Ex-CIA Chief John Brennan Has His Security Clearance Revoked...

[gnadfly]

Remember his track record? Maybe this will jog your memory:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/...ion-justified/

Such demagoguery would be beneath any former CIA director, but it is especially indecorous in Brennan’s situation. There are ongoing investigations and trials. Brennan’s own role in the investigation of the Trump campaign is currently under scrutiny, along with such questions as whether the Obama administration put the nation’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus in the service of the Clinton campaign, and why an unverified dossier (a Clinton-campaign opposition-research project) was presented to the FISA court in order to obtain surveillance warrants against an American citizen. Until these probes have run their course, Brennan should resist the urge to comment, especially in ways that implicate his knowledge of classified matters. (So should the president, but that’s another story.)

Quite apart from the ongoing investigations, there is considerable evidence that intelligence was rampantly politicized on Brennan’s watch as CIA director and, before that, Obama’s homeland-security adviser. For example, Obama-administration national-security officials deceptively downplayed weapons threats posed by Syria, Iran, and North Korea. As The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes notes, Brennan directed the CIA to keep under wraps the vast majority of documents seized in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani compound, precisely because that information put the lie to Obama-administration narratives about a “decimated” al-Qaeda, the moderation of Iran, and general counterterrorism success. (Since this week’s craze is the Trump administration’s use of non-disclosure agreements, we should add Hayes’s reporting that Brennan’s CIA presented NDAs to survivors of the Benghazi terrorist attack — at a memorial service for those killed during the siege — in order to silence them while the Obama administration’s indefensible performance was being investigated.) In 2015, over 50 intelligence analysts complained that their reports on ISIS and al-Qaeda were being altered by senior officials in order to support misleading Obama-administration storylines. Brennan himself was instrumental in the administration’s submission to the demands of Islamist organizations that information about sharia-supremacist ideology be purged from the training of security officials.

That last decision flowed logically from Brennan’s absurd insistence that the Islamic concept of “jihad” refers merely to a “holy struggle” to “purify oneself or one’s community” (see my 2010 column, here). It’s as if there were no other conceivable interpretation of a tenet that, as the late, great Bernard Lewis observed, is doctrinally rooted in the imperative of forcible conquest — which is exactly how millions and millions of fundamentalist Muslims, including those who threaten the United States, understand it. Airbrushing sharia-supremacist ideology in order to appease an administration’s Islamist allies may be fit work for political consultants; it ill suits a director of central intelligence.

Brennan, moreover, has proved himself irresponsible and untrustworthy. In 2014, when it first surfaced that his CIA had hacked into the computer system of the Senate Intelligence Committee staff investigating the agency’s enhanced-interrogation program, Brennan indignantly denied the allegation. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he insisted. “I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.”

Of course, it was the truth. An inspector-general probe established that the hacking had, in fact, occurred. And not just that; as the New York Times reported, CIA officials who were involved in spying on the Senate committee maintained that their actions “were lawful and in some cases done at the behest of John O. Brennan.” Brennan eventually apologized to senior committee senators. Then he handpicked an “accountability board” to investigate the matter. As I’m sure you’ll be stunned to learn, Brennan used the pendency of the accountability board’s examination as a pretext to avoid answering Congress’s questions; then the board dutifully whitewashed the matter, recommending that no one be disciplined.

and
https://spectator.org/john-brennan-a...rom-the-start/

he real story about John Brennan’s security clearance is not that he lost it under a Republican president but that he once got one. One of the peculiar footnotes of Brennan’s history is that he obtained a position in Bill Casey’s CIA after having supported the Soviet-backed American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War. Had Casey conducted the polygraph test in which Brennan admitted to voting for Soviet proxy Gus Hall in 1976, Casey would have tossed him out of the office. Casey hated communists. Whoever hired Brennan must have been a Deep State holdover from the Carter years.

All of Brennan’s propaganda about “Trump-Russian collusion” is just sour grapes over the loss of his preferred candidate, Hillary, for whom he was desperately auditioning by launching an unfounded investigation into her opponent, and a remnant of his pro-Soviet nostalgia. Brennan’s much-vaunted “conscience” was pricked not by Soviet leaders who slaughtered their own people and enslaved hapless nations but by a Russian leader who — brace yourselves — isn’t keen on postmodern Western propaganda in favor of gay rights. Brennan prided himself on his “commitment” to alternative lifestyles and would pad down the halls of the CIA in a “rainbow lanyard,” as Bill Gertz once reported. Putin’s refusal to hold “gay pride” parades in Moscow infuriated Brennan. He also didn’t care for Putin’s unsentimental approach to Islamic terrorism. Brennan defined jihad as “self-improvement” and lobbied Obama to embrace the fanatics of the Muslim Brotherhood. Brennan got his wish when the Obama-backed Morsi rose to power in Egypt and wrecked it.

[lustylad]

Treason, Trust—and Trump

John Brennan’s allies worry his intemperate presidential criticism is backfiring.

By William McGurn
Aug. 20, 2018 6:22 p.m. ET

So Rachel Maddow is now the voice of moderation on Donald Trump. Of course, it’s only by comparison to John Brennan. In an interview Friday on MSNBC, Ms. Maddow gently intimated that the former Central Intelligence Agency director might have gone too far in calling the president “nothing short of treasonous” for his Helsinki press conference with Vladimir Putin. Mr. Brennan backed away—but just a little.

“I didn’t mean that he committed treason,” Mr. Brennan said. Ms. Maddow pressed him, noting that treason is a “serious allegation” and saying “if we diagram the sentence, ‘nothing short of treasonous’ means it’s treason.”

By Sunday’s appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Brennan had shaken loose any qualifiers. When asked if he regretted his words, Mr. Brennan replied, “I called his behavior treasonous, which is to betray one’s trust and to aid and abet the enemy. And I stand very much by that claim.”

Mr. Trump’s decision last week to revoke Mr. Brennan’s security clearance drew predictable howls from the president’s opponents—and equally predictable defenses from his supporters. But the most interesting response has been from Brennan allies warning him that his intemperance may be backfiring.

Start with his colleague in the Obama administration’s intelligence community, James Clapper. Though the former director of national intelligence excoriated the president for stripping Mr. Brennan of his clearance, he also admitted on CNN this Sunday that “John and his rhetoric have become an issue in and of itself.” Message to Mr. Brennan: Shut your mouth, John, because you are doing more harm than good.

Mr. Clapper had plenty of company. Retired Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, likened Mr. Trump’s plan to strip critics of clearances to Nixon’s enemies list. But he went on to say that Mr. Brennan’s over-the-top charges have “put him in a political place which actually does more damage for the intelligence community.”

Finally, there’s Sen. Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Mr. Burr has defended the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Mr. Trump win. Yet in a statement released last Thursday, he slammed Mr. Brennan for writing a New York Times op-ed that accused the president’s campaign team, without evidence, of having colluded with the Russians.

“If Director Brennan’s statement is based on intelligence he received while still leading the CIA,” Mr. Burr wrote, “why didn’t he include it in the Intelligence Community Assessment released in 2017? If his statement is based on intelligence he has seen since leaving office, it constitutes an intelligence breach. If he has some other personal knowledge of or evidence of collusion, it should be disclosed to the Special Counsel, not The New York Times.”

Mr. Brennan has responded to all this by threatening to sue the president. It is almost certainly a hollow threat. In addition to having a doubtful legal case, a lawsuit would give the president’s team an opening for some uncomfortable discovery about Mr. Brennan’s behavior.

Just one example of a question that might be difficult to answer under oath: When you were CIA director, did you ever speak directly to the press, or ask someone else to speak to the press, about matters pertaining to the Russia investigation with the condition that you were not named as a source? If so, whom did you speak to and what information did you convey?

On Monday Mr. Trump tweeted his own response to the threat of a suit: Bring it on. “I hope John Brennan, the worst CIA Director in our country’s history, brings a lawsuit,” he wrote. “It will then be very easy to get all of his records, texts, emails and documents to show not only the poor job he did, but how he was involved with the Mueller Rigged Witch Hunt.”

Plainly Mr. Brennan’s decision to put himself out in front of the Trump resistance is giving his more thoughtful allies heartburn. He doesn’t seem to appreciate what Messrs. Clapper and Mullen surely do: that the unhinged and highly politicized attacks he’s been directing at Donald Trump after stepping down as CIA director may inadvertently be helping to advance the case that he was equally politicized while on the job.

In the end, the heat and drama over revoking security clearances for former government officials is but a proxy for a larger battle. Thus far the best take has been offered by George W. Bush’s former press secretary, Ari Fleischer. In a recent tweet Mr. Fleischer says that while he doesn’t like the politics of retaliation, “it’s worth pointing out that outgoing Obama officials retaliated against Trump because he won the election”—and that they did their dirty work in the dark.

“Someone leaked to CNN about the dossier briefing and someone unmasked [Mike] Flynn,” tweets Mr. Fleischer. “Trump does his retaliating openly. Obama officials hid their retaliation, and the MSM fell for it.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/treason...ump-1534803727