The revelation that former CIA Director John Brennan made a secret trip to Moscow in March 2016, meeting with the Russian Federal Security Service (today’s version of the Soviet KGB), has heightened speculation that Brennan may have been a key figure behind the Trump-Russian collusion story.
Certainly Brennan is well-known for his intense hatred of President Donald Trump. After Trump fired Andrew McCabe, a senior official with the FBI and a close confidante of Brennan, last month, Brennan let loose a vitriolic tweet aimed at Trump: “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.” After Trump fired another of Brennan’s friends, former FBI Director James Comey, Brennan tore into Trump, “Your kakistocracy is collapsing after its lamentable journey.… We have the opportunity to emerge from this nightmare stronger & more committed to ensuring a better life for all Americans, including those you have so tragically deceived.”
Exactly who the “we” are in Brennan’s tweet rant — a tweet rant that rivals anything that Trump has put out — is not clear. But what is clear is that the “we” does not include those Americans who voted for Trump, because he considers them to be “deceived.” The “we” that Brennan considers himself a part of, which supposedly is going to make things better, whatever that means, even for those who voted for Trump, is something Americans should know more about.
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According to the British newspaper The Guardian, Brennan passed derogatory material about Trump to eight senators in August and September 2016 (soon after Trump had been nominated at the Republican National Convention). One of the eight, Senator Harry Reid, then the Democratic Party leader of the Senate, was given information from the much discussed “Steele dossier.”
Not surprisingly, the material soon turned up on the front page of the New York Times.
According to Yahoo News, Reid then wrote a letter to Comey, arguing that the dossier provided “evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.”
Even before taking office, Trump regularly denounced the “Deep State.” The Deep State has been defined as those who dictate the policies of the U.S. government, who remain the same regardless of who occupies the White House. And Brennan — who was a high-ranking member of the Bush administration before he seamlessly became a high-ranking member of the Obama administration — certainly fits that description.
The American Thinker, in a story on Brennan’s’s secret trip to Russia, believes that it is a real possibility that “John Brennan himself colluded with the Russians to help Hillary win to guarantee his continued tenure as CIA director,” noting that the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele “was used by Brennan and others as a pretext for a Trump investigation bonanza.”
Brennan certainly personifies the “Swamp” that Trump vowed to drain during the 2016 campaign. While Trump has taken very seriously the threat of terrorism, emanating from the Middle East, Brennan’s connections with that part of the world are rather curious.
A former FBI agent, John Guandolo, has even charged that Brennan is a Muslim himself. He has noted that Brennan once said during a speech that he had “marveled at the majesty of the Hajj [an annual pilgrimage undertaken by Muslims to Mecca, a city that non-Muslims are not even allowed to enter].” Guandolo argued that it was curious as to how Brennan would be able to comment on the Hajj’s “majesty,” unless he had seen it personally — and, under Guandolo’s reasoning, is therefore a Muslim.
Of course, Brennan could just be sympathetic to Islam, and believe anything connected to the religion is majestic, whether or not he has actually seen it in person. Brennan apparently does not believe the holy book of Christianity — the Bible — is all that majestic, as he refused to take his oath of office on it. Brennan was a CIA station chief for a quarter of a century. He spent a year abroad in college learning Arabic and taking Middle Eastern studies courses at the American University in Cairo, and received a master’s degree at the University of Texas, with a concentration in Middle Eastern studies.
Others might argue that Brennan was a fierce opponent of Islamic terrorism, even supportive of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. He defended CIA drone strikes in several Middle Eastern countries. But The Atlantic has also noted that earlier, Brennan had “been willing to lie about those drone strikes.”
In 2013, President Obama nominated Brennan to be CIA director, precipitating a 13-hour filibuster against him by Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Paul, citing Obama’s use of combat drones against Americans, said, “No one politician should be allowed to … charge an individual, to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual.” Despite Paul’s courageous filibuster, Brennan won the vote. Then, in the summer of 2014, Director Brennan received more criticism when it was revealed that some of his CIA employees had even accessed the computer servers of the Senate Intelligence Committee after the CIA had received some criticism from that committee.
Interestingly, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, former Senator David Boren (D-Okla.), now president of the University of Oklahoma, invited Brennan to speak on the campus in 2015. By this time, Brennan’s propensity to ignore the civil liberties of Americans was well known, and his appearance precipitated a protest organized by the OU Young Americans for Liberty.
Now, Brennan apparently is opposed to the type of “change” desired by Trump and his supporters (or “deplorables,” as they were called by Hillary Clinton) — America First, with secure borders and the protection of national sovereignty. But at one time, Brennan was all for change of a much different sort. In 1976 he voted for Communist Party USA presidential candidate Gus Hall. He explained later that he considered his vote for communism as a way “of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change.”
Apparently, for John Brennan, Gus Hall is a better representative of the sort of change he wants for America than that promoted by Donald Trump. And Brennan’s remarks that “we” will triumph over Trump, especially after Brennan’s clandestine trip to Russia, meeting with the successors to the Soviet KGB, should raise serious questions as to exactly why he hates Trump so much.
Photo of John Brennan: Wikimedia
