Mark Stout

My God. I just read DNI Tulsi Gabbard's "Russia Hoax memo." It is so monumentally unpersuasive. The vast majority of it, in fact, boils down to "the IC said A didn't and couldn't happen but later the IC said X happened. This contradiction is nefarious." It's not a contradiction!

Great story from @spytalker.bsky.social and Michael Isikoff . Former head of CIA counterintelligence who headed the CIA team writing the 2016 election intelligence community assessment denies the claim in the recent tradecraft review that Brennan cooked the books.

Well, yesterday I wrote all of one paragraph for the book I'm working on. But in the process I rooted around deep in Ancestry[dot]com and I had to learn a bit about Austrian nobility to understand what I'd found. So, I don't feel tooooo bad about the very modest progress. That's my claim. Yes.

The now defunct Section 219 of the NDAA legislation was not a measure to merge the US and Israeli militaries. It was about cooperation in military technology. One can reasonably debate whether that was a good idea but it wasn't going to create a unified military.

Much to chew on here about Dutch intel and its failure to see that Russia would invade Ukraine. Alongside issues re intelligence failure that have been seen in the US and elsewhere on other occasions, this gives a good picture of a small state with good services in the international Intel ecosystem.

Nice little article from the Foreign Service Journal on the State Department's Office of the Historian and its Foreign Relations of the United States series.