Rep. Adam Schiff, apparently determined to do every single thing that Trump is accused of having done wrong. Colluding with Russian spies to affect US politics? The only reason he failed is that he got pranked. Exposing sensitive sources and methods to endanger US intelligence collection for partisan purposes? Included for the sole purpose of forcing the President to make redactions.
This guy is making a clear-cut case for restoring the practice of caning Congressmen.
7 comments:
Exposing sensitive sources and methods to endanger US intelligence collection for partisan purposes? Included for the sole purpose of forcing the President to make redactions.
It'll be interesting to see the memo when it's released, especially if there are redactions. The paragraphs containing redactions will have to have been marked with the appropriate classification markings. If they're not, then Schiff, et al., will be guilty of mishandling classified material--grossly negligently so.
Eric Hnes
I think the paras have to be remarked (U) as part of the process by which the redactions are certified as adequate. In any case the whole document is to be declassified, in its redacted form, so (U) would be correct in the final public product.
What was released from the Senate--the Grassley/Graham letter--was marked Top Secret/NOFORN at the top and bottom of the pages, with that lined through. That letter had the markings redacted, too, when they redacted whole paragraphs; if only parts of sentences were redacted, the G/G staff had marked the paras unclass.
I was looking for no markings at all on the as-delivered from the House Schiff memo, with redactions following the review. The Nunes memo was unmarked, and it had no redactions. If the Schiff memo was delivered with material that needs redactions in order to force redaction so the Progressive-Democrats can claim political motives, and the memo had no markings, Schiff and his staff will have been grossly negligent in their handling of classified.
If the Schiff memo was delivered with markings, then it'll be pretty clear that the redactions occurred for security, and Schiff and his cronies will just look like fools if they holler politics over the redactions.
Eric Hines
I didn’t deal in declassification, so I could be wrong here. S//NF is strong, though. We only rarely keep things from FVEY, but sometimes.
I dealt with classification daily in the Army. NOFORN is not actually that big a thing. It simply means the information was acquired from a source that our allies (ostensibly) don't know about, or that we don't want them to know is giving us said information.
An unclassified example is if we had an agent in the (fictional) nation of Latveria. He hands us information on the ongoings of the Latverian government, that's a HUMINT source who likely would be classified as SECRET/NOLAT. If the same agent had gotten information stolen from the British Embassy to Latveria, we'd likely classify that intelligence as SECRET/NOFORN. Because if the French found out we were getting information on the Brits from our Latverian source, they might decide to go tell the Brits about it.
In practice, NOFORN basically is just a warning not to share the unsanitized information with any friendly foreign intelligence sources like MI6 or Mossad. And they're generally good sports about not pushing us on that type of information. I've even heard tell that the Brits will mark documents NOYANK for much the same reasons. And as you'd expect those pieces of intel were probably gathered from a US source. And we generally don't push them about those things.
The stuff doesn't even have to be particularly classified to get a NOFORN designation. I handled a lot of stuff in Germany and the RoK that was marked FOUO/NOFORN.
My point here, though, is the general presence or absence of security markings on a document that winds up having significant redactions for security reasons.
Eric Hines
I handled mostly NF stuff in Iraq, where we had a coalition and releasability was a big deal. It was a very common marking, which created issues at times.
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