John Brennan does a disservice to himself and the Central Intelligence Agency he formerly led by his veiled attacks on President Trump.
Don’t misunderstand me.
When Brennan suggests, as he did on NBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday, that the Russians “may have something on [Trump] personally that they could always roll out and make his life more difficult,” he does reflect the consensus of NATO orbit intelligence services.
The “personal” references here pertain to a confident belief that Putin has evidence of personal misconduct by Trump on at least one of Trump’s trips to Russia.
Yet Trump is the president of the United States, and Brennan is the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
And a former CIA director does his agency and the nation no positive service when he plays to the “personal” compromise stories. The assessment of that material is the purview of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and the congressional intelligence oversight committees, not Brennan.
The distinction matters.
After all, the CIA’s mission, as the career CIA officer Brennan knows full well, is to collect intelligence that can be fed into analytical assessments which can then help national leaders create good policy. That process is necessarily designed to be apolitical and nonpartisan. It involves exactly the opposite approach to that which Brennan is now employing in his statements on Twitter and television.
And the problem with Brennan’s approach is simple: engaging partisan attention onto himself, Brennan inextricably allows that partisanship to wash into Trump’s conspiracy theories about a “deep state” that is out to get him. In turn, Brennan helps dilute confidence in the patriotic agency he served for most of his life.
That point of service is the final key element here.
Because while it’s not popular to say so in conservative circles these days, the truth is that John Brennan was a distinguished public servant both in his time as a CIA officer and as director. In that work in the nation’s service, Brennan did a very good job.
But while I, and you, should thank Brennan for his service, we should also ask him to jump off his partisan war horse.
