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.)and
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.
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.
