When President-elect Barack Obama first considered John Brennan for director of the CIA, one of his supporters, an erstwhile War on Terror hawk, implored him not to.
“[I]f Obama picks him, it will be a vindication of the kind of ambivalence and institutional moral cowardice that made America a torturing nation,” wrote the blogger Andrew Sullivan. “It would be an unforgivable betrayal of his supporters and his ideals.”
Brennan, like current CIA Director Gina Haspel, was at the very least in close proximity to Bush-era excesses most observers concluded amounted to torture: enhanced interrogation, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, and black sites. He later defended, however ambivalently, some of these practices.
Once Obama finally nominated Brennan to run the CIA in 2013, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., mounted a lengthy filibuster protesting his and the administration’s position on extrajudicial killings through drone strikes. The American Civil Liberties Union took much the same position as the Tea Party senator: “The Senate should not move forward with the nomination of John Brennan until it is clear that he is committed to making sure that the CIA will end its targeted killing program, and agree to work with the Senate Intelligence Committee on the declassification review and disclosure of the committee’s report on the CIA’s past role in torture and abuse.”
In the same statement, the ACLU declared, “This nomination is too important to proceed without the Senate first knowing what happened during Brennan’s tenures at the CIA and the White House, and whether all of his conduct was within the law.”
Brennan reassured enough senators to win confirmation easily, only to challenge their assessment of enhanced interrogation once safely ensconced at Langley. “The intelligence gained from the program,” he said in a statement, “was critical to our understanding of al Qaeda and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day.”
Later, Brennan’s CIA came under fire for snooping on computers used by Senate staffers helping compile this torture report. Then Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., was one of two Democrats in the upper chamber to call on Brennan to resign.
“The CIA unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into Senate Intelligence Committee computers,” Udall said. This grave misconduct not only is illegal, but it violates the U.S. Constitution’s requirement of separation of powers. There must be consequences.”
All this was swept under the rug Wednesday when the White House yanked Brennan’s security clearance under orders from President Trump. “As the head of the executive branch and Commander-in-Chief, I have a unique constitutional responsibility to protect the nation’s classified information, including by controlling access to it,” Trump said in a statement read from the podium by press secretary Sarah Sanders.
Everyone went apoplectic — Brennan and all the other current and former officials whose clearances the White House had announced were under review had emerged as frequent, occasionally trenchant critics of the president.
Even here, Brennan’s conduct could be problematic. He often sounded like a Democratic operative railing against Trump while hiding behind the nonpartisan reputation of the agency he once headed. At a time when trust in institutions is low and there was growing talk of a “deep state” conspiracy against the sitting president, recent former directors of the CIA and FBI were sounding like anti-Trump partisans.
Brennan, James Comey, James Clapper, and the like have a First Amendment right to say what they want, especially now that they are private citizens. (Bruce Ohr’s situation seems more complicated.) They could, however, express their views in a manner more fitting of former high-ranking government officials rather than Resistance Twitter.
None of them will be silenced, though perhaps Trump’s move will have a chilling effect on lower-level officials. Brennan is already making the rounds of cable news channels and his voice, if anything, was amplified by Trump’s decision.
Still, Trump looks petty and vindictive for singling out the security clearances of people who have disagreed with him. His supporters love that he fights back, but sometimes he suffers self-inflicted wounds in the process. Omarosa Manigault Newman’s book was already falling apart, for instance, when Trump breathed new life into its PR campaign by calling her a “dog” on Twitter.
In Trump’s America, one wag observed, we are all dogs and his Twitter account is a bell instructing us when to salivate. The rehabilitation of the very people whose foreign-policy and other missteps Trump campaigned against, people like Brennan, could wind up being his legacy.
But for all that is unusual about this political moment, here is some continuity: A president is rashly setting precedents without regard for their future consequences while a top official is being punished due to politics rather than official misdeeds.
