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    Trump Officials Take Steps to Target Comey and Brennan, Who Investigated Trump

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    It is unclear whether moves targeting the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan will lead to charges.The Trump administration appears to be targeting officials who oversaw the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, examining the actions of the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan, according to people familiar with the situation.John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director and a harsh critic of his Democratic-appointed predecessors, has made a criminal referral of Mr. Brennan to the F.B.I., accusing him of lying to Congress, officials said. The bureau is also scrutinizing Mr. Comey for his role in the Russia investigation, other officials said, although the exact basis for any inquiry remains unclear.Even if it is unclear whether the moves will lead to charges, they are among the most significant indications that President Trump’s appointees intend to follow through on his campaign to exact retribution against his perceived enemies. That includes people leading the investigation into what he has repeatedly denounced as the “Russia hoax” nine years ago and officials involved in two failed federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump during the Biden years.This all comes at a precarious moment for the appointed leadership of federal law enforcement agencies. Since Monday, Trump supporters on the far right have lashed out at Attorney General Pam Bondi and F.B.I. brass for closing the investigation into the death of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Those same allies have called for aggressive investigations of Trump investigators.C.I.A. and F.B.I. officials declined to comment. A Justice Department spokeswoman wrote in a statement that it did not comment on “ongoing investigations.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      C.I.A. Says Its Leaders Rushed Report on Russia Interference in 2016 Vote

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      But the new review of the earlier assessment does not dispute the conclusion that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump.A C.I.A. review of its assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election criticized the agency’s leadership at the time for rushing the effort but did not dispute the conclusion that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump.The review also criticized John O. Brennan, who was the C.I.A. director when the assessment was written, for his oversight of the project and for too tightly controlling access to sensitive intelligence that formed the basis of the work.The original intelligence review, which was undertaken in the aftermath of the November 2016 vote, came amid concerns about Russian ties to Mr. Trump’s campaign and efforts by the Kremlin to sow dissent during the election.Before the vote, the Obama administration issued warnings about Russian cyberoperations, and the C.I.A. and F.B.I. intensified their scrutiny of Russian activity after the election.Early on, the intelligence assessment, an unclassified version of which was released in January 2017, came under criticism from Republican supporters of Mr. Trump. The criticism continued through his first term, though a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee affirmed the judgment of the assessment.John H. Durham, a Justice Department special counsel in the first Trump administration, looked at the C.I.A.’s and other intelligence agencies’ work on the assessment, but made no substantive mention of it in his final report.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Spy Agencies Assess Iran Remains Undecided on Building a Bomb

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      U.S. intelligence officials said Iran was likely to pivot toward producing a nuclear weapon if the U.S. attacked a main uranium enrichment site, or if Israel killed its supreme leader.U.S. intelligence agencies continue to believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to make a nuclear bomb even though it has developed a large stockpile of the enriched uranium necessary for it to do so, according to intelligence and other American officials.That assessment has not changed since the intelligence agencies last addressed the question of Iran’s intentions in March, the officials said, even as Israel has attacked Iranian nuclear facilities.Senior U.S. intelligence officials said that Iranian leaders were likely to shift toward producing a bomb if the American military attacked the Iranian uranium enrichment site Fordo or if Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader.The question of whether Iran has decided to complete the work of building a bomb is irrelevant in the eyes of many Iran hawks in the United States and Israel, who say Tehran is close enough to represent an existential danger to Israel. But it has long been a flashpoint in the debate over policy toward Iran and has flared again as President Trump weighs whether to bomb Fordo.White House officials held an intelligence briefing on Thursday and announced that Mr. Trump would make his decision within the next two weeks.At the White House meeting, John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, told officials that Iran was very close to having a nuclear weapon.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      C.I.A. to Cut Over 1,000 Staff Positions, Using Attrition

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      The agency plans, for now, to use attrition, including retirements and voluntary resignations, to reduce the size of the C.I.A. instead of more mass firings.The C.I.A. plans to cut more than 1,000 staff positions through attrition over the next few years as the Trump administration shrinks the federal government, according to officials briefed on the plans.The agency does not plan any more mass firings. About 80 recently hired employees were let go in March. The C.I.A. is also firing officers who had worked on diversity issues, although a judge has temporarily halted that effort.For the next rounds of reduction, the agency plans, for now, to use normal attrition, including retirements and resignations.A spokeswoman for the agency did not directly confirm the plan to reduce its size but said in a statement that John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, was “moving swiftly” to ensure that its work force was “responsive to the administration’s national security priorities.” The cuts were confirmed by officials who were not authorized to speak publicly about them.Changes at the agency, the spokeswoman said, would “provide opportunities for rising leaders to emerge, and better position C.I.A. to deliver on its mission.”The plan to reduce the size of the agency was earlier reported by The Washington Post.The C.I.A. does not officially discuss the size of its staff, but it is believed to number about 22,000. Other intelligence agencies, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Agency, are planning reductions as well. More

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      Torture and Secret C.I.A. Prisons Haunt 9/11 Case in Judge’s Ruling

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      Prosecutors have said they will appeal the decision, although they lost a similar appeal this year.When a military judge threw out a defendant’s confession in the Sept. 11 case this month, he gave two main reasons.The prisoner’s statements, the judge ruled, were obtained through the C.I.A.’s use of torture, including beatings and sleep deprivation.But equally troubling to the judge was what happened to the prisoner in the years after his physical torture ended, when the agency held him in isolation and kept questioning him from 2003 to 2006.The defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi, is accused of sending money and providing other support to some of the hijackers who carried out the terrorist attack, which killed 3,000 people. In court, Mr. Baluchi is charged as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.He is the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man accused of masterminding the plot.The judge, Col. Matthew N. McCall, wrote that it was easy to focus on the torture because it was “so absurdly far outside the norms of what is expected of U.S. custody preceding law enforcement questioning.”“However,” he added, “the three and a half years of uncharged, incommunicado detention and essentially solitary confinement — all while being continually questioned and conditioned — is just as egregious” as the physical torture.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Chinese Intelligence May Be Trying to Recruit Fired U.S. Officials

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      The National Counterintelligence and Security Center warned on Tuesday that China’s intelligence services were using deceptive efforts to recruit current and former U.S. government employees.The center, along with the F.B.I. and the Pentagon’s counterintelligence service, said in an advisory that foreign intelligence agencies were posing as consulting firms, corporate think tanks and other organizations to recruit former U.S. officials.The American government has long said that China uses social networks to secretly recruit people. But former U.S. officials say China now sees an opportunity as the Trump administration shuts down agencies, fires probationary employees and pushes out people who had worked on diversity issues.The warning advised former officials who have security clearances of their “legal obligation to protect classified data” even after they leave the government. It added that China and other foreign countries were targeting a variety of former officials.Postings on the social media platform Bluesky targeted researchers dismissed by the National Institutes of Health, offering them a chance to “pursue career development” in Shenzhen, China.Former officials said other outreach from foreign intelligence services has targeted agents let go from the F.B.I. and military officers who have retired.“Current and former federal employees should beware of these virtual approaches and understand the potential consequences of engaging,” the counterintelligence center said.Chinese intelligence services often begin recruitment efforts by offering a small fee for an innocuous research paper. Over time, the requests push for more sensitive material.The center advised former officials, particularly people with security clearances, to be careful about what they post concerning their government work.Red flags of the recruiting efforts include offers of disproportionately high salaries and flexible work conditions, the center said. Recruiters can also be “overly responsive” to messages from a former government official and give a strange amount of praise.Last month, CNN reported that China and Russia had directed their intelligence services to ramp up recruiting of U.S. federal employees working on national security issues, including targeting people who could be fired.Former officials have said that workers forced out of government jobs can be vulnerable — desperate for work and angry at the government — and could let down their guard. While some approaches, like the ones posted on Bluesky, were obviously of Chinese origin, others may be better disguised, appearing to come from American companies, former officials said.While intelligence and military officials are trained to recognize such efforts by foreign intelligence services, government researchers do not routinely receive the same level of counterintelligence training.The intelligence agencies have not cut as deeply as some departments, like the U.S. Agency for International Development, but the C.I.A. has fired about 80 probationary employees. The National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies have also fired workers. More

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      The Secret History of America’s Involvement in the Ukraine War

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      <!–> [–><!–> [–><!–>On a spring morning two months after Vladimir Putin’s invading armies marched into Ukraine, a convoy of unmarked cars slid up to a Kyiv street corner and collected two middle-aged men in civilian clothes.–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> –> <!–> [–> <!–> ]–> <!–> –><!–> –><!–> […] More

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      Trump Administration Deflects Blame for Leak at Every Turn

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      It was a hoax. The information wasn’t classified. Somehow the journalist got “sucked into” the Signal chat, either deliberately or through some kind of technical glitch.In the days since the editor in chief of The Atlantic revealed he had been inadvertently included in a group chat of top U.S. officials planning a military strike on Houthi militants in Yemen, senior members of the Trump administration have offered a series of shifting, sometimes contradictory and often implausible explanations for how the episode occurred — and why, they say, it just wasn’t that big a deal.Taken together, the statements for the most part sidestep or seek to divert attention from the fundamental fact of what happened: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used Signal, an unclassified commercial app, to share sensitive details about an imminent attack in an extraordinary breach of national security.Here’s a look at the main players and what they’ve said about what happened, and how much their reasoning matches up with what transpired.President Trump said the Atlantic’s article was a “witch hunt” and called the journalist a “total sleazebag.”President Trump told reporters on Wednesday that the fervor over the Atlantic’s article was “all a witch hunt,” suggesting that perhaps Signal was faulty, and blaming former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for not having carried out the strike on Yemen during his administration.“I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you,” he said, after complaining that “Joe Biden should have done this attack on Yemen.” The fact that he didn’t, Mr. Trump added, had “caused this world a lot of damage and a lot of problems.” While the Trump administration has criticized Mr. Biden for not being aggressive enough against the Houthis, his administration led allied nations in several attacks on Houthi sites in Yemen in 2024.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Were the Kennedy Files a Bust? Not So Fast, Historians Say.

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      The thousands of documents posted online this week disappointed assassination buffs. But historians are finding many newly revealed secrets.In June 1973, a C.I.A. employee wrote a memo at the request of William E. Colby, the agency’s director, listing various ways the C.I.A. had, to put it delicately, “exceeded” its charter over the years.The seven pages matter-of-factly described break-ins at the French Consulate in Washington, planned paramilitary attacks on Chinese nuclear facilities and injections of a “contaminating agent” in Cuban sugar bound for the Soviet Union. The memo ended with an offhand aside about John A. McCone, the agency’s former director.“Finally, and this will reflect my Middle Western Protestant upbringing, McCone’s dealings with the Vatican, including Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, would and could raise eyebrows in certain quarters,” the author wrote.It was just one paragraph in the roughly 64,000 pages the National Archives posted online this week as part of the latest — and supposedly final — release of its vast collection of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.But for some of the scholars who immediately started combing through the documents, the brief passage, seen unredacted for the first time, raised eyebrows for sure.“This opens a door on a whole history of collaboration between the Vatican and the C.I.A., which, boy, would be explosive if we could get documents about,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, an independent research center at George Washington University.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More