Greenwald: Intelligence Agents in “Open Warfare” Against Trump

Controversial journalist Glenn Greenwald, whose reporting gained national fame when he helped Edward Snowden get the message out about NSA domestic surveillance, said this week that there is “obvious open warfare” between Donald Trump and the U.S. intelligence community. Greenwald, in an interview with Tucker Carlson Thursday, said Democrats were “openly calling for and cheering for the intervention of the CIA.”

Discussing the vile allegations included in intelligence reports about Trump’s Russian connections, Greenwald said that angry liberals were “hoping that this unelected faction in Washington will undermine and subvert and destroy the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidency before he’s even inaugurated.”

Greenwald said this was no laughing matter. “I think,” he said, “what you’re seeing is actually quite dangerous.”

Greenwald said it was apparent that the CIA favored Hillary Clinton in the election. According to him, they viewed Trump as a “threat to the CIA’s primary institutional priority of regime change in Syria.”

“Beyond that,” Greenwald continued, “Clinton wanted a much more confrontational and belligerent posture toward Moscow, which the CIA has been acrimonious with for decades, whereas Trump wanted better relations. I think they viewed Trump as a threat to their institutional preeminence, to their ability to get their agenda imposed on Washington.”

Intelligence officials, including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, have vigorously denied that the leak – which was published at BuzzFeed – came from inside the agencies. Their denials are not impossible to believe; in the aftermath of the story breaking, we learned that many media outlets had the so-called “dossier” in their hands for weeks. It was developed by a private firm and paid for by anti-Trump PACs. Despite being included as an “addendum” to an intelligence briefing last week, these allegations did not originate with the CIA, the NSA, or the FBI.

That said, it’s clear that there is growing animosity between the intelligence agencies and the president-elect, and Democrats are going to take full advantage of any opening they can find.

In the interview with Carlson, Greenwald said the media was too willing to defer to agencies like the CIA.

“Whenever it comes to national security issues, especially in the post-9/11 era, you see this incredibly close relationship between the media and the intelligence agencies,” he said. “When [journalists] serve their agenda, they get scoops, they get secret documents, they get access, and I think a lot of that is what you’re seeing on top of the fact that the media has been aligned against Trump and will side with anybody who wants to subvert him, including the CIA.”

No one said taking on the Washington establishment would be easy. Winning the election…well, that was only the beginning.