Breitbart:
Colin Kahl, who served as Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, participated in the secretive and highly compartmentalized early principals’ meetings that took place at the White House to discuss the controversial early stages of the Russia investigation, according to a book.
The tidbit was contained in the March 2018 book Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump by Michael Isikoff, chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo News, and David Corn, Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones.
The detail is newly relevant in light of renewed scrutiny of Biden’s role during the Obama administration’s initial operations related to the Russia probe.
Attorney General William Barr has in the past two weeks made a series of public comments that the U.S. administration’s early handling of the Russia investigation may itself raise questions. He noted that it was first handled at a “very senior level” and then by a “small group.” Barr recently appointed a U.S. attorney to investigate the origins of the Russia collusion claims.
In their book, Isikoff and Corn confirmed other mainstream media reports describing a small, tightly-held unit of senior officials and experts handling the initial probe efforts.
By July 31, 2016, they note, “the FBI had formally opened a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump’s campaign’s ties to Russians, with sub-inquiries targeting four individuals” — Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos.
Then-CIA Director John Brennan got together with FBI Director James Comey and NSA Chief Mike Rogers, they document, asking them “to dispatch to the CIA their experts to form a working group at Langley that would review the intelligence and figure out the full scope and nature of the Russian operation.”
In discussing how to respond to the information gathered, Isikoff and Corn write, the traditional interagency process of deputy chiefs meeting to formulize options for the heads of agencies — also referred to as principals — was bypassed for a more secretive route.
They write:
Usually, when the White House invited the deputies and principals to such meetings, they informed them of the subject at hand and provided “read ahead” memos outlining what was on the agenda. This time, the agency officials just received instructions to show up at the White House at a certain time. No reason given. No memos supplied. “We were only told that a meeting was scheduled and our principal or deputy was expected to attend,” recalled a senior administration official who participated in the sessions.
Also, they write that principals and deputies could not bring additional staffers, as is routine in other briefings.
Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, chaired the principals meeting, which the authors write included Kahl, who served as Biden’s national security adviser from October 2014 to January 2017.
Kahl was present to inform Biden about what happened inside the meetings, they write:
Tell them how much you love China, Joe!
Idiot.
Joe’s been an underhanded scoundrel for decades but he’ll skate like all the others.
I want to see the pig Vietnam vet John F Kerry rousted for his sneaky meetings with Iran. {I wonder if James Taylor comes along to sing for them during talks}
That crafty old Joe. His foot may always be in his mouth, but his ears and fingers are all over the place.
But really, I think Colin Kahl was in on the plot so he could feed old Joe a narrative that would keep Joe from screwing things up with his big foot-holster.
Kahl was present to inform Biden about what happened inside the meetings…
I’d venture to say Biden requires an aide to tell him what happened in meetings he himself attended.