Bill Binney: Elimination of Texts, Other NSA Intelligence, Was ‘Deliberate’—It ‘Smells to High Heaven’

Referring to “lost” Strzok/Page texts, former NSA analyst and security expert Bill Binney is speaking out in interviews this week.

On a drive-time program on the Sean Hannity Radio Show, including fellow guest Philip Haney, a whistleblower (formerly at the Department of Homeland Security), Binney replied to the question of whether lost texts could be still retrieved. He said that, unless the National Security Agency destroyed them, they would be retrievable, in NSA records. If the NSA destroyed them, there would be a trace on that as well. Binney said that the whole operation “smells to high heaven,” and this has happened repeatedly. The Attorney General must act and follow the law, he demanded. He added that phone companies could be a source for the texts; otherwise, any NSA analyst’s computer could find the messages, including transcripts.

In a Jan. 23 article on Sputnik, many of Binney’s points are covered. He recalls that NSA was under court order to preserve information linked to warrantless wiretapping under G.W. Bush, and the FBI told by Homeland Security and the House Government Affairs Committee to preserve texts between Strzok and Page. But this intelligence has now been lost. “Could it be a coincidence that two of the U.S.’s most prominent security agencies somehow both managed to jettison intelligence they were told to keep?”

Binney charges that this information was “‘deliberately’ deleted since the hardware would also have to be tossed,” reported Sputnik. It only makes sense that this was done deliberately, he said. “Any judge that would buy that [that it was an accident] is just a real sucker. Either they’re just outright stupid or they’re part of the cover-up.”

According to Binney, the NSA’s claims that it did not specifically target its own information is “an outright fabrication on their part…. These are all lies they’re feeding the court, hoping they’ll believe them because judges don’t know diddly squat about national security or data storage or any technology. They’re usually out there just saying, ‘Tell me what to do,'” Binney stated. The probability of text messages being accidentally junked, “is next to zero…. The random probability is zero on all of it simply because not only did they delete the evidence in the FBI they also, since it’s text messages going across the net, have to delete it in the NSA,” Binney told Sputnik. “They have to do both agencies and to do the same kind of similar data, in both cases that is data relevant to an investigation that kind [of mistake] is virtually impossible [to be a random act].” In Binney’s opinion, the loss of data is just “a conspiracy to cover up the crimes [the NSA and FBI have] been committing.”

Also, Ray McGovern, analyst and fellow-founder of the VIPS, has an op-ed on Antiwar.com, “Foxes in Charge of the Intelligence Hen House.” He recalls the Rosemary Woods incident on the deletion of many minutes of the Nixon tape, plus disappearance of CIA videos showing waterboarding victims at a CIA “black site” in Thailand.