House Democrats Seek Brennan’s Malignant Advice on Iran While the ex-CIA director squirms as his legal problems intensify. Joseph Klein
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273826/house-democrats-seek-brennans-malignant-advice-joseph-klein
Disgraced former CIA director John Brennan will be briefing House Democrats early this week on his perspective regarding the current situation in Iran. No doubt, he will use the opportunity to once again take a shot at President Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Obama administration’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran and to blame the president for escalating tensions with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Brennan said late last week on NBC, for example, that it is the United States under the Trump administration whose drums are “beating the loudest” in any march towards war with Iran.
Last year, in one of his many deranged rants, Brennan tweeted that “Donald Trump simultaneously lied about the Iranian nuclear deal, undermined global confidence in US commitments, alienated our closest allies, strengthened Iranian hawks, & gave North Korea more reason to keep its nukes. This madness is a danger to our national security.”
House Democrats are wasting time listening to Brennan on Iran. It’s a lame attempt to bolster Brennan’s reputation as a so-called national security expert and divert attention as more damaging facts come out about his abuse of power as CIA director during and shortly after the 2016 presidential election campaign.
Starting with Brennan’s baseless complaints regarding President Trump’s confrontational stance with the Iranian regime, President Trump is merely trying to clean up the mess that Brennan’s boss Barack Obama and top members of his administration created.
Iran received infusions of cash and major sanctions relief upfront while pressuring the Obama administration to make significant concessions. Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry downplayed these concessions, such as the lack of “anywhere, anytime” international inspections and the sunset clauses that will remove, within a decade, restrictions on Iran’s ability to quickly ramp up its nuclear enrichment to weapons-grade levels. The Iranians continued to fire ballistic missiles with abandon. They intensified their spread of terror through their Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and proxy terrorist groups they control such as Hezbollah. They captured U.S. sailors, forcing them to kneel with their hands clasped behind their heads and then snapping pictures of the sailors for propaganda purposes. All this happened on Obama’s watch after the nuclear deal was finalized. The North Koreans meanwhile took note of how quickly the Obama administration was willing to cave to a non-nuclear power with merely the potential sometime in the future to develop nuclear weapons. The North Koreans tested nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles as the Obama administration was seeking a deal with Iran and thereafter.
Nevertheless, Brennan had the audacity to describe President Trump’s attempts to plug the many loopholes in the Iranian nuclear deal and his refusal to countenance a kick-the-can-down-the-road agreement as “madness” posing “a danger to our national security.”
Brennan suffers from his own case of madness, fueled by his hatred of President Trump. He is as reckless with his attacks on President Trump’s Iran policies as he was with his false accusation that President Trump and his campaign conspired with the Russians to influence the 2016 presidential election. At least Brennan no longer poses a danger to our national security. President Trump sidelined him by revoking his security clearance. All this has-been can do now is spew his vile on twitter and as an NBC correspondent. However, while he served as CIA director during the Obama administration, his actions endangered the very fabric of our constitutional republic.
In January 2014, Brennan’s intelligence agency snooped into the U.S. Senate intelligence committee staff’s computer system. Brennan tried to cover up this abuse of power until he had no choice but to admit what his agency’s employees had done on his watch after the CIA inspector general issued his findings as to improper access. Then-Democrat Senator Mark Udall of Colorado called for Brennan to resign. “The CIA unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into Senate intelligence committee computers,” he said. “This grave misconduct is not only illegal, but it violates the US constitution’s requirement of separation of powers.”
Fast forward to the 2016 presidential election. Brennan was evidently one of the prime instigators behind the Russian collusion witch hunt while still serving as CIA director. Brennan pushed the FBI to get involved, using the discredited, unverified Steele dossier as a lure. “Just because it was unverified didn’t mean it wasn’t true,” Brennan said about the dossier on Meet the Press last year. The dossier served as a major justification for the FBI and the Department of Justice to apply to the FISA court for a surveillance warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Just as Brennan tried to do with respect to his agency’s improper snooping into the Senate intelligence committee’s computer system, Brennan danced around the truth. He tried to distance himself from any knowledge of who commissioned the Steele dossier. He also claimed in congressional testimony on May 23, 2017 that he had “no awareness” whether the FBI ever relied on the Steele dossier as part of any court filing and that the CIA had not relied on the dossier. “It wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had,” Brennan testified. According to a report by Paul Sperry, published by RealClear Investigations on February 11, 2018, however, “Several Capitol Hill sources say Brennan, a fiercely loyal Obama appointee, talked up the dossier to Democratic leaders, as well as the press, during the campaign. They say he also fed allegations about Trump-Russia contacts directly to the FBI, while pressuring the bureau to conduct an investigation of several Trump campaign figures starting in the summer of 2016.”
Now that an investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham into the origins of the Russian collusion hoax investigation has gotten underway, Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey are pointing fingers at each other. Both should face the music for what they have done.
Brennan may also have dirty hands in the attempted setup of former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos. Mr. Papadopoulos said recently on Fox News’ “The Story” that he was the target of “clearly a CIA operation” involving a meeting in London in late 2016 with an FBI informant Stefan Halper and a mysterious female informant. They tried to grill him on what he knew about alleged Trump campaign ties to Russia.
Following his usual pattern of denial and obfuscation, Brennan said his former agency does not spy against “domestic individuals.” Mr. Papadopoulos retorted, “Yeah, usually the CIA doesn’t spy domestically, and that’s why they brought me to London to meet Stefan Halper and this informant. So I have to highly disagree with John Brennan and I think the CIA is up to their neck in this. I think you’re probably going to see some people scrutinized, if not indicted, reaching up to the CIA.”
The House Democrats want to waste their time speaking with John Brennan about Iran. They will do anything to avoid discussion of Brennan’s perilous legal situation. But Mr. Durham’s investigation goes on in any event. Brennan is facing the real possibility of indictment on multiple charges. These charges could include Brennan’s misusing his agency’s intelligence tools to spy on the Trump campaign for purely partisan reasons. The charges could also include Brennan’s conspiring with high level FBI officials to defraud the FISA court by knowingly using the unverified, Hillary Clinton campaign-funded Steele dossier as justification to the FISA court for a warrant to spy on a U.S. citizen. The FBI and Justice Department then leveraged the dossier to obtain three more surveillance warrants. Finally, Brennan could be indicted for perjured congressional testimony regarding his knowledge about the dossier. It all couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
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