY
— Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) March 29, 2017
But it also sounds like Farkas admitted that the Obama administration was spying on then candidate Trump during the election. From Fox News (emphasis ours)
“I was urging my former colleagues, and frankly speaking the people on the Hill, it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration,” Farkas, who is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said.
“Because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior [Obama] people who left, so it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy … that the Trump folks – if they found out how we knew what we knew about their … the Trump staff dealing with Russians – that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence.”
Wow.
Here’s the video, with the bit from the transcript above starting at the 4:50 mark with Mika saying, “You actually knew about this attempt to get and preserve information and, full transparency, were doing some work yourself”:
Scott Johnson over at Power Line adds that this makes Farkas the likely source of the New York Times article titled, ““Obama administration rushed to preserve intelligence of Russian election hacking”:
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Evelyn Farkas is the former Obama administration deputy secretary of defense — and now an MSNBC analyst. Appearing on air among her friends at MSNBC yesterday, she all but outed herself as a key source for the seminal New York Times story on the Obama administration’s efforts to subvert the incoming Trump administration.
The March 1 Times story ran under the headline “Obama administration rushed to preserve intelligence of Russian election hacking” under the byline of Matthew Rosenberg, Adam Goldman and Michael Schmidt. The Times reporters noted that they protected the identity of their sources because, you know, their cooperation with the Times was criminal or because their actions were otherwise legally problematic.
And Farkas might have admitted to Vox’s Ezra Klein back in February that Obama administration national security officials were leaking on then candidate Donald Trump and potential ties to Russia as far back as the summer of 2016.
From Vox on February 16, 2017, after the resignation of Michael Flynn (emphasis ours):
Ezra Klein
What’s your level of alarm after the resignation of Michael Flynn?Evelyn Farkas
It’s lower than it’s been since the summer, when I was first made aware of all this stuff. I’m like, finally, everybody else sees it! Seriously.The reason I was so upset last summer was that I was getting winks and hints from inside that there was something really wrong here. I was agitated because I knew the Clinton campaign and the world didn’t know. But I didn’t think it would happen this fast. I didn’t think Flynn would survive a year, but I thought it would be most of the year.
The fact that Flynn is gone is constructive from the perspective of US foreign policy. He was getting it wrong on combating terrorism and Russia. So I feel relieved that he will not be whispering his policy prescriptions in the president’s ear.
On the bigger issue, the intelligence community, the bureaucracy, patriotic Americans, and some members of Congress are making it impossible for the White House to sweep whatever they are trying to hide under the rug. And the White House is clearly trying to hide something, or the president would have said, on day one, that he would support the investigations that began under his predecessor.
Over to you, Congress. Time to get Ms. Farkas under oath.
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