The Trump-Russia collusion theory was not propagated by a few rogue figures. Key Obama administration and intelligence officials laundered it through national security reporters who gave their explosive claims anonymous cover. Nevertheless, Brennan stands apart for the outsized role he played in generating and spreading the false narrative.
Brennan on MSNBC: Well, I don't know if I received bad information but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was. I am relieved that it's been determined there was not a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government over our election.
Hmmm...your bizarre tweets and recent temper tantrums reveal your panic over the likelihood the Special Counsel will soon further complicate your life, putting your political & financial future in jeopardy. Fortunately, Lady Justice does not do NDAs.
My principles are greater than clearances too John, especially when you and the @CIA kool-aid drinkers punished us for not going along with the Benghazi cover-up story in order to protect you, @HillaryClinton ‘s & @BarackObama ‘s failures. You put your politics before us. https://t.co/qWFWujKthL— Kris Paronto (@KrisParonto) August 16, 2018
. @JohnBrennan you put your leftist politics before Patriots then and now.... that stripper named Karma is getting closer 😡 . #leftisthack https://t.co/3MOTf5qes0— Kris Paronto (@KrisParonto) August 17, 2018
But the left wing elitist feels it necessary to lecture conservatives , including the President , about honor & integrity. @JohnBrennan #NoHonor #NoIntegrity #Leftisthack https://t.co/3Vdl3EHPwt— Kris Paronto (@KrisParonto) August 17, 2018
..Or caught lying to congress OR caught spying on Pres. candidates OR caught using their positions to influence US elections OR caught fabricating stories about attacks on US personnel in Libya OR providing weapons to ISIS backed militias in Syria ..should I go on @JohnBrennan ? https://t.co/Vk6ui6SmR7— Kris Paronto (@KrisParonto) August 17, 2018
My principles are greater than clearances too John, especially when you and the @CIA kool-aid drinkers punished us for not going along with the Benghazi cover-up story in order to protect you, @HillaryClinton ‘s & @BarackObama ‘s failures. You put your politics before us. https://t.co/qWFWujKthL— Kris Paronto (@KrisParonto) August 16, 2018
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| The usual suspects |
But the strain has been terrific, and there is no doubt that the man [Brenan] is barking. So he deserves our compassion. He also deserves our vigilance. Give him a sweet and wipe his brow as you walk by, but make sure that the straps on the straight jacket are secure.
It was President Trump’s summit meeting and subsequent press conference with President Putin in Helsinki that sent poor John Brennan and his faithful anti-Trump cultists into orbit. I don’t think we’ve seen anything quite like it since the melee at Charlottesville, when Trump had the temerity to suggest that there was plenty of blame on both sides of the protest.
That was supposed to be a “moral disgrace” just as his efforts to patch things up with Russia was supposed to be “treasonous.”
You may think, as I do, that Trump is doing the right thing by reaching out a hand to Vladimir Putin, odious though he is. Or you might believe, as many thoughtful people do, that Putin is just too odious to do business with. People can disagree about that, though I would note that I cannot see that Putin is any more odious than Joseph Stalin, with whom FDR consorted, or his successors, which every US President since have had to deal with. Mao Tse-Tung was one of the greatest monsters in history. That didn’t stop Richard Nixon from making overtures to him. Was that “treasonous”?
Yep, the party that has spent a decade and more coddling Washington elites and ignoring the heartland as a bastion of “irredeemable deplorables,” the party that has destroyed black inner cities across the country by a making their inhabitants wards of the state: here they are with “for the people.” “House Democrats,” Politico says, “plan to begin working ‘For the People’ into their statements and press conferences.”Please stop giggling.
Brennan — it is well known and he admits it — voted for Communist Party USA chief Gus Hall in the 1976 presidential election. Talk about sex change operations. He excuses that as kind of youthful indiscretion — he was in his early twenties — and evidently many (including Obama, who gave him his job) believed him or said they did.But I was only a few years older than Brennan then and remember those days well, since I too was on the left. I was even an acquaintance of such notorious characters as Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden and knew dozens of people who, to one degree or another, sympathized with them. Yet not a single person I can recall voted for Gus Hall or even remotely considered it. Hall was a Stalinist, for crissakes! He was anathema, everything the young people of the so-called New Left were rebelling against then — and, in this one case at least, justifiably so. The mass-murdering crimes of Stalin were already common knowledge.Years later, when I read Brennan was among the minuscule .07 percent who actually voted for Hall, I was astonished. How could such a person end up director of the CIA? I mean, I'm all for redemption and everything, but there are limits. Voting for a Stalinist candidate as late as 1976 would be akin to a personality disorder, almost like voting for Satan. It's one thing to forgive Brennan for this, hard as that may be, but there is something seriously unsettling about putting him at the helm of our most famous intelligence agency. (Other questions have arisen about Brennan's Middle East connections.)But now we have him leading the charge against Trump, accusing the president of actual treason in his dealings with Putin, the very thing Brennan's former hero Hall directly advocated. It's enough to make a sane man paranoid.
"John Brennan started out his adulthood by voting for the communist party presidential candidate. He is now ending his career by showing himself to be the most biased, bigoted, over the top, hyperbolic, and unhinged Director of the CIA we have ever had." -@RandPaul.
"John Brennan started out his adulthood by voting for the communist party presidential candidate. He is now ending his career by showing himself to be the most biased, bigoted, over the top, hyperbolic, and unhinged Director of the CIA we have ever had." -@RandPaul. pic.twitter.com/OUt6xn2uOj— Nick Short 🇺🇸 (@PoliticalShort) July 18, 2018
There are details yet to come, but here is the bottom line, the irreducible minimum. A cabal of CIA and FBI operatives, including the Director of the CIA, John Brennan, along with other members of the intelligence “community,” prominently including James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, and various members of the Obama administration, colluded to undermine Donald Trump’s campaign.Like almost everyone else, they assumed that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in, so they were careless about covering their tracks. If Hillary had won, the department of Justice would have been her Department of Justice, John Brennan would still be head of the CIA, and the public would never have known about the spies, the set-ups, the skulduggery.But Hillary did not win. For the last 16 months, we’ve watched as that exiled cabal shifted its efforts from stopping Trump from winning to a desperate effort to destroy his Presidency. Thanks to the patient work of Devin Nunes, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and a handful of GOP Senators, that effort is now disintegrating. What is being exposed is the biggest political scandal in the history of the United States: the effort by highly placed—exactly how highly placed we still do not know—members of one administration to mobilise the intelligence services and police power of the state to spy upon and destroy first the candidacy and then, when that didn’t work, the administration of a political rival.It is banana republic behaviour, but it looks now as if those responsible for this effort to undermine American democracy and repeal the results of a free, open, and democratic election will be exposed. Let’s hope that they are also held to account.
As Trump won primary after primary in 2016, a rattled John Brennan started claiming to colleagues at the CIA that Estonia’s intelligence agency had alerted him to an intercepted phone call suggesting Putin was pouring money into the Trump campaign. The tip was bogus, but Brennan bit on it with opportunistic relish.
Out of Brennan’s alarmist chatter about the bogus tip came an extraordinary leak to the BBC: that Brennan had used it, along with later half-baked tips from British intelligence, as the justification to form a multi-agency spy operation (given the Orwellian designation of an “inter-agency taskforce”) on the Trump campaign, which he was running right out of CIA headquarters....
A veteran of the intelligence community tells TAS that Brennan’s CIA was full of Hillary supporters, some of whom decorated their desks with her campaign paraphernalia. Brennan, whom the press noted would walk the halls of the CIA in an LGBT rainbow lanyard, encouraged this open political atmosphere. While Brennan knew his spying operation on the Trump campaign was an “exceptionally, exceptionally sensitive” matter (as reported by journalists David Corn and Michael Isikoff), he assumed its machinations would never come to light.
The members of Brennan’s working group at Langley “were just a bunch of out-of-control idiots,” says a former high-ranking CIA official to TAS. He finds it flabbergasting that Brennan would bring CIA officials and FBI officials into the same room to cook up schemes to send a spy into the Trump campaign’s ranks. One of those schemes involved money (Halper paid George Papadopoulos $3,000 for a phony research paper as a way of luring him into a London meeting); another involved sex (Halper’s assistant, with a name out of a bad spy novel, Azra Turk, tried to coax information from Papadopoulos at flirty bar outings, according to the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross).
As his plot to destroy Trump backfires, his squeals grow louder.
It was the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky who coined the phrase the “dustbin of history.” To his political opponents, he sputtered, “You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history!”
It is no coincidence that John Brennan, who supported the Soviet-controlled American Communist Party in the 1970s (he has acknowledged that he thought his vote for its presidential candidate Gus Hall threatened his prospects at the CIA; unfortunately, it didn’t), would borrow from Trotsky’s rhetoric in his fulminations against Donald Trump. His tweet last week, shortly after the firing of Andrew McCabe, reeked of Trotskyite revolutionary schlock: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America… America will triumph over you.”
America will triumph over a president it elected? That’s the raw language of coup, and of course it is not the first time Brennan has indulged it. In 2017, he was calling for members of the executive branch to defy the chief executive. They should “refuse to carry out” his lawful directives if they don’t agree with them, he said.
Trump has said that the Russians are “laughing their asses off” over the turmoil caused by Obamagate. No doubt many of the laughs come at the sight of Brennan, a supporter of Soviet stooges like Gus Hall, conducting a de facto coup from the top of the CIA and then continuing it after his ouster. Who needs Gus Hall when John Brennan is around? This time the Russians don’t even have to pay for the anti-American activity....
Trotsky would have understood the shorthand of all the tweets, polemics, and posturing perfectly. Nothing in this show trial bears any relationship to reality or justice. It is simply an expression of power politics, which doesn’t always end well for its exponents. As even an old Gus Hall supporter like John Brennan must know, and perhaps his fulminating panic indicates a dawning awareness of it, those who talk the loudest about their enemies heading for the ash heap of history often end up in it.
Power was first identified by the Washington Free Beacon last month as a central figure in a congressional investigation into efforts by senior Obama administration officials to obtain classified intelligence information in what many allege was an effort to undermine President Donald Trump and his incoming national security team.Power is believed to be the anonymous official responsible for “hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama administration,” according to current and former U.S. officials who spoke to the Free Beacon about the ongoing investigation.
New revelations have surfaced that the Obama administration abused intelligence during the election by launching a massive domestic-spy campaign that included snooping on Trump officials.The irony is mind-boggling: Targeting political opposition is long a technique of police states like Russia, which Team Obama has loudly condemned for allegedly using its own intelligence agencies to hack into our election.The revelations, as well as testimony this week from former Obama intel officials, show the extent to which the Obama administration politicized and weaponized intelligence against Americans.Thanks to Circa News, we now know the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama routinely violated privacy protections while snooping through foreign intercepts involving US citizens — and failed to disclose the breaches, prompting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court a month before the election to rebuke administration officials.The story concerns what’s known as “upstream” data collection under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the NSA looks at the content of electronic communication. Upstream refers to intel scooped up about third parties: Person A sends Person B an e-mail mentioning Person C. Though Person C isn’t a party to the e-mail, his information will be scooped up and potentially used by the NSA.Further, the number of NSA data searches about Americans mushroomed after Obama loosened rules for protecting such identities from government officials and thus the reporters they talk to.The FISA court called it a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue” that NSA analysts — in violation of a 2011 rule change prohibiting officials from searching Americans’ information without a warrant — “had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.”A number of those searches were made from the White House, and included private citizens working for the Trump campaign, some of whose identities were leaked to the media. The revelations earned a stern rebuke from the ACLU and from civil-liberties champion Sen. Rand Paul.We also learned this week that Obama intelligence officials really had no good reason attaching a summary of a dossier on Trump to a highly classified Russia briefing they gave to Obama just weeks before Trump took office.Under congressional questioning Tuesday, Obama’s CIA chief John Brennan said the dossier did not “in any way” factor into the agency’s assessment that Russia interfered in the election. Why not? Because as Obama intel czar James Clapper earlier testified, “We could not corroborate the sourcing.”But that didn’t stop Brennan in January from attaching its contents to the official report for the president. He also included the unverified allegations in the briefing he gave Hill Democrats.In so doing, Brennan virtually guaranteed that it would be leaked, which it promptly was.In short, Brennan politicized raw intelligence. In fact, he politicized the entire CIA.Langley vets say Brennan was the most politicized director in the agency’s history. Former CIA field-operations officer Gene Coyle said Brennan was “known as the greatest sycophant in the history of the CIA, and a supporter of Hillary Clinton before the election. I find it hard to put any real credence in anything that the man says.”Coyle noted that Brennan broke with his predecessors who stayed out of elections. Several weeks before the vote, he made it very clear he was pulling for Hillary. His deputy Mike Morell even came out and publicly endorsed her in The New York Times, claiming Trump was an “unwitting agent” of Moscow.Brennan isn’t just a Democrat. He’s a radical leftist who in 1980 — during the height of the Cold War — voted for a Communist Party candidate for president.When Brennan rants about the dangers of strongman Vladimir Putin targeting our elections and subverting our democratic process, does he not catch at least a glimpse of his own reflection?What he and the rest of the Obama gang did has inflicted more damage on the integrity of our electoral process than anything the Russians have done.
They investigated candidate Trump and then planted smears in the English press about it.
