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“Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”
– Honoré de Balzac, French novelist
The biggest bureaucracy of all is the deep state. And the deep state’s biggest pygmy is John Brennan. His role leading the Trump resistance is becoming more obvious as time passes and more information comes to light. He has become so unhinged, we might expect he will soon call for an assassination. Kimberley Strassel comments.
… That’s what Mr. Brennan is—a partisan—and it is why his role in the 2016 scandal is in some ways more concerning than the FBI’s. Mr. Comey stands accused of flouting the rules, breaking the chain of command, abusing investigatory powers. Yet it seems far likelier that the FBI’s Trump investigation was a function of arrogance and overconfidence than some partisan plot. No such case can be made for Mr. Brennan. Before his nomination as CIA director, he served as a close Obama adviser. And the record shows he went on to use his position—as head of the most powerful spy agency in the world—to assist Hillary Clinton’s campaign (and keep his job).
Mr. Brennan has taken credit for launching the Trump investigation. At a House Intelligence Committee hearing in May 2017, he explained that he became “aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons.” The CIA can’t investigate U.S. citizens, but he made sure that “every information and bit of intelligence” was “shared with the bureau,” meaning the FBI. …
… More notable, Mr. Brennan then took the lead on shaping the narrative that Russia was interfering in the election specifically to help Mr. Trump—which quickly evolved into the Trump-collusion narrative. Team Clinton was eager to make the claim, especially in light of the Democratic National Committee server hack. Numerous reports show Mr. Brennan aggressively pushing the same line internally. …
… The CIA director couldn’t himself go public with his Clinton spin—he lacked the support of the intelligence community and had to be careful not to be seen interfering in U.S. politics. So what to do? He called Harry Reid. In a late August briefing, he told the Senate minority leader that Russia was trying to help Mr. Trump win the election, and that Trump advisers might be colluding with Russia. (Two years later, no public evidence has emerged to support such a claim.)
But the truth was irrelevant. On cue, within a few days of the briefing, Mr. Reid wrote a letter to Mr. Comey, which of course immediately became public. “The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount,” wrote Mr. Reid, going on to float Team Clinton’s Russians-are-helping-Trump theory. Mr. Reid publicly divulged at least one of the allegations contained in the infamous Steele dossier, insisting that the FBI use “every resource available to investigate this matter.”
The Reid letter marked the first official blast of the Brennan-Clinton collusion narrative into the open. …
George Neumayr of American Spectator is staying in close touch with Brennan. Here he spins off a Guardian piece on agents of Estonia and the UK who worked with Brennan to help Hillary and hurt Trump.
An article in the Guardian last week provides more confirmation that John Brennan was the American progenitor of political espionage aimed at defeating Donald Trump. One side did collude with foreign powers to tip the election — Hillary’s.
Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump’s candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to TrumpTower and gave cover to Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people.
John Brennan’s CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump. An official in the intelligence community tells TAS that Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with “Hillary for president cups” and other campaign paraphernalia.
A supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, Brennan brought into the CIA a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump. He bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as “non-partisan.” …
… The Guardian says that British spy head Robert Hannigan “passed material in summer 2016 to the CIA chief, John Brennan.” To ensure that these flaky tips leaked out, Brennan disseminated them on Capitol Hill. In August and September of 2016, he gave briefings to the “Gang of Eight” about them, which then turned up on the front page of the New York Times.
All of this took place at the very moment Brennan was auditioning for Hillary. He desperately wanted to keep his job …
More from George Neumayr on Brennan, “The revolutionary who never grew up”.
… Imagine a former CIA director under a Democratic president calling for members of the executive branch to defy his lawful directives, blithely spreading grave charges against him without evidence, and calling on the “country” to “defeat” him. The media would treat that figure as a dangerous weirdo. But Brennan has done all of that and more, and it has only enhanced his appeal in the eyes of the media.
“A Spymaster Steps Out of the Shadows“—that’s the New York Times’s idea of a hard-hitting take on a former CIA director who is calling in effect for insurrection. In the first paragraph of this essentially friendly, punch-pulling profile, we learn that Brennan refuses to recognize Trump as a duly elected president:
A few days before, Brennan wrote an op-ed calling Trump “a snake-oil salesman.” The paper’s editors tried to persuade Brennan to use the word “president,” but Brennan refused. “I said no, I’m not going to refer to him as ‘president,’” Brennan told me. “Because he doesn’t deserve that, in my mind. Yes, he won the most electoral votes. But I think he has demonstrated, over and over again, that he is unfit to carry out the responsibilities of that office.”
Naturally, the Times doesn’t find it troubling that a former CIA director would throw such a juvenile snit. Yet it is one of the few revealing tidbits in the piece and it captures Brennan’s low, demagogic complex: he is a political hack who never outgrew his revolutionary youth and is trying to rekindle it through a coup against Trump. …
… Brennan tells the Times that his grandfather was a “supporter, an affiliate, say” of the Irish Republican Army, as if that’s a very charming family story. But Brennan’s rebellious tastes ran more toward the Muslim Brotherhood, and we learn from the piece that he played a large role in Obama’s tribute to radical Islam in his infamous Cairo speech.
Brennan’s vote for Gus Hall is dispatched quickly — his support for the Soviet-controlled American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War was just a reaction to “Watergate,” you understand. The piece gives Brennan more of a hard time about his support for the Bush-era drone program, but doesn’t really push the issue. In order to make any sense of Brennan’s self-serving blather about his involvement in it, you just have to accept his premise that liberals can never do anything wrong. They aren’t to be judged, you see, by the same standards as Republican drone-strikers. When Brennan killed innocents, he cared; Trump doesn’t. According to the piece, Brennan dropped a drone on an American hostage. Oops. But Brennan isn’t going to beat himself up about it, since war “is awful for those who had to make the tough decisions and who have to live with the results.”
The irony of Brennan’s career culminating in the very secret military strikes and political espionage he once condemned is lost on him. He is still searching for “Watergate heroes,” as he put it in a recent tweet. He has returned to the revolutionary ramparts of his youth, convinced more than ever that nothing is treasonous for a leftist.
Andy McCarthy thought Trump was right to pull Brennan’s security clearance. However . . .
I do not share my friend David French’s theoretical constitutional concerns about the president’s revocation of security clearances — at least when it comes to former government officials who become media commentators and have no demonstrable need for a security clearance. Like David and many other analysts, though, I think it’s a big mistake to politicize the revocation of security clearances.
Still, I am even less of a fan of the politicization of intelligence itself. And that justifies the revocation of former CIA director John Brennan’s clearance.
As is often the case with President Trump, the right thing has been done here for the wrong reason, namely, for vengeance against a political critic who is always zealous and often unhinged. That a decision amounts to political payback does not necessarily make it wrong on the merits, but its in-your-face pettiness is counterproductive, undermining its justification.
Brennan’s tweets about Trump are objectively outrageous. To compare, I think some of former CIA director Mike Hayden’s tweets are ill-advised — particularly this one, comparing Trump’s border-enforcement policy to Nazi concentration camps. But General Hayden is making anti-Trump political arguments, not intimating that he has knowledge of Trump corruption based on his (Hayden’s) privileged access to intelligence information (which he may or may not still have — I haven’t asked him). Hayden is absolutely entitled to speak out in that vein. Generally, he is a voice of reason even when one disagrees with him, and — let’s be real here — even his edgier tweets are pretty tame compared to the president’s.
Brennan, by contrast, speaks out in a nod-and-a-wink manner, the undercurrent of which is that if he could only tell you the secrets he knows, you’d demand Trump’s impeachment forthwith. (See, e.g., tweets here, here, and here.) Indeed, “undercurrent” is probably the wrong word: Brennan, after all, has expressly asserted that our “treasonous” president is “wholly in the pocket of Putin” and has “exceed[ed] the threshold of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’”
Such demagoguery would be beneath any former CIA director, but it is especially indecorous in Brennan’s situation. There are ongoing investigations and trials. …
Political Insider reports a vindictive Brennan leak. Possibly.
… Some have speculated that Brennan may have leaked the information of a source close to Putin to the NYT:
Jordan Schachtel @JordanSchachtel
Let me get this straight: John Brennan calls President Trump treasonous. The next day, he calls the New York Times and apparently reveals to them that the United States intelligence community has placed “a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin”. Unreal…
Pwn All The Things @pwnallthethings
One of the most shockingly egregious leaks in recent years. This is just a pile of sources and methods that are gone now. And for what? To find out Trump knows Russia interfered and is lying? Congratulations on this big reveal.
If Brennan did leak this source to the NYT, he may have just signed his death warrant. This, not Trump’s bungled words about Russia, is what being a traitor looks like.
Whoever leaked the source, they’ll surely have blood on their hands. What do we think is going to happen with that information? Will Putin just shrug his shoulders and forget about it?
Of course not. He’ll seek out this U.S.-supported spy and dispose of him in either a discreet manner, or a loud one. Either way, it’ll be nasty.
And that’s the kind of consequences Brennan may have helped create by tattling to the New York Times in order to make Trump look bad.