“John Brennan has a lot to answer for,” tweeted Terry Moran, ABC News senior national correspondent, after the revelation that Robert Mueller’s investigation burst the collusion bubble. We couldn’t agree more.
Moran called out the former CIA director for “going before the American public for months, cloaked with CIA authority and openly suggesting he’s got secret info.”
Right again.
To call his behavior irresponsible would be an understatement. The truth is, Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper used their influence and newfound liberal sympathy to paint a picture of an intelligence community sounding the alarm about a Manchurian president. The trio had a setback when the president revoked Brennan’s security clearance. Brennan was promptly given space on the New York Times op-ed page to declare: “Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash.” His security clearance was pulled precisely “to scare into silence others who might dare to challenge” the president. We now know, as we long guessed, that it was Brennan talking hogwash, and tendentious hogwash at that.
Trump was “certainly close” to being an unindicted co-conspirator to charges filed by Mueller and other federal prosecutors, Comey said a few months ago.
Perhaps even worse than the troika throwing their reputations and assumed insider knowledge behind Collusionpalooza was that they also chose to reinforce the sensational claim that the president was being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin. In March 2018, Brennan told MSNBC that Russia “may have something on him personally,” and added, “The Russians, I think, have had long experience with Mr. Trump, and may have things that they could expose.”
The following month, Comey told ABC News “it’s possible” the Russians had compromising material on Trump. Then in June, he tweeted, “Thought experiment: Make a list of all the public figures in this country and around the world the current president has criticized. Ask yourself: ‘Why is Putin missing from the list?’ No responsible American should ever stop asking, ‘Why?’”
In July, after a bizarre and indeed disgraceful press conference Trump held with Putin in Finland, Clapper told CNN: “More and more I come to a conclusion after the Helsinki performance and since, that I really do wonder if the Russians have something on him.”
The ultimate irony here is that Brennan, Comey, Clapper, and those who followed their lead are the ones doing exactly what Moscow wants. Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was done to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton, but the larger goal was, as Attorney General William Barr wrote last Sunday, to sow division, incite chaos, and undermine faith in America’s electoral integrity and in our politics more broadly.
It’s not as though Brennan, Clapper, and Comey don’t know that. “We must get better at disagreeing without hating,” Comey tweeted last August. “The Russians know ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand.’ So they push us on social media from all sides.”
In his New York Times piece, Brennan wrote: “We knew that Russian intelligence services would do all they could to achieve their objectives, which the United States intelligence community publicly assessed a few short months later were to undermine public faith in the American democratic process, harm the electability of the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, and show preference for Mr. Trump.”
These comments now read like mea culpas. They were not intended to be admissions of incompetence and guilt, but that is what they are. The three stooges, Brennan, Comey, and Clapper, knew very well they were giving Putin what he wanted but pretended it was others doing his dirty work. They may still be lauded as heroes of the #Resistance, but their reputations and those of the intelligence and law enforcement communities over which they presided are stained. It will take much cleansing to restore them. They helped Putin succeed beyond his wildest dreams and turned the past two years into a political nightmare.
