There’s been some odd circumstances surrounding the Senior Director of Intelligence appointed by Micheal Flynn. Cohen-Watnick is said to have been a “fast-rising protege” of Flynn at the DIA, which is interesting since supposedly most of the DIA didn’t like Flynn:

http://forward.com/news/367690/meet-ezra-cohen-watnick-the-secret-source-at-the-center-of-trump-russia-pro/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_T._Flynn#Retirement_from_the_military


Flynn brought Cohen-Watnick to Trump’s transition team and then to the NSC. One Washington “consultant” claims the CIA wanted Cohen-Watnick out of the NSC for nefarious reasons:

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/trump-national-security-mcmaster-overrule-236065
    Cohen-Watnick was brought onto Trump’s transition team and then the NSC by a leading critic of the CIA: retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was Cohen-Watnick’s boss at the Defense Intelligence Agency and preceded McMaster as national security adviser.

    Cohen-Watnick and Flynn “saw eye to eye about the failings of the CIA human intelligence operations,” said a Washington consultant who travels in intelligence circles. “The CIA saw him as a threat, so they tried to unseat him and replace him with an agency loyalist,” the operative said.


Mr. Daniel Greenfield also claims there is a nefarious plot by the “deep state” to remove Cohen-Watnick from the NSC, but he sounds like a Russian propagandist…

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
https://www.frontpagemag.com/author/daniel-greenfield
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/264307/russia-and-wests-insane-syrian-war-daniel-greenfield
    Russia and the West are there as pawns of their Islamic allies. Putin and NATO aren’t protecting their influence because the influence goes entirely the other way. The West does not dictate anything to the Saudis nor does Russia get to tell Iran what to do. Instead the old empires are called in when the wannabe caliphates want a power with a big military machine to do their dirty work for them.

    Russia and the West are obsessed with a factional struggle in the face of a civilizational struggle. Their failure to recognize the civilizational threat of the caliphate is the greatest threat to their future.


https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/266270/brexit-here-daniel-greenfield
    Merkel is pushing to make the exit as hard and unpleasant as possible. That means negotiating termination without putting into place a framework of agreements to replace it. That will have a negative impact on Europe, and on counterterrorism, which May and the EU have both referenced, but Merkel is willing to help terrorists to hurt the UK and maintain the EU's reign of terror over free nations.


https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/266283/deep-states-war-ezra-cohen-watnick-daniel-greenfield
    The Deep State's War on Ezra Cohen-Watnick

    ...Now there's Ezra Watnick-Cohen. He showed up in the news recently when McMaster attempted to replace him with an establishment infiltrator.

    ...Why would you not believe "unnamed officials"?

    But what we are seeing very obviously is some of the shape and texture of the war based on who is being targeted and why. While those doing the targeting are "unnamed", their targets are named. And that tells us also about those doing the targeting. Any enemy action reveals something about the enemy, his motives, his nature and his goals. That is how wars of this kind must be understood.

    But Cohen-Watnick was spared when Trump personally intervened, reportedly after top White House aides Sphen Bannon and Jared Kushner stepped in. Cohen-Watnick still serves as senior director at the NSC.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Azerohedge.com+%22deep+state%22


What’s interesting about Cohen-Watnick is that he is said to be the source for Nunes’ “wiretapping” documents:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/us/politics/devin-nunes-intelligence-reports.html
    The officials who detailed the newly disclosed White House role said that this month, shortly after Mr. Trump claimed on Twitter that he was wiretapped during the campaign on the orders of President Barack Obama, Mr. Cohen-Watnick began reviewing highly classified reports detailing the intercepted communications of foreign officials.

    …There were conflicting accounts of what prompted Mr. Cohen-Watnick to dig into the intelligence. One official with direct knowledge of the events said Mr. Cohen-Watnick began combing through intelligence reports this month in an effort to find evidence that would justify Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts about wiretapping.

    But another person who was briefed on the events said Mr. Cohen-Watnick came upon the information as he was reviewing how widely intelligence reports on intercepts were shared within the American spy agencies. He then alerted the N.S.C. general counsel, but the official said Mr. Cohen-Watnick was not the person who showed the reports to Mr. Nunes.


The NY Times source with "direct knowledge" says Cohen-Watnick was digging for evidence to back up Trump's tweets, but the source who was "briefed on the events" say Cohen-Watnick came upon the information by accident. And Paul Ryan says Nunes’ source was a “whistleblower-type person”:

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/paul-ryan-devin-nunes-whistle-blower-surveillance-source-236683
    “He had told me that like a whistle blower-type person had given him some information that was new that spoke to the last administration and part of this investigation,” Ryan told O’Donnell. “He briefed me about it. Didn’t know the content of it. Only knew the nature of it and that he was going to brief others.”


So it looks like we’re getting conflicting reports from the White House, one saying that Cohen-Watnick was trying to cover for the Trump Administration, and another saying he was a whistleblower. But if he was a whistleblower, that doesn’t make much sense, since Nunes himself said the surveillance involving Trump’s associates was “normal foreign surveillance” and “all done legally:”

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/03/22/what_the_hell_did_devin_nunes_just_say_about_trump_and_surveillance.html
    Nunes initially said “yes,” when asked by a reporter if President Trump’s own communications were part of that surveillance, but when he was asked that same question again later, he said “it’s possible.”

    …Nunes said that the information was collected in November, December, and January—the transition period after the election. He said he had seen “dozens” of reports involving Trump and his team, which were brought to his attention by a concerned but unidentified party. The information was collected, according to Nunes, as part of “normal foreign surveillance” and not related to any criminal investigation. “I believe it was all done legally,” he said. While he said repeatedly that the surveillance had nothing to do with the investigation of ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, he wouldn’t say what countries were involved.


Although Nunes can’t really be trusted anyway. For example, it looks like Nunes cancelled Yates’ hearing after the White House tried to block her from testifying about Flynn:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/03/28/sally-yates-wont-stop-haunting-the-trump-administration/
    But it's even more troubling because it leads to the obvious question: Did Nunes cancel the hearing at the White House's behest? The hearing was canceled Friday shortly after Yates's attorney informed White House counsel Donald McGahn that Yates would move forward with testifying, despite the White House's objections.


Yates was the one who warned the White House that Flynn was vulnerable to Russian blackmail:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justice-department-warned-white-house-that-flynn-could-be-vulnerable-to-russian-blackmail-officials-say/2017/02/13/fc5dab88-f228-11e6-8d72-263470bf0401_story.html


It’s a bit odd that the the White House would act to cover up such a major national security risk, even going as far as trying to defend Flynn:

http://www.france24.com/en/20170215-usa-trump-knew-weeks-ago-ousted-national-security-adviser-flynn-misled-white-house
    Just six days into his term, US President Donald Trump was informed that his national security adviser had misled his vice president about contacts with Russia.

    Trump kept his No. 2 in the dark and waited nearly three weeks before ousting the aide, Michael Flynn, citing a slow but steady erosion of trust, White House officials said Tuesday.

    …The explanation of the episode left many questions unanswered, including why Trump didn't alert Pence to the matter and why Trump allowed Flynn to keep accessing classified information and taking part in the president's discussions with world leaders up until the day he was fired.

    White House officials also struggled to explain why Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway had declared the president retained "full confidence" in Flynn just hours before the adviser had to submit his letter of resignation.

(and there was more than one way for Flynn to be blackmailed—he also tried to hide payments he received from Russia: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/michael-flynn-financial-disclosures-rt-russia-today-236783)


But paying lax attention to major national security issues seems to be a theme in this Administration, which brings us back to Flynn’s protege, Cohen-Watnick.

After Flynn’s departure, H.R. McMaster was promised “total and complete say” in staffing the NSC. The CIA and McMaster had a problem with Cohen-Watnick, but Bannon, Kushner, and Trump intervened to keep him on:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/tension-between-cia-and-trump-white-house-persists-over-personnel-and-policy/2017/03/15/0694bf76-09b5-11e7-b77c-0047d15a24e0_story.html
    The recent removal, and reinstatement, of the National Security Council’s senior intelligence director is a telling illustration of the ongoing animosity between at least some sectors of the Trump White House and the CIA and may be an early sign of problems for new national security adviser H.R. McMaster.

    On Friday, McMaster told Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a 30-year-old former Defense Intelligence Agency operative brought on board by ­McMaster’s ousted predecessor, Michael Flynn, that he was being moved to another job from his position as senior NSC director for intelligence programs.

    McMaster had been told by CIA Director Mike Pompeo that some intelligence officials had problems with Cohen-Watnick and didn’t think he was up to the job, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. The intelligence director provides White House interface with the intelligence community and is a filter for information to the president.

    Cohen-Watnick, who worked on the Trump transition and is close to Jared Kushner, a top adviser and President Trump’s son-in-law, immediately consulted Kushner and Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief White House strategist. The two subsequently spoke with Trump, and by Sunday, ­Cohen-Watnick was back in place.

    The sequence of events, first reported by Politico, appeared to contradict public pledges made by the White House that McMaster would have full leeway to choose his own staff.

    Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said in mid-February that Trump had made clear, after the first choice to replace Flynn had turned down Trump’s offer in part because of staffing issues, “that the new director will have total and complete say over the makeup of the NSC and all of the components of the NSC.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/trump-national-security-mcmaster-overrule-236065
    But Cohen-Watnick appealed McMaster’s decision to two influential allies with whom he had forged a relationship while working on Trump’s transition team — White House advisers Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. They brought the matter to Trump on Sunday, and the president agreed that Cohen-Watnick should remain as the NSC’s intelligence director, according to two people with knowledge of the episode.


Cohen-Watnick happened to be friends with both Bannon and Kushner, and after he appealed to them, Trump insisted Cohen-Watnick would stay on. Shortly afterward, a CIA operative working under Cohen-Watnick was fired instead:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/three-white-house-officials-tied-to-files-shared-with-house-intelligence-chairman/2017/03/30/de4b8c30-1589-11e7-9e4f-09aa75d3ec57_story.html
    Cohen consulted Kushner and Bannon, Trump’s chief White House strategist. After Kushner and Bannon spoke with Trump over the March 11-12 weekend, Cohen was back in place.

    Within days, a CIA detailee to the NSC working under Cohen was told without explanation to clear out his desk and return to the agency. The agent, a former and future covert operative whose name is being withheld by The Washington Post at the request of the CIA, was on a standard two-year rotation to the White House.


Reportedly, Cohen-Watnick and the rest of Flynn’s NSC staff were especially interested in having more “raw intelligence” in the President’s daily briefings, which would have included more information about sources and methods:

http://www.militarytimes.com/articles/trump-changes-relationship-between-white-house-spy-agencies
    Officials have expressed an interest in having more raw intelligence sent to the president for his daily briefings instead of an analysis of information compiled by the agencies, according to current and former U.S. officials. The change would have given his White House advisers more control about the assessments given to him and sidelined some of the conclusions made by intelligence professionals.

    One official said the focus on accessing more raw intelligence appeared to be more of a priority under the short tenure of Michael Flynn, who was ousted as national security adviser after less than one month on the job. He was replaced by H.R. McMaster, an Army lieutenant general who was expected to exert more control over the NSC but has found himself struggling to overcome skepticism among Flynn holdovers who have the ear of Bannon.


Cohen-Watnick, in particular, would have access to “full range” of classified information:

    Cohen-Watnick was a protege of Flynn, having worked for him at the Pentagon's intelligence shop. Now the NSC's senior director for intelligence programs, Cohen-Watnick is one of about a dozen people in the White House with access to a full range of classified information, including details of U.S. covert programs. His position also gives him the ability to request intelligence products from agencies.


If the CIA and McMaster want Cohen-Watnick removed from his post as Senior Director of Intelligence that badly, you’d think there’d be an important reason for it. But it looks like Trump trusts advisors like Bannon and Jared Cohen more than he trusts our intelligence agencies. Trump also fought to keep K. T. McFarland as Deputy National Security Advisor after Flynn’s departure:


https://pastebin.com/MTKpCzGp


http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/kt-mcfarland-deputy-national-security-advisor-232388
    McFarland’s support for Trump and his positions also made her welcome in his inner circle. Since her ill-fated Senate campaign, McFarland has positioned herself as an anti-establishment outsider wary of globalism and U.S. interventions abroad. Trump is “willing to rethink a lot of the conventional wisdom,” she said on Fox in August.

    McFarland has celebrated Brexit, the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union; called the 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya “insane”; and said the U.S. might be able to find “common ground” with Russian President Vladimir Putin. She has also called Islamism a “death cult” that demands a more aggressive U.S. response.


http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/09/10/putin-is-one-who-really-deserves-that-nobel-peace-prize.html
    Putin is the one who really deserves that Nobel Peace Prize

    By K.T. McFarland

    In one of the most deft diplomatic maneuvers of all time, Russia’s President Putin has saved the world from near-certain disaster. He did so without the egoistical but incompetent American president, or his earnest but clueless Secretary of State, even realizing they had been offered a way out of the mess they’d created.


https://twitter.com/BillHemmer/status/831554254565470210
    NOW: KT McFarland says she "just met with President who asked me to stay on" as Deputy National Security Advisor despite #Flynn's departure.


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/robert-harward-turns-down-national-security-adviser-job/
    Sources close to the situation told Garrett Harward and the administration had a dispute over staffing the security council.

    Two sources close to the situation confirm Harward demanded his own team, and the White House resisted.

    Specifically, Mr. Trump told Deputy National Security Adviser K. T. McFarland that she could retain her post, even after the ouster of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Harward refused to keep McFarland as his deputy, and after a day of negotiations over this and other staffing matters, Harward declined to serve as Flynn’s replacement.


It’s interesting that both McFarland and Cohen-Watnick are reportedly in favor of starting a war with Iran:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/tension-between-cia-and-trump-white-house-persists-over-personnel-and-policy/2017/03/15/0694bf76-09b5-11e7-b77c-0047d15a24e0_story.html
    Cohen-Watnick, said one official who has worked with him at the NSC, is “very big on how we can get more aggressive against Iran, and very dismissive that [Tehran] might escalate. . . . Ezra is really a big fan of covert-y action stuff.”

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/03/19/kt-mcfarland-obama-iran-israel-nuclear-bomb-attack.html
    Bomb Iran or Let Them Get the Bomb?

    By K.T. McFarland

As well as Russia’s propaganda:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Azerohedge.com+Iran

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/from-breitbart-to-sputnik/522051/

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Abreitbart.com+Iran

(Russia’s propaganda targeting the U.S. also pushes for starting wars with China, North Korea, and other countries—basically any country we could conceivably start a war with besides Russia and its allies like Ukraine and Syria).


But it looks like Trump’s advisors are still trying to push him into starting a war with Iran:

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/donald-trump-bashar-assad-syria-chemical-weapons-237083
    In White House meetings, evening calls with friends and even throughout the weekend at Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump asked a repeated question: Why did Syria’s president use nerve gas? Trump puzzled over the mystery —even as he ordered 59 Tomahawk missiles careening into a Syrian airfield last Thursday night.

    Trump isn’t alone. U.S. officials and Syria experts are still debating what Syrian President Bashar Assad was thinking when he ordered a chemical attack sure to spark international outrage. Maybe Assad was hoping to terrorize his opponents. Perhaps he was testing Trump’s limits for his military planning. Trump officials even initially considered the possibility that Assad had not ordered the strike at all, according to one administration official, and that a military commander might have gone rogue without Assad’s knowledge.

    …Trump is hardly the only one wondering about Assad's motive. “It’s a good question,” said Paul Salem, a Syria expert at the Middle East Institute. “Nobody really knows.”

    While many Syria experts in Washington endorse the official consensus that Assad is desperate to fend off even a weakened rebel opposition, they are still entertaining other theories.

    Some are complex and probably far-fetched. They include the possibility of a rogue military commander — perhaps loyal to Iran, which has sent troops and funding to prop up Assad — was trying to sabotage the possibility of a U.S.-Russia-Assad alliance that could isolate Tehran.

https://www.apnews.com/19772be1238e49fbb62c509a5b659b3d
    Official: Russia knew Syrian chemical attack was coming

http://thehill.com/policy/international/middle-east-north-africa/328165-us-determines-russia-knew-of-chemical-weapons
    WH disputes report Russia knew of chemical attack in Syria beforehand

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/11/politics/white-house-russia-syria-chemical-weapons/
    The White House said Tuesday the Syrian regime and Russia are trying to "confuse the world community about who is responsible for using chemical weapons against the Syrian people in this and earlier attacks."


Funny that the White House finally admits that Russia is trying to "confuse the world" about who is responsible for the chemical attack shortly after Trump's "advisors" tried to pin the attack on another country.

I think this is the main way Trump is a danger to our national security. If he’s dumb enough to listen to his advisors over the CIA and fight for keeping national security risks like McFarland and Cohen-Watnick on the NSC, or dumb enough to keep Flynn on the NSC for three weeks after being warned he was vulnerable to Russian blackmail, he might be dumb enough to let his “advisors” convince him to start a war with the wrong country.


------


Also, piggybacking off this, what's up with Mr. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon? He spends a lot of time arguing that the U.S. should invade various parts of the world with ground troops out of fear they will acquire WMDs:


https://www.rt.com/news/libya-yellowcake-un-control-212/
    A former commander of the British military's chemical defense regiment Hamish de Bretton-Gordon told RT that the fact that Libya has so much of this yellowcake uranium is a concern.

    “If Al Qaeda did get hold of this yellowcake it potentially could be used for a radiological explosive device…One would expect that security agencies around the world would be looking very closely at this to ensure that yellowcake is secured in Libya and any potential proliferation of it outside of Libya is looked at very closely indeed.”


https://www.rt.com/uk/312438-troops-chemical-weapons-chlorine/
    Former officer Hamish de Bretton-Gordon said extremists had been experimenting with chemical weaponry since autumn 2014. He said 15 Islamic State militants were killed during one calamitous experiment.


http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/612793/Exclusive-ISIS-WMD-weapons-warn-head-British-Army-nuclear-team
    Dr Hamish de Bretton-Gordon said the extremist jihadist group already had chemical weapons such as mustard gas and it is “only a matter of time” before it managed to launch an attack capable of destroying a substantial part of a city.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/12159167/Vladimir-Putin-is-dancing-around-us-with-ease-we-must-send-troops-into-Syria.html
    Vladimir Putin is dancing around us with ease – we must send troops into Syria

    Only Nato ground forces can take the fight to Isil while preventing the Russians from acquiring dominance over the Middle East

    By Hamish de Bretton-Gordon


And his latest article is strange:


http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/11/opinions/trump-right-syria-strike-opinion-de-bretton-gordon/
    Conspiracy theories that these jets targeted Al Nusrah ammunition dumps that were full of sarin are unrealistic, and the Russian government has recently distanced itself from this idea, urging an independent investigation into the incident.


It doesn't look like the Russian government has done much to "distance itself" from its efforts to confuse people about who was behind the chemical attack:

https://www.infowars.com/putin-syria-chemical-attack-was-false-flag-more-coming/
    Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed that the recent chemical attack in Idlib province in Syria was a false flag operation, and that more ‘provocations’ are being prepared.

    “We have reports from multiple sources that false flags like this one – and I cannot call it otherwise – are being prepared in other parts of Syria, including the southern suburbs of Damascus.” Putin said during a joint press conference with Italian President Sergio Mattarella in Moscow.

    “They plan to plant some chemicals there and accuse the Syrian government of an attack,” Putin told media representatives, adding that he has “trusted sources”.


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-11/intelligence-and-military-sources-who-warned-about-wmd-lies-iraq-war-now-say-assad-d
    Intelligence and Military Sources Who Warned About WMD Lies Before Iraq War Now Say that Assad Did NOT Use Chemical Weapons


http://www.globalresearch.ca/analysis-of-evidence-contradicts-allegations-on-syrian-gas-attacks/5584570
    Together, the findings illustrate that, despite all the declarations of certainty, the Syrian government is almost certainly not dropping chlorine on its people. Instead, as outlandish as it may sound, it’s quite likely that Islamist opposition forces in Syria are behind all of these events.


And he sounds pretty confident that the Syrian chemical attack was a "surprise" to Russia:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/11/opinions/trump-right-syria-strike-opinion-de-bretton-gordon/
    However, I do expect that last week's chemical attack was a surprise to the Russians. Chlorine is one thing, but sarin, many times more deadly than chlorine, is another. President Putin is no fool and would realize that the new President of the United States would be good to his word to act if the chemical red line were crossed on his watch.


What makes him so sure?

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_UNITED_STATES_SYRIA_MILITARY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-04-10-15-16-17

www.cnn.com/2017/04/12/politics/us-intelligence-syrian-chemical-weapons/

Russian personnel were working at the airfield that launched the attack, a Russian drone was flying over the site of the attack, a Russian-made jet bombed the hospital where the victims were being treated in an apparent attempt at a cover-up, and then Russian propaganda tried to shift blame on who was behind the attack, including, apparently, Russian propaganda within the White House itself. So why is he so sure the attack was a "surprise" to the Russians?