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Friday, January 31, 2025

Prostate cancer study reveals early radiation side effects predict future issues

Men undergoing radiation therapy for prostate cancer who experience side effects early in treatment may face a higher risk of developing more serious long-term urinary and bowel health issues, according to a new study led by investigators from the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The study found that patients who experienced moderate acute urinary side effects in the first three months after radiation were nearly twice as likely to develop late urinary complications years later compared to those without early symptoms. Similarly, patients with early bowel side effects had nearly double the risk of chronic bowel issues.

The findings, published in the Lancet Oncology, highlight the importance of developing strategies to better manage acute toxicities to help improve long-term outcomes and quality of life for patients.

"Men with prostate cancer are living longer than ever, and our goal is to reduce the risk of late toxicities, such as difficulty urinating or rectal bleeding, that can impact a patient's quality of life for years," said Dr. Amar Kishan, executive vice chair of radiation oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and senior author of the study. "This study highlights innovations we're developing, such as using smaller treatment margins in prostate radiation to minimize early side effects, that can lead to lasting benefits by also reducing the risk of long-term complications for patients."

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men, with radiation therapy often serving as a key treatment for localized prostate cancer, often involving higher doses to better control the disease. While this approach effectively controls cancer, it can also harm nearby healthy tissues, causing acute and late-term side effects.

Acute toxicity refers to side effects that occur during treatment or within the first three months after it ends, and they are typically temporary. Common urinary side effects include increased frequency of urination, difficulty urinating and discomfort during urination. Bowel-related side effects may include softer stools or diarrhea, as well as rectal discomfort during bowel movements.

Late toxicity, on the other hand, can appear months or even years later and can last for years. Late urinary toxicities include narrowing of the urethra and having blood in the urine. Late bowel toxicities include having blood in the stool or having an ulcer in the wall of the rectum. These issues often can have a bigger impact on a person's quality of life compared to acute side effects.

While both acute and late toxicities are caused by radiation's effect on healthy tissues, the connection between the two hasn't been well-studied, particularly using large-scale data.

To better understand this relationship, the researchers analyzed data from over 6,500 patients from six randomized phase 3 trials clinical trials that shared detailed, individual-level data on short-term and long-term side effects affecting the urinary and bowel systems.

The researchers found patients with moderate or worse early side effects were more likely to experience severe late effects, even years after treatment. Men with early urinary or bowel issues were also more likely to report significant drops in their ability to manage daily activities and overall quality of life.

For urinary toxicity, experiencing acute toxicity increased the rate of late toxicity from 7.5% to 12.5%, and for bowel toxicity, experiencing acute toxicity increased the rate of late toxicity from 12.7% to 22.5%.

The odds of having a clinically-significant decline in urinary quality of life were 1.4 times as high for men who had moderate acute urinary toxicity. The odds of having a clinically-significant decline in bowel quality of life were 1.5 times as high for men who had moderate acute bowel toxicity.

"These results show that acute toxicities following prostate radiotherapy are associated with late toxicities months and years later," said Dr. John Nikitas, a resident in the department of radiation oncology at UCLA Health, and first author of the study. "This underscores the importance of measures that reduce the risk of acute toxicities because they may also potentially improve long-term outcomes and quality of life for patients."

Kishan, who is also an investigator at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, emphasized the potential impact of newer techniques to reduce both acute and late toxicities.

"Reducing early side effects through advanced techniques like MRI-guided radiation, which allows for more precise targeting of tumors, and urethral-sparing methods, which uses spacers between the prostate to protect surrounding tissues and rectum could potentially help lower the risk of lasting side effects," said Kishan.

However, more studies are needed to determine if specific strategies to reduce early side effects will improve long-term outcomes and whether treating short-term side effects early can help prevent long-term complications.

Other UCLA authors are Dr. Michael Steinberg, Dr. Luca Valle, Dr. Joanne Weidhaas, Parsa Jamshidian, Donatello Telesca and Tahmineh Romero. A full list of authors is included with the article.

More information: John Nikitas et al, The interplay between acute and late toxicity among patients receiving prostate radiotherapy: an individual patient data meta-analysis of six randomised trials, The Lancet Oncology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/S1470-2045(24)00720-4

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-01-prostate-cancer-reveals-early-side.html

DOJ orders firing of Jan. 6 prosecutors; other FBI employees could also soon be fired

Justice Department leadership has directed Washington, D.C.'s top prosecutor, Acting U.S. Attorney Edward Martin, to fire prosecutors who were assigned to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol protest, according to a memo dated Jan. 31, reviewed by CBS News and also confirmed by sources familiar with the matter.

The directive, written by Acting Attorney General James McHenry, said the firings would be effective immediately. The memo included an appendix with names of the employees who would be fired.

Some operating under the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C., had been hired as term employees to carry out the sprawling Jan. 6 probe. Before the presidential transition, the Biden Justice Department made them permanent employees.

According to the memo, their employment has "hindered the ability" of the D.C. U.S. attorney to "faithfully implement the agenda that the American people elected President Trump to execute."

"The appropriate step is to terminate these employees, and to take all appropriate steps to ensure that resources allocated to their hiring and employment" are available to current Justice Department leadership, the memo said.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

FBI agents who worked on the bureau's probes of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the federal investigations into President Trump's handling of classified records and his post-2020-election conduct could also be fired as soon as Friday, multiple sources familiar with the matter confirmed to CBS News.

The potential personnel changes were initiated by the Justice Department, which informed FBI leadership. Currently, McHenry and Acting Deputy General Emil Bove are leading the Justice Department.

The moves would expand an ongoing purge of employees within the Justice Department and the FBI, where top officials have been told to retire, resign or be fired by Monday. Government officials are reviewing lists of FBI agents who worked on the probes to determine who should be fired and the numbers of agents affected could grow, two of the sources said

The senior FBI officials receiving notice to resign or be fired include those at the executive assistant director level at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., and numerous heads of FBI field offices across the country. The special agents in charge of Miami and Las Vegas offices, as well as the assistant director in charge of the Washington field offices have also received notice, three people familiar with the moves told CBS News. These agents are expected to accept retirement.

The top officials at the executive assistant director level being instructed to retire manage the FBI's criminal, national security and cyber investigations. There may be more changes throughout the FBI, too, sources said.

Some were notified while Kash Patel, President Trump's pick to lead the FBI, faced questions by senators at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday. The panel has not yet voted on his confirmation.

While the number of agents affected by the latest changes remains unclear, the decision to include those who worked on the complex probe into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot could reverberate across the country, since agents from a number of FBI field offices participated in what became the largest investigation in Justice Department history. More than 1,500 defendants were charged in nearly every state, and FBI personnel played critical roles in each case. On his first day in office, Mr. Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of all Jan. 6 defendants.

The investigation into the Capitol breach has been closed, but multiple people familiar with the matter previously told CBS News that Acting U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., Edward Martin, initiated a review previous charging decisions behind hundreds of cases. That review is ongoing.

FBI agents also worked with federal prosecutors as they investigated and later charged Mr. Trump in two cases brought by former special counsel Jack Smith, one tied to the president's handling of classified records and the other related to his conduct after the 2020 presidential election. Those agents are expected to be removed from their positions. The charges against Mr. Trump were dropped before his inauguration and the special counsel resigned.

The FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment when contacted by CBS News. However, Patel was asked during his confirmation hearing specifically about the firing of FBI agents who worked on the Trump cases.

"Every FBI employee will be held to the absolute same standard and no one will be terminated for case assignments," Patel said. He later added that "all FBI employees will be protected from political retribution."

In a statement, the FBI Agents Association, which represents active and former FBI personnel, said, "If true, these outrageous actions by acting officials are fundamentally at odds with the law enforcement objectives outlined by President Trump and his support for FBI Agents. Dismissing potentially hundreds of Agents would severely weaken the Bureau's ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats and will ultimately risk setting up the Bureau and its new leadership for failure.

"These actions also contradict the commitments that Attorney General-nominee Pam Bondi and Director-nominee Kash Patel made during their nomination hearings before the United States Senate," the association continued. "They also run counter to the commitment that Director-nominee Patel made to the FBI Agents Association, where during our meeting he said that Agents would be afforded appropriate process and review and not face retribution based solely on the cases to which they were assigned."

Last week, CBS News reported that more than a dozen federal prosecutors who worked on Smith's team to charge Mr. Trump were fired by the Justice Department.

The federal prosecutors were informed of the decision to terminate their positions by a letter sent over email after Justice Department leadership determined they were unable to carry out Mr. Trump's agenda, according to two sources.

"Acting Attorney General James McHenry made this decision because he did not believe these officials could be trusted to faithfully implement the president's agenda because of their significant role in prosecuting the president," a Justice Department official told CBS News at the time.

In all, the moves make good on a Trump campaign promise to clean house at the Justice Department. Earlier this month, the president signed an executive order to take on the "weaponization of the federal government," a characterization he has applied to the special counsel's prosecutions.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-agents-on-jan-6-capitol-riot-trump-investigations-to-be-fired-sources-say/

Rising early adult mortality in the US: Death rates remain higher than expected post-pandemic

New research from the University of Minnesota shows that death rates for early adults, or adults aged 25–44, rose sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic and remain higher than expected post-pandemic.

Heightened death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic intensified an already negative trend for early adults, which began around 2010. As a result, early adult death rates in 2023 were about 70% higher than they might have been if death rates had not begun to rise about a decade before the pandemic.

Researchers from the University of Minnesota and Boston University analyzed death rates between 1999–2023. The study, published in JAMA Network Open, found:

For early adults, there was a large jump in the death rate between 2019 and 2021, which are considered the core pandemic years. In 2023, the death rate remained nearly 20% higher than in 2019.
Drug-related deaths are the single largest cause of 2023 excess mortality, compared with the mortality that would have been expected had earlier trends continued.
Other important contributing causes were a variety of natural causes, including cardiometabolic and nutritional causes, and a variety of other external causes, including transport deaths.

"The rise in opiate deaths has been devastating for Americans in early and middle adulthood," said Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, lead author and an associate professor in the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts and Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation.

"What we didn't expect is how many different causes of death have really grown for these early adults. It's drug and alcohol deaths, but it's also car collisions, it's circulatory and metabolic diseases—causes that are very different from each other. That tells us this isn't one simple problem to fix, but something broader."

"Our findings underscore the urgent need for comprehensive policies to address the structural factors driving worsening health among recent generations of young adults," said author Andrew Stokes of Boston University. "Solutions may include expanding access to nutritious foods, strengthening social services and increasing regulation of industries that affect public health."

Future research will explore ongoing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the trends that were already in place when it began.

More information: Elizabeth Wrigley-Field et al. Mortality Trends Among Early Adults in the United States, 1999-2023, JAMA Network Open (2025). DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.57538. jamanetwork.com/journals/jaman … /fullarticle/2829783

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-01-early-adult-mortality-death-higher.html

Redesigning effective cancer therapy to make it safer

University of Illinois Chicago scientists have redesigned a treatment for the most common pediatric leukemia to eliminate its severe side effects, like blood clots and liver damage. If approved, the new drug may be tolerated by a broader range of leukemia patients and even be used to treat other cancers.

The team led by UIC's Arnon Lavie created a new form of asparaginase, an enzyme approved clinically for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common blood cancer in children. Using protein engineering, the team designed a new biologic compound that tries to maximize the therapeutic effects of the enzyme while reducing toxicity and harmful responses in the patient.

In a paper in Cancer Letters, Lavie and co-authors from UIC and Ghent University in Belgium reported that their compound successfully destroyed leukemia cells in mice without the common side effects of asparaginase. The new treatment also shrank tumors in laboratory models of additional cancers, such as melanoma and liver cancer.

These encouraging results boost the ongoing efforts of Lavie's research group to bring their novel enzyme to clinical trials. In 2023, the National Cancer Institute Experimental Therapeutics Program chose his company, Enzyme by Design, to perform the preclinical work needed for approval to test the drug in humans.

"I am excited for the opportunity to translate my academic research into a potential treatment that addresses an unmet need," said Lavie, UIC professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics and a member of the University of Illinois Cancer Center. "The reality is that the pharmaceutical industry is primarily interested in de-risked molecules, and our goal is to de-risk our novel asparaginase sufficiently so that it becomes an interesting therapeutic for a company."

Remodeling and humanizing an enzyme

Asparaginase depletes an essential amino acid called asparagine, which some cancer cells—unlike normal cells—can't make. As a result, treatment starves the cancerous cells and kills them, while most normal cells remain healthy, at least in theory.

The FDA approved asparaginase in the 1970s. But its severe side effects mean the drug can only be used in a subset of leukemia patients. Because the drug is derived from bacterial sources, it can cause a strong immune response in some patients, forcing treatment to be stopped. The drug's short half-life also means it must be infused intravenously multiple times per week during treatment to maintain the effective dose.

To solve these issues, Lavie and his research group went back to the animal where asparaginase was originally discovered in the 1950s: the guinea pig. Because the enzymes in mammals are similar to those in humans, the researchers hoped that the guinea pig enzymes would not provoke an immune response in patients.

"We characterized several different asparaginases from the guinea pig to identify the one with highly unique anticancer properties," said Amanda Schalk, a research assistant professor at UIC who has been involved in the project since it started in 2011. "Then we re-engineered it to see if we could make that enzyme even better."

After determining the enzyme's protein structure, the team set out to "humanize" it, substituting components to make it more like the human version.

"The molecular structures told us where we can make changes that would not interfere with the structure, stability or activity of the enzyme," Lavie said. "Then we leveraged the fact that the body is tolerant to human-like proteins, which would allow kids and other patients to successfully complete their cancer treatment."

In making the changes, they serendipitously extended the half-life of the enzyme, which would mean less frequent treatments when used against cancer and reducing the burden on patients receiving the treatment.

"It was a very happy accident, which turns out to be extremely important," Lavie said. "Ultimately, it means that you can treat the patient with a lower dose, and with a longer interval between treatments."

Success in leukemia, potential beyond

The Cancer Letters paper is the strongest evidence yet of their novel enzyme's promise. In an animal model of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, mice treated with the new compound recovered as well as those treated with traditional asparaginase. But asparaginase treatment caused a dramatic loss of body weight—a common sign of toxicity—while the new compound did not.

The team also tested their modified enzyme with models of melanoma and liver cancer subtypes that, like acute lymphoblastic leukemia, produce tumor cells that can't make their own asparagine. In both cases, the redesigned enzyme effectively killed the cancer cells, suggesting its potential to treat certain solid-tumor cancers as well.

"It has been incredible to see the progress made from discovery to drug development over the past 13 years," Schalk said. "It's so exciting the further along we get on the path to the clinic to provide life-changing benefits to patients."

Through that support, the group is conducting the toxicity, pharmacokinetic and manufacturing studies necessary for permission from the FDA to begin their first clinical trials.

"After more than a decade, we will finally get the chance to see how the drug performs in humans," Lavie said. "The university has been very supportive of this project, and of me as a faculty member, to try to realize this dream of translating an academic discovery to something that could help patients."

Additional UIC co-authors on the paper included Ying Su, Ashley De Loera, Alyssa Garcia and Hui Chen.

More information: Maaike Van Trimpont et al, A human-like glutaminase-free asparaginase is highly efficacious in ASNSlow leukemia and solid cancer mouse xenograft models, Cancer Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.canlet.2024.217404

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-01-scientists-redesigned-effective-cancer-therapy.html

Top DOJ Official Resigns After Attempted Reassignment

by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The man who led the U.S. Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section has resigned, according to a new letter.

Corey Amundson, who had been in charge of the section for years before the Trump administration recently reassigned him to work on immigration issues, has stepped down.

“I am honored and blessed to have served our country and this department for the last 23 years,” Amundson wrote in his letter to Acting Attorney General James McHenry.

“I spent my entire professional life committed to the apolitical enforcement of the federal criminal law and to ensuring that those around me understood and embraced that central tenet of our work.”

The Department of Justice (DOJ) did not respond to a request for comment.

Amundson started working for the DOJ out of Louisiana in 2002, according to his LinkedIn profile. He shifted to Washington about 10 years ago.

The profile lists his experience with the DOJ as ending in 2025.

Amundson was tapped in 2019 during Trump’s first term to become chief of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section. That put him in charge of overseeing public corruption and other politically sensitive investigations.

Amundson is one of an estimated 20 career officials inside the DOJ to be reassigned to a new Sanctuary City Working Group inside the associate attorney general’s office.

At least two of those officials, Amundson and George Toscas from the National Security Division, had some involvement in the two criminal investigations against Trump.

Former special counsel Jack Smith said in his final report that his team “consulted regularly” with the Public Integrity Section on topics such as serving subpoenas, bringing election fraud charges, and a U.S. Constitution clause that provides immunity to members of Congress who are furthering legislative acts.

Amundson’s resignation letter did not make reference to his section’s role in the Trump cases.

However, it cited a number of other high-profile cases he helped oversee, including the public corruption cases against Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), and Fugees hip hop group member Prakazrel Michel.

The DOJ, in addition to the recent reassignments, recently fired a number of officials who worked on Smith’s team.

The reassignments and terminations have drawn scrutiny from Democrats, who expressed concern about the treatment of individuals they said were “excellent career prosecutors.”

The moves contradicted Trump’s “repeated pledges to maintain a merit-based system for government employment,” Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said in a letter to DOJ officials.

“By removing them from their positions in this hasty and unprincipled way, you have very likely violated longstanding federal laws,” they added later.

The DOJ has not responded to an inquiry about the letter.

Jacob Burg and Reuters contributed to this report.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/top-doj-official-resigns-after-attempted-reassignment

New CIA Director: Evidence Didn't Support Brennan's Explosive Trump-Russia Assessment

by Paul Sperry

Though even Donald Trump's harshest critics now concede he may not be the "Russian agent” they once speculated he was, the consensus among Washington’s elite remains that he's a beneficiary of Kremlin skullduggery.

This persistent belief springs from a January 2017 U.S. intelligence document crafted by the Obama administration, which classified the sourcing behind it at the highest levels.

Known as an intelligence community assessment (ICA) and titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections," its unclassified finding that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win has gone largely unquestioned by the Washington media and by Democrats and Republicans alike. They’ve accepted its conclusion that Putin abetted Trump as incontrovertible fact, and many suspect he continues to cast a spell over the now-reelected president.

Hillary Clinton still blames her 2016 loss on Putin. She’s asserted, “There's no doubt in my mind [that Putin] wanted me to lose and wanted Trump to win,” echoing the ICA’s judgments, which she and other leading Democrats continue to cite to explain Trump’s ascendency.

But former intelligence czar John Ratcliffe has seen the evidence underlying the ICA, and is not convinced it supports that conclusion. His skepticism, reported here for the first time, appears in written testimony he submitted to the Senate in advance of his confirmation hearing for CIA director.

Ratcliffe was confirmed last Thursday as Trump’s nod for the top Langley job.

In a pre-hearing questionnaire obtained by RealClearInvestigations, Senate Democrats asked Ratcliffe, “Do you agree with the ICA’s judgments,” specifically that “Putin’s goals in influencing the 2016 presidential election included ‘denigrat[ing] Secretary Clinton, and harm[ing] her electability and potential presidency’ ”?

They also asked Ratcliffe if he concurred with the ICA’s finding that "Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

Ratcliffe answered that after reviewing the ICA’s underlying intel, including sources and methods, he could only agree that “Russia’s goal was to undermine confidence in U.S. democratic institutions and sow division among the American people,” according to page 38 of the document.

He noted that “Russian social media campaigns included efforts to both support and criticize candidate Trump as well as candidate Clinton, further suggesting an overarching goal of promoting discord.” In other words, he saw no concrete evidence to support a plot by Putin to side with Trump against Clinton.

In the questionnaire, Ratcliffe also pointed out that Moscow has “long used” propaganda, disinformation, and cyberattacks to target not only U.S. elections but also those in other Western democracies, implying its 2016 influence operation was nothing new.

Ratcliffe saw for himself the underlying evidence while acting as Trump’s director of the Office of National Intelligence.

In 2020, he discovered a CIA document from 2016 stating that Clinton, in July of that year, had approved "a plan” by her foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, to create a scandal tying Trump to Putin and the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The CIA material seemed to contradict the findings of the ICA, prepared and widely disseminated just months later by his predecessor John Brennan, who, as Barack Obama’s CIA director, was tasked after Trump’s surprise victory to assess Russia’s role in the election.

Raising more alarms, Brennan had attached as an annex to the ICA false rumors about Trump and Putin conspiring during the election, plucked from a political dossier underwritten by the Clinton campaign.

Suspicious, Ratcliffe decided to look deeper into how the ICA was developed, according to his Senate confirmation testimony.

“I requested a briefing from the CIA from some members of the team that were involved in that,” he said.

After interviewing CIA analysts who helped draft the ICA and examining the underlying intelligence, he reached different conclusions. Ratcliffe’s review found the evidence was much weaker than Brennan had claimed and did not support his explosive judgments about Putin and Trump.

This flies in the face of what the public has been told about one of the most consequential pieces of intelligence in modern American history.

By painting Trump as a Trojan Horse for Putin, the ICA triggered years-long investigations by a special counsel and by both the Senate and House intelligence committees. It also provided the foundation for thousands of Russiagate articles questioning the patriotism, credibility, and legitimacy of the Trump presidency, including stories that won a Pulitzer Prize for both the Washington Post and the New York Times.

In her witness testimony, Trump aide Hope Hicks told Special Counsel Robert Mueller that the ICA report was viewed internally as the then-president's “Achilles' heel” because even if the Russiagate “collusion” scandal were a hoax, “people would think Russia helped him win, taking away from what he had accomplished.”

Aside from Ratcliffe’s startling new disclosure, the national media have ignored several red flags about the ICA's spycraft and even gone along with demonstrably false spin about its veracity and dependability. For example:

- - Despite widespread press accounts that the report reflected the consensus view of "all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies," it was rushed out in just a few weeks by a tightly controlled group of CIA analysts led by Brennan, who only consulted with the FBI and National Security Agency.
  - Yet even the NSA, which intercepts signals intel from Moscow and monitors the communications of Russian officials, dissented from the key judgment that Putin plotted to install Trump as president. And Brennan had to convince a highly skeptical FBI Director James Comey to join that judgment.
  - Two agencies specializing in Russian intelligence – the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency – were never consulted.
  - Brennan dismissed input from experts from the CIA’s own Russia House, a unit within Langley officially called the Mission Center for Europe and Eurasia that for decades had been locked in battle with Russian intelligence. When two senior managers from Russia House visited Brennan in his office to tell him they agreed with the NSA, the then-CIA director overruled them, arguing that they were not privy to all the intelligence that he had seen.
  - In another significant departure from previous intelligence assessments, the ICA did not attach an annex with dissenting views.
  - It did, however, attach material from a political campaign dossier – a first – which happened to support Brennan’s findings that Putin ordered the influence effort with the aim of defeating Clinton and electing Trump. A summary of the Clinton-paid, so-called Steele dossier was included as a two-page annex.

The report of Special Counsel John Durham on the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe would later shred every allegation from the dossier, one by one, using subpoenaed emails, texts, and phone records to prove they were all simply made up by Clinton advisers and paid opposition researchers. None of the information actually came from Kremlin sources, yet Brennan still included it as part of the ICA, not knowing that Clinton’s secret role in it would be uncovered years later. At the time, the dossier was deceptively referred to as “Crown material” since it was written by former British spy Christopher Steele.

- - The assessment suddenly changed after Trump upset Clinton. Before the election, the intelligence community agreed Russia was merely meddling in the election to create chaos and wasn’t siding with either candidate. But after Trump won, new intelligence emerged claiming Trump was personally aided by Putin, which provided a convenient excuse to explain Clinton’s stunning defeat. It also helped Obama, who endorsed Clinton, to save face after voters effectively repudiated his agenda. He'd assured them Clinton would continue his policies. Again, it was Obama who ordered the hastily drafted assessment.
  - And Obama timed the release of the unclassified version of the ICA just two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, knocking his presidency off balance before it could even get started.

Brennan has insisted the ICA didn’t rely on the Clinton campaign’s anti-Trump dossier and that his team obtained separate Russian intelligence that was highly classified and could not be shared publicly.

It wouldn’t be the first time Brennan, a Democrat who openly supported Clinton and previously worked in the White House with Obama, has played politics with U.S. intelligence.

Trump last week stripped Brennan of his top-secret security clearance, arguing he signed an intelligence community letter just weeks before the 2020 election falsely claiming that incriminating emails found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop by the New York Post appeared to be Russian disinformation. On MSNBC, Brennan dismissed Trump’s order as part of “his effort to try to get back at those individuals who have criticized him openly and publicly in the past, and I think very legitimately."

It’s not clear if Ratcliffe plans to declassify the evidence behind the ICA or his review of it. Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful. He said he has not yet briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee about his findings.

But he also testified that what he learned about the ICA’s shoddy spycraft “influence[d]” his move to declassify and release the Brennan memo about Clinton’s plan to stir up a Russia scandal against Trump to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020.

Former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz, who drafted intelligence assessments and Presidential Daily Briefings, said he hopes Ratcliffe issues a report on his own findings so the public can see how the Obama administration "cooked up" the anti-Trump intelligence judgments in the assessment.

“There should be an unclassified report on how the ICA was drafted, who drafted it, and objections by certain IC agencies and CIA officers that were excluded,” Fleitz said in an RCI interview.

Ratcliffe’s revelation undercuts the prevailing narrative that Putin has been meddling in U.S. elections to help Trump and to shape U.S. foreign policy, particularly as it pertains to the war in Ukraine. The Washington press corps, which essentially has staked its reputation on this narrative, continues to beat the drums.

The Atlantic, for instance, ran an article this month – and before Ratcliffe’s confirmation hearings – confidently assuming that even Trump’s “partisan” pick for the CIA would have to go along with the “unanimous, unclassified assessment on Russian election interference in 2016.”

“Ratcliffe has never said publicly whether he agrees with one of its key findings: that the Russians were trying to help Trump win,” wrote Atlantic staffer Shane Harris, who previously covered Russiagate for the Washington Post. “But his silence is telling.”

Of course, the new CIA director has since broken his silence and revealed information that is inconvenient for many in the media who still hold fast to the Trump-Russia storyline. Things could get more inconvenient as Obama-era intelligence is finally declassified.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2025/01/30/new_cia_director_evidence_didnt_support_brennans_explosive_trump-russia_assessment_1088238.html

Copter in DC plane crash was flying twice as high as it should have, lacked new tech

The military helicopter that collided with an American Airlines flight over Washington, DC, was flying nearly twice as high as it should have been — but the Black Hawk was not equipped with a new technology that would have alerted air traffic control to its dangerously deviated path, The Post can reveal.

The revelations come as questions plague the Pentagon over why the Army would allow its pilots to train in an area home to the most densely trafficked air path convergences in the country — and as the Federal Aviation Administration prohibited most helicopter traffic in the area as the deadly midair collision continues to be investigated.

The Black Hawk chopper was flying more than 300 feet above the Potomac River Wednesday night when it smashed into Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport-bound Flight 5342 from Wichita, Kan., as the plane was landing, killing 67 people aboard both aircraft.

Aviation guidelines require helicopters on that route to stay below 200 feet.

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President Trump on Friday blasted critics for casting blame on his administration’s recent firing of aviation officials since taking office, pointing out that the issue clearly rested with the Army helicopter’s fatal deviation from the required altitude.

“The Black Hawk helicopter was flying too high, by a lot. It was far above the 200-foot limit,” an exasperated Trump wrote on Truth Social. “That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???”

The collision may have been avoided if the Army had outfitted the Black Hawk with an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast device, a relatively new technology that allows air traffic control operators to see an aircraft’s altitude, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said on Friday’s episode of his podcast, “The Verdict.”

“The Black Hawk helicopter had a transponder, so it was appearing on radar. It did not have technology called ADS-B, which is technology that pings the location of an aircraft, and it does so using GPS rather than radar,” the Texas Republican said. “ADS-B is more accurate and more reliable than simply a transponder that is pinging on radar.”

Without an ADS-B, the ATC operator could see where the helicopter was — but not how high it was flying. That’s because the helicopter was only equipped with a transponder, which can only provide locational data, according to Federal Aviation Administration guidance.

Still, pilot and aviation attorney Steven Marks said the ATC operator — who constantly watches helicopters and aircraft — should have been able to identify that the chopper was far above the required altitude just by looking at it.

“The tower not only looks at their radar screen, but you have people in the tower, particularly at very low altitudes, that are visually separating aircraft, as well,” he told The Post.

“It just makes no sense to any type of Americans. It’s a common-sense issue. I’m calling on the military to stop. I don’t want your helicopters where my people are landing. I think it’s that simple.”
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.)

“And so even if they didn’t know the exact altitude, they should have seen roughly what altitude the helicopter was at, and that it looked higher than it should have been and it was in a flight path of an approaching aircraft.”

It was the first time in modern US history that a commercial airliner was involved in a midair collision near an airport, Marks said.

While federal aviation rules do not allow pilots to vary from their required ceilings up to 75 feet, a skilled pilot would not have deviated so far from their required altitude, Marks said.

“Helicopter precision pilots should not be 75 feet off assigned altitude,” he said. “Yeah, there’s room [for deviation] but that’s for the general aviation weekend pilots — not for commercial jets or military aircraft. They should be right on.”

Marks said that begs the question: why would the Army allow Black Hawk training to occur near one of the United States’ most congested airports?

“You could do that kind of recurrent training anywhere, so why would you do it in our nation’s capital — where you have traffic that has a crazy flight path to begin with?” he said. “There’s a very tight approach where you have multiple turns and the pilots have a great deal of busy activity going on. Why would you allow military training flights to be crossing over approaches?”

“It’s beyond me. I’ve been a pilot since I was 15, and I couldn’t foresee this ever happening where a helicopter could fly in my path in a controlled aerospace,” he added.

Brian Alexander, an aviation attorney at Kreindler & Kreindler who previously served as a military helicopter pilot training routes near Reagan National, understands the training routes have been around for as long as 50 years.

“I flew on them in the mid-80s, and they predate me,” he told The Post. “They serve critical national security missions in the DC area, providing designated corridors for ingress and egress to support contingency operations — such as the evacuation of key federal facilities and the executive branch.

“Additionally, they facilitate routine VIP transport, moving important Pentagon personnel to various bases in the Northeast.”

Alexander noted, however, “These routes were established when air traffic at National was significantly lighter.”

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) was among lawmakers calling on the Army to cease flying its helicopters within such close range of Reagan Airport where commercial flights frequently land.

“Why are we allowing these type of helicopters into the busiest airport runway in the nation?” he told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” on Friday.

“It just makes no sense to any type of Americans. It’s a common-sense issue. I’m calling on the military to stop. I don’t want your helicopters where my people are landing. I think it’s that simple.”

Hours later, the FAA halted the helicopter path that the Black Hawk was using, stopping all choppers — not just those training — from crossing through the heavily trafficked area.

“With the support of President Trump and in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, effective today, the Federal Aviation Administration will restrict helicopter traffic in the area over the Potomac River around Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) and stretching to Wilson Bridge,” the agency said in a statement Friday.

Investigators are still probing how an American Airlines passenger jet and a Black Hawk helicopter managed to crash and plunge into the Potomac River on Wednesday, killing 67 people in the country’s deadliest aviation disaster in almost a quarter century.

In the wake of the tragedy, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, said it was time the military reconsidered the significant helicopter flights near the heavily congested airport.

“The big question I have is why do you have a military training flight so close to the route that people are supposed to land … Why is that corridor right on top of the [civilian] flight corridor?,” she asked.

Army Secretary nominee Dan Driscoll also said the military should rethink training in congested areas.

“I think we might need to look at where is an appropriate time to take training risk, and it may not be near an airport like Reagan,” Driscoll said during his Thursday confirmation hearing.

The FAA on Friday nixed all chopper traffic in the area near the crash site and busy airport.

“Today’s decision will immediately help secure the airspace near Reagan Airport, ensuring the safety of airplane and helicopter traffic,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said.

The ban does not include helicopters flying in for life-saving medical support, active law enforcement, air defense or presidential transport, according to the DOT. The restrictions will remain in place until the National Transportation Safety Board finishes its investigation of Wednesday’s collision.

Still, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth vowed earlier in the day to continue the training flights — despite the mounting calls to limit them.

“The military trains, and it trains robustly, and we’re not going to stop training,” he said during an appearance on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”

“… You need to train as you fight. You need to rehearse in ways that would reflect a real-world scenario,” Hegseth said, arguing such exercises were needed in case of an emergency — including government continuity and protection of President Trump.

Meanwhile, the crash has also cast a harsh spotlight on questions regarding air safety after it emerged the military chopper may have been flying at a higher altitude than permitted at the time of the collision.

The helicopter collided with the passenger jet at an altitude of around 300 feet, according to flight tracking data. The military, though, has said the maximum altitude for such flights is capped at 200 feet due to safety reasons.

“There is a ceiling for all helicopters at 200 feet, so why was that particular helicopter above 200 feet?” Marshall said. “Why didn’t air traffic control pick that up?”

Cantwell, too, questioned the safety of military and commercial flights separated by such small margins.

“I can’t imagine you can have visual separation that close … That makes no sense,” she said.

Hegseth said investigators were looking into the elevation issue.

The Army did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.

https://nypost.com/2025/01/31/us-news/helicopter-in-dc-plane-crash-was-flying-twice-as-high-as-it-should-have-lacked-new-tech-as-faa-nixes-all-chopper-traffic-near-collision-site/

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