Italian Democratic Party Senate leader Luigi Zanda asks for withdrawal of Intelligence resignation requests.

A report published May 15th on the Italian news site, La Repubblica, led to a request by the Italian Sentate Democratic Party leader, Luigi Zanda, that Prime Minister Giuseppe Conté withdraw his request for the resignation of four Italian Security Service Intelligence Officers. It has been speculated that these requests are subsequent to President Trump's meeting with Prime Minister Conte in D.C. July 2018 and a consequence of Italian Intelligence's involvement in the Russia-Gate scandal, perhaps in collaberation with Maltese Professor Joseph Misfud who is implicated in the Russia-Gate scandal. Misfud, orignally deemed a Russian agent is now generally accepted to be a western intelligence asset and has links to Italian intelligence and it has been suggested that it was Vincenzo Scotti, former interior minister and a colleague of Joseph Mifsud’s, who advised the professor to go into hiding. Vincenzo Scotti and Joseph Mifsud knew each other from programs of the University of Malta in the early 1990s and subsequently at the Link Campus in Rome which started out as a subsidiary of the University of Malta, eventually becoming an autonomous institution.

The following report is translated from Italian and appeared in repubblica.it on May 15th, 2019.

Democratic Party Senate Leader Luigi Zanda presented an urgent question to the President of the Council after the news appeared today in the newspaper La Repubblica about a presumed request for the resignation of the four deputy directors of the departments of the Italian secret services.

"The facts reported, if confirmed, appear to be of absolute gravity, providing for the application of a system of rigid spoil system and a real political subdivision applied to the intelligence system, which is entrusted with the security of our country" reads in the question, where it is underlined that "such behavior would risk not only to question the operational efficiency of our intelligence systems in a very delicate moment, but also to destroy their credibility in the precious international information network, which finds its fundamentals in professionalism, independence and in the absence of political interests in the heads of the secret services of the countries to which we are connected ".

Zanda therefore asks the President of the Council to know "if the facts reported in the introduction correspond to the truth and, if so, if he intends to revoke the request for resignation, and what urgent initiatives he intends to take to ensure that the appointments of the directors and deputy directors of our security system always respond to criteria of operational efficiency and are never subjected to the logic of political subdivision ".

The senator of the Democratic Party Roberta Pinotti, former Minister of Defense, subscribes to the question. "Intelligence and security services - he said - are a good of the state to safeguard the community and we cannot think of naming the top on the basis of spoil system logics". "I do not remember that the change of service executives ever took place in the fullness of their mandate, not as a result of any errors or serious shortcomings, but simply to politically reorient the offices".

"If the press reports were confirmed, we would be faced with an episode that would humiliate the structure of our Intelligence and the people involved and that would create a very serious precedent, establishing an extremely dangerous and unacceptable practice in a democratic country," concludes Pinotti.