Who Really Is Barack Obama? A Counterintelligence Inquiry
Our 44th president harmed the security of America, Israel, and the West – it’s time to ask why
Donald J. Trump is back in the news regarding intelligence. The former president who’s again the GOP’s nominee for the office announced that he won’t be receiving classified intelligence briefings as our Nov. 5 election approaches. Although major party nominees for the White House have received such briefings from the Intelligence Community in recent decades, to prepare them for the national security demands of the Oval Office if elected, Trump is refusing such briefings on the grounds that he doesn’t want to be accused of leaking any classified information.
Perhaps that’s for the best, since during his four years in the White House President Trump was frequently accused of demonstrating a cavalier attitude regarding the protection of classified information. His relationship with his intelligence briefers was testy. Worse, Trump faces serious federal charges relating to the willful mishandling of highly classified intelligence after he left office. Trump can’t leak or compromise intelligence that he doesn’t know.
Trump bears a grudge against the Intelligence Community for the many leaks that spooks provided to the media during his presidency at his expense (I reported several of them). Trump believes that there was a full-blown secret conspiracy against him perpetrated by IC leaders to smear him with imaginary connections to Moscow. He’s largely right to think that. I spent the years of Trump’s presidency discussing allegations of his clandestine links to the Kremlin in detail. Those connections to Russian intelligence were not wholly imaginary. From any counterintelligence perspective, Trump’s dalliances with Moscow were highly concerning.
That said, it’s evident almost a decade after Trump entered presidential politics for the first time that his ties with the Kremlin were considerably overblown by the mainstream media and liberal pundits possessing zero understanding of real-world intelligence operations. Trump’s relationship with Moscow, which commenced in the 1980s, is complex and nearly impossible for neophytes to decipher. You have to know a lot about Russian espionage tradecraft, what they tellingly call konspiratsiya (yes, “conspiracy”), to fairly assess what was going on between Trump and the Kremlin.
The only unclassified analysis of that relationship by a counterintelligence expert who knows the Russians and their modus operandi appeared in this newsletter (you can read it here). Trump has nothing to be proud of in this matter, but he was never a Russian spy, neither was he “installed to destroy us” per the online “Resistance” wine-mom mantra. I’ve been a frequent Trump critic, but his anger at the “Deep State” is understandable, particularly after 51 IC senior officials, the notorious “spies who lie” (a list which included friends of mine), decided to help swing the 2020 election against Trump by denouncing Hunter Biden’s notorious laptop – which included proof of Biden, Inc.’s being on the payroll of Chinese intelligence – as a Kremlin disinformation scheme, when it was entirely real. There’s a reason I’ve taken to calling myself a Deep State Dissident.
I’ve learned quite a bit over the past decade. Many liberals who became my superfans when I was asking necessary questions about Trump’s connections to Moscow got very upset when I did what any counterintelligence professional does and kept asking questions – not exclusively about Republicans and Russia. China now presents a far greater espionage and illicit influence threat to the United States (and the West more broadly) than Russia or any other country, but liberals don’t like to dwell on Chinese spy operations aimed at U.S. politics, since so many of these involve Democrats.
The same liberals who regard any Republican who ever shook hands with a Russian as a probable Kremlin operative think there’s nothing at all strange about Hunter Biden taking several million dollars from CEFC China Energy, a known Chinese intelligence front. (The less we say about the “Big Guy” and his ten percent, perhaps the better.) Similarly, the fact that the current Democrat vice-presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, made over 30 visits to Communist China, with some of his “educational” junkets there being funded by the Chinese foreign ministry (which is the standard cover for China’s Ministry of State Security), is considered a nothingburger by liberals. Anyone asking obvious questions in this weird case is “paranoid.”
Asking questions is the nature of counterintelligence work. Making hypotheses based on limited information constitutes the cornerstone of counterespionage. If you’re not judicious, you can wind up in the vaunted Wilderness of Mirrors alarmingly easily. “Just asking questions” here doesn’t mean social media sealioning, rather making informed inferences from intelligence fragments, looking for patterns. This is why counterintelligence must be left to professionals, while there are few things more toxic in a democracy than amateur counterintelligence weaponized for partisan purposes (see: Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy).
So, what happens when you employ a professional counterintelligence eye and look at today’s Democrats?
What jumps out immediately is the shocking extent to which foreign spies and extremists have gained a foothold at the upper echelons of the Democrats. Over the past 15 years, people possessing connections and views which would have been show-stoppers until quite recently have instead risen to the commanding heights of the Democratic party. President Bill Clinton endured a scandal relating to Chinese Communist money and his 1996 reelection campaign, a troublesome impropriety that’s been largely forgotten. But it’s not like the Clinton cabinet included people with questionable ties to Beijing and its spies.
Tim Walz and his many trips to the PRC combined with his stated affection for China and its Communist regime would have gotten more attention when Bill Clinton occupied the White House. Similarly, Walz’s dalliances with radical Islam would have been too much for 1990s Democrats to gloss over. It’s been reported that Walz, while campaigning in 2018 to be Minnesota governor, praised Asad Zaman, a senior Muslim cleric, as a “master teacher” among other accolades. Inconveniently, Zaman has pushed blatant Nazi propaganda and considered the Oct. 7 HAMAS attack on Israel a marvelous act of liberation rather than a massive war crime. Worse, Walz has hosted Zaman several times as Minnesota governor, giving $100,000 in state funds to Zaman’s organization. There’s the interesting part. Bad vetting happens, but Zaman’s the head of Minnesota’s chapter of the Muslim American Society, which is hardly a secret. MAS was established in 1993 and has chapters across the United States. It’s an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, which MAS doesn’t really even deny, and that matters because the Brotherhood, established in Egypt in 1928, is the world’s preeminent Sunni Islamic extremist organization.
Known in the Muslim world as Ikhwan, the Brotherhood advocates Islamism, that is society run according to hardline Islamic law, of an extreme sort. There’s a reason they’ve been banned in many Muslim countries, including its native Egypt. Although the Brotherhood professes non-violence, its condemnation of armed jihad is at best conditional. Numerous terrorist groups, including HAMAS, have been outgrowths of the Brotherhood. Even if Imam Zaman isn’t a terrorist, he espouses the standard Ikhwan rhetoric, brimming with hatred of Jews and Western “decadence,” plus a wide array of anti-democratic ideas. Why Tim Walz is Zaman’s buddy demands an answer.
Take the case of Maher Bitar, who’s currently serving as coordinator for intelligence on the National Security Council. In other words, Bitar is the top White House official responsible for collaboration with the Intelligence Community. As such, Bitar has access to every IC secret. Bitar graduated from Georgetown University then worked in the Obama administration. Bitar served on Obama’s NSC as director for Israel-Palestine issues, then as deputy to Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. After Obama left the White House, Bitar served as legal counsel to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), as the top lawyer on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, when Schiff was leading the House Democrats’ futile charge to prove that President Trump was a Russian spy.
It gets more interesting. While at Georgetown, Bitar held a leadership role in Students for Justice in Palestine, a radical group that can be charitably termed anti-Zionist. SJP, which boasts chapters on dozens of college campuses across the country, is another Brotherhood front that loathes Jews (and the West generally). It was created three decades ago by Hatem Bazian, a University of California at Berkeley professor who was – you guessed it – affiliated with MAS among other Ikhwan fronts. SJP pushes the standard “anti-colonial” and “anti-imperialist” rhetoric while serving as an apologist and advocate for HAMAS (which, I remind, has been a banned Foreign Terrorist Organization since the State Department created the FTO list in 1997).
SJP activists have played a vanguard role in the pro-HAMAS protests across the U.S. during the current Gaza war, leading to controversy and the banning of some SJP chapters, since the group doesn’t bother any longer to mask its support for HAMAS and its mass-murdering ways. Does Bitar have any relationship with HAMAS or any Brotherhood fronts today? Given his enormously sensitive job, it must be asked (particularly because Bitar also worked with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Jerusalem – the same UNRWA that’s uncomfortably supportive of HAMAS and whose employees were directly involved in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel). The Beltway rumor mill has it that, if Democrats win the election, Bitar will hold a top national security post in a President Harris administration, perhaps even National Security Adviser.
How did we get to this place, which from any counterintelligence viewpoint looks highly alarming (plus pretty bonkers)? Individuals with ties to FTOs like HAMAS, no matter how tenebrous, are not supposed to possess any security clearances, much less occupy senior security jobs in Washington, DC. Where did this all go wrong?
What happened was Barack Hussein Obama.
It’s now painfully clear that since Obama took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, he and his people have been running the Democratic party at the top levels. The mainstream media isn’t bothering to elide this any longer. Cadres decide everything, per Stalin’s sagacious mantra, and Obama’s chosen cadres have run the show during President Joe Biden’s presidency (since Biden was suffering from age-related decline from early in his presidency, which became impossible to hide over the last year, it’s worth pondering how much Joe was really commander-in-chief at all: but that’s another matter for another time). We should expect the same cadres will be running things if we get President Kamala Harris. Obama-Biden will then become Obama-Biden-Harris: OBH, if you like. There’s been remarkable continuity in personnel across these administrations, especially in the national security arena, which is no accident.
It's time to confront the difficult reality that Team OBH in its foreign policy has boosted avowed enemies of the United States like the Islamic Republic of Iran plus radical Islamists of many stripes, all of which have ample American blood on their hands. Why? It needs to be asked if such an outcome, which is unquestionably detrimental to the security of the United States, Israel, and the entire West, isn’t a bug but rather a feature of Democrat foreign policy since 2009.
This has nothing to do with “conspiracy theories” or related crackpottery. Top Secret Umbra doesn’t engage in nonsense about Obama’s birth certificate, who his father “really” was, whether Obama is a secret Muslim, nor speculation about the genitalia of “Big Mike.” Indeed, one of my game-changing revelations early in Obama’s presidency was the discovery that Team Obama was quietly encouraging the kook-Right’s fascination with Obama’s alleged birth issues, knowing that it distracted the GOP’s online idiot brigade from asking more earth-based questions about who Barack Obama really was.
What we can state confidently about Barack Obama is that he grew up in an international and multicultural milieu where “anti-imperialist” rhetoric was de rigueur. His youthful mentor was a Stalin-loving Communist Party member. During his 1980s student days, Obama engaged in the usual left-wing protesting (apartheid South Africa was a big issue then). He always had an affection for Islam, probably due to the father he never really knew. Obama’s political career was launched with the support of a prominent domestic terrorist. In all, from a counterintelligence perspective, it doesn’t amount to much except inviting more questions. It’s revealing that Obama’s own biographer, a Pulitzer-winning liberal, deemed his subject “not normal—as in not a normal politician or a normal human being.”
We then must judge Obama based on his policy. That’s concrete. Take Iran, a country which loomed oddly large in American foreign policy during Obama’s presidency, culminating his 2015 “Iran Deal,” formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. (It’s also the regime that’s currently trying to influence our election and assassinate Donald Trump.) JCPOA was the crowning achievement of Obama’s foreign policy, at least in his own mind, and his administration sacrificed a great deal on other fronts to get it. It helped that the media was so naïve and pliant. As Ben Rhodes, Obama’s mini-me whose main task was selling JCPOA to the media, infamously explained after the Iran Deal was done, reporters are malleable idiots who “literally know nothing.” It may not be irrelevant that Rhodes was so anti-Israel that his nickname in the West Wing was “HAMAS.”
Here Rob Malley played a pivotal role behind the scenes. The left-wing academic turned diplomatic fixer got JCPOA done for Obama, serving as the administration’s mullah-whisperer. Malley returned to the Biden White House, where he was charged with resurrecting JCPOA after President Trump killed it. However, that initiative was cut short last year when Malley had his security clearances suspended, and he was kicked out of the State Department and placed under FBI investigation. We know very little about the Malley case, since the Biden White House has stonewalled Congressional inquiries into this sensitive matter, which reeks of espionage. This newsletter has reported on the Malley case in detail – more than any mainstream media outlet has, by a wide margin – and the possibility that he’s his generation’s Alger Hiss cannot be ruled out. At best, Malley was uncomfortably close to Tehran, flew too near the sun, and got burned. It will come as no surprise to longtime readers of Top Secret Umbra that Rob Malley is a longtime friend of Phil Gordon, who is Vice President Harris’ national security guru (Gordon too possesses questionable ties to Iranian intelligence fronts), nor that Malley recommended Maher Bitar for a position on Obama’s National Security Council.
Therefore, Obama and Biden’s counterintelligence problems with Iran and Islamism will surely carry over into any Harris administration. The current case of Ariane Tabatabai is illustrative. Another Friend of Tehran, Tabatabai still occupies a highly sensitive senior Pentagon position with TOPSECRET//SCI clearances, despite apparently being an agent of Tehran. As this newsletter recently reported, Tabatabai remains on the job inside one of the most secretive Pentagon offices, even though her connections to an Iranian intelligence front were publicly exposed last year. Indeed, Tabatabai visited the White House several times after her dubious connections to Tehran dating back a decade came to light. As usual, the White House is ignoring Congressional inquiries into the case. At this point, I see no reason to doubt that Tabatabai will get a promotion in the Harris administration.
At the dawn of the Obama era, a Pentagon friend and colleague, now of blessed memory, warned me that the new administration was riddled with Islamist sympathizers and related Communist-adjacent types who were seeking to swing U.S. foreign policy in a direction more pleasing to the mullahs in Tehran and jihadists worldwide. Moreover, he predicted the emergence of a domestic front, an odd alliance of leftist radicals, terrorist fans, LGBT activists, environmentalists, and Islamists, all seeking to change America at a basic “anti-imperialist” level. I pooh-poohed his predictions as unduly alarmist, the output of a brilliant mind that was scattered by too many deployments. I was wrong.
I realized how wrong I was starting a dozen years ago, and now it’s time for me to blow the whistle regarding what demonstrated indelibly in my mind that there was something very wrong with the Obama White House.
The place was a city in Central Europe. The venue was a conference where spooks and related sorts gathered to meet and share gossip between boring canned presentations. It was always pleasant to see old friends and share spy stories over strong drinks. One of those friends was someone I’ll simply refer to as M. A spook’s spook, a soft-spoken, tough-as-nails guy who’d been in the shit in several warzones. Yet, he remained a happy warrior through it all, the first to request another round at the bar – and pick up the tab.
M. was especially pro-American and pro-NATO, even by the standards of his country, which is a friend of the United States, even though our governments don’t always see eye-to-eye (for the benefit of anti-Semites: no, it’s not Israel). It was common knowledge in those days that the Obama administration was hell-bent on getting its Iran Deal, a prospect which alarmed governments and spooks who took a less benign view of the mullahs than the White House did.
I ran into M. on the first day of the conference and just after lunch, following a quick visit to his hotel room, he came up to me and tried to subtly pass me a large, thick envelope that was bound with an excessive amount of tape. Taken aback, since this was non-standard spook behavior, I asked M. more or less: “Dude, whassup?” He replied curtly, “I’ll explain tonight, just take it.”
So, I did, securing the package as best I could. After dinner, as promised, M. and I discussed this unusual matter, which began on my end with a bunch of pointed questions. M. explained this most delicate situation to me in hushed tones.
His country’s foreign intelligence service had recruited a couple well-placed moles high-up in Tehran. These moles had a track record of supplying accurate intelligence, the one embedded in the upper reaches of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, especially so. They were handled with great caution and counterespionage vigilance. The agent inside the IRGC was a true golden source, a senior officer who had access to nuclear secrets. He knew a great deal about the true status of Iran’s program to develop “the bomb.”
What M. attempted to brush-pass me with was a dossier of original IRGC documents that were classified Top Secret and provided ample technical information about centrifuges and whatnot. Things I didn’t remotely understand, my diffident study of physics having ceased in high school (not to mention that I don’t know Farsi), but M. gave me the BLUF, i.e. the Bottom Line Up Front: Iran is further along with their nuclear weapons program than the U.S. Intelligence Community officially assesses, and the Obama administration publicly claims.
“Great!” I explained: “Just pass this package to my guys (i.e. the IC), they’ll know what to do with it.”
M. at that point went ashen faced. I knew he needed another drink, so I procured one hastily. He explained that his intelligence service had informed the Americans of the existence of the purloined IRGC dossier through standard channels, what spooks term “liaison.” They offered to share it immediately. The CIA station located in his country’s capital didn’t take the bait. Indeed, they seemed to show no interest in the dossier at all.
Mystified, M. took matters into his own hands. He scheduled a meeting with the CIA’s Chief of Station in the capital, whom he knew. M. brought the dossier with him and explained that his intelligence service had authenticated the documents. Moreover, they were willing to share information about their mole inside the IRGC, to establish his bona fides, always a risky proposition given counterintelligence concerns (plus the fact that Iran executes traitors). A face-to-face meeting with the mole might even be on the table, given the significance of the intelligence he provided.
The COS appeared wholly nonchalant and bluntly explained that he couldn’t take the dossier. Since the COS and M. knew each other, the CIA official explained in hush-hush fashion that he had orders “from higher up” not to take possession of the IRGC’s nuclear secrets. “Just following orders,” per the Nuremberg testimony.
M. walked out of that meeting thoroughly demoralized. His high opinion of the American way was shattered. Hence his appeal to me to resolve the situation. I understood the stakes and suspected what was going on here. I took the triple-wrapped dossier and got it into U.S. intelligence channels where it would be secure. I appealed to high-up IC authorities to read it and take it seriously. Of course, I was assured that the IC had “top people” on it. In retrospect, I believe that the dossier was placed in a back room of a classified warehouse somewhere in Northern Virginia, if it wasn’t immediately burn-bagged.
That detailed IRGC dossier was the Wrong Narrative as far as the Obama administration was concerned, it might jeopardize their precious Iran Deal, thus it had to not exist. Therefore, it never existed. Until I went whistleblower right here.
Political influence on intelligence analysis is one thing. And a serious problem. The Trump administration was accused of this, asking IC analysts to spin information in a manner more pleasing to the White House. Neither was Team Trump the first administration to demand such “massaged” intelligence analysis. What the Obama White House did in this case is far more serious, amounting to political influence on intelligence collection. Don’t bring us intelligence we don’t want to see, at any level: that’s an order. As far as I know – as a spook but also historian who’s read (and authored) highly classified internal histories of CIA, NSA, and other U.S. intelligence agencies never seen by the public, I think I would know – no other White House has done this.
Only Obama did this. Which makes Barack Obama a worse abuser of American intelligence than Donald Trump – or any other president. A dozen years ago I learned, to my horror, that the fix was in. The fix was always in.
Therefore, I ask again: Who really is Barack Obama?