Award-Winning National Security/War Correspondent
If you’re an investor, you need to understand the “big picture” of the market. That’s where politics comes in…
Stansberry Investor Hour host Buck Sexton spoke with Sara Carter – an award-winning national security reporter for Circa News. She is one of the few people doing original, groundbreaking reporting that pushes back against the established media entities and narrative.
She has been breaking stories left and right on surveillance, the Russia collusion investigation, and the Deep State. If you’re interested in what’s real and what’s not, she is a must-read…
Q: Everyone wants to hear about your latest bombshell – a breaking story on whether retaliation from within the FBI led to the investigation of former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn.
Sara Carter: It’s been a long journey. It all started out with the leak on Lieutenant General Michael Flynn when he was the National Security Advisor for President Trump… That very short stint he did with him. And the leaking of his name in a conversation with Ambassador Kislyak from Russia.
The story we just broke was whether the FBI retaliated against Michael Flynn during the launch of the Russia probe. And what was so fascinating to me is that from the very beginning, people would talk about what happened during the Russia investigation, particularly with the FBI. And there was a lot of angst and animosity against former FBI Director James Comey and particularly even more so against now-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe. One of the things I started to do was not just look and listen to hearsay or anonymous sources, because everybody has their own opinion about things. I wanted to find documents…
My colleague John Solomon and I went on a hunt looking for documents that would back the supporting agent’s case from people that were involved in the investigation. And what we discovered was that Michael Flynn and McCabe had it out several years ago over Supervisory Special Agent Robyn Gritz.
What we can see is a very politicized bureaucratic – some people have it called it the swamp at work here in Washington, D.C.
She was and is still considered by many to be one of the premier counterterrorism experts of the U.S. She was at the top of the hostage rescue team. She worked on the Robert Levinson case in Iran. She’s worked on numerous other cases, including Daniel Pearl.
But she butted heads with now-FBI Director Andrew McCabe – she filed a sexual discrimination lawsuit against the FBI.
McCabe and others went after her, while Michael Flynn came to her defense and so did many other people like Rear Admiral Brian Losey, who was then Head of Naval Warfare group. She had a slew of people backing her up. But she ended up leaving the FBI.
Believe it or not, she ended up working at Macy’s for a few years at the makeup counter because she couldn’t get a job. She felt that McCabe and others had basically put the kibosh on her. Her EEOC case against the FBI is still ongoing.
Now she’s back working in another capacity as an expert in terrorism. But when we started to uncover these documents, we realized that Michael Flynn’s intervention on her behalf really rubbed McCabe the wrong way. He went after him. In fact, the FBI went so far as to try to stop his actual testimony that he was giving on behalf of Robyn Gritz. At the time, he was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He wrote this commendable letter for her on his letterhead and it appears by all the people that we’ve spoken to that this is when Andrew McCabe really had it out for Michael Flynn.
Fast-forward, we have Andy McCabe who’s in charge of the Russia investigation. We’re also breaking a number of stories regarding his role with that in the upcoming weeks. But we have Andrew McCabe, and now he sees Michael Flynn in his line of sight…
We documented this with facts and with testimony given on behalf of Gritz and others. In fact, we interviewed Gritz. She hadn’t done an interview in quite a while. We also spoke with Rear Admiral Losey who backed everything he said about her. And what we can see is a very politicized bureaucratic – some people have it called it the swamp at work here in Washington, D.C.
Q: I know you’ve been on the Sean Hannity Show a lot, both radio and TV, with the stories that you and John Solomon have been breaking. Tell us a bit about what your role has been in bringing to light the allegations of surveillance done for political reasons while President Obama was still in office.
Sara Carter: I feel grateful that that I could get these stories out there to the American public because I feel they are vitally important to our liberties, to our Fourth Amendment rights and to the foundation of our country.
Once again, the stories are based on documented fact. We obtained documents that were pretty much buried… nobody paid attention to them… from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which openly chided the Obama administration for basically illegal surveillance.
What we’ve seen is that there was, in a sense, political espionage.
Going back to the FBI, it was illegally sharing our espionage data on Americans with unauthorized actors – third parties, forbidden parties, and contractors.
There were hundreds of cases of warrantless surveillance where the FBI was basically able to glean information from people that you would’ve thought was protected under your Fourth Amendment rights. Let me give you a couple of examples…
Private conversations between your attorney and you. There were cases where the FBI went in and they obtained and listened in to private privileged client-attorney relations, which you would’ve thought would’ve been completely secured.
Priests; priests were also there. And another interesting factor that we saw under the Obama administration, journalists… There was a loophole that allowed the FBI, under certain conditions and with no warrant, to look at communications that journalists had with their sources.
This was incredible to me because you have the FISC Court, which pretty much says yes to everything that comes across their desk for a warrant. But requesters have to fill out 80 pages worth of paperwork. This is a very intense thing when you’re trying to get a warrant to surveil someone. But what happened was the FISC Court couldn’t do everything. So they kind of gave oversight to the agencies themselves…
What they came back with was complete disregard for the rules. They said there was inadequate training and there was deficient oversight, sharing spy data with forbidden parties. And remember, James Comey testified to lawmakers and told them that they only use sensitive espionage data that was gathered about Americans without a warrant when it was overseen and checked. And what the FISC Court found out was that that was not the case at all.
We were also able to uncover that Obama relaxed the laws on the National Security Agency for searches… That they were searching much more than we ever thought. From 2011 until the time of the election, those searches increased by over 350%…
That’s overseas searches on Americans talking to foreigners overseas. And so those “unmaskings” also increased, particularly from November through December. Not only did we see searches on upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA increasing, but we also saw unmasking of Americans increase exponentially. And very curiously, from November through December after the election… so after President Trump had won.
And that led to other stories where we discovered that John Brennan, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and others within the administration were unmasking Americans unlike anything we had ever seen in the past. And I think those stories were eye-opening. They revealed what was happening inside the United States and in the bureaucracy, and they raised a lot of questions, such as: “Has our intelligence community been politicized?”
Q: What do you say to people when they ask you if there is a Deep State, whether small or large, but a Deep State faction that is trying to oppose the president of the United States, his agenda, and his administration?
Sara Carter: I think there is enough evidence to support that there are people within the previous administration that were politicizing intelligence and were seeking this intelligence. Remember, a lot of this is classified. For us to get our hands on those exact transcripts of conversations is very impossible.
So we tried to do our best to tell the stories without violating any of those classified norms and without breaking the law. But what we know based on our research and based on all the evidence, it appears that, yes, there were people using intelligence and have used the intelligence that they intercepted. Methods that we entrusted our agencies so that they could capture terrorists, not politicians.
And what we’ve seen is that there was, in a sense, political espionage. Those leaks were definitely political. They had a purpose. In fact, Michael Flynn is one example of that – the leaking of his name in that conversation with Ambassador Kislyak. What happened there was a felony.
And I can tell you this… There were very few people that had access to those exact transcripts between Kislyak and Flynn. And that would’ve been people within the FBI and at the Department of Justice. But it was a very small number, and what I can say is it was under 10 people. If they really wanted to find out who leaked it, I’m sure they could.
For the full interview between Buck and Sara, click here to sign up for the Stansberry Investor Hour notification list
Sara Carter is a National Correspondent for Circa News. You can see her work at circa.com or on Twitter, @SaraCarterDC.
Buck Sexton is host of the nationally syndicated talk radio program, Buck Sexton with America Now, heard on over 100 stations across the country.
A former CIA and NYC Police Department Intelligence Officer, Buck is also the cohost of Stansberry Investor Hour, a weekly radio show that you can subscribe to for free right here: http://investorhour.com/
