https://spectator.us/2018/07/who-benefits-from-john-brennans-security-clearance/
John Brennan had a tough time when he took his first CIA lie-detector test in 1980. He was asked a standard question as to whether he had ever belonged to an organisation dedicated to the overthrow of the United States government. Not quite, but almost: just four years earlier Brennan, then a student at Fordham University, had cast his first vote for president for the candidate of the Communist Party USA. Brennan had never been a party member—just a Communist voter.
The CIA let him in. A little more than thirty years later, he was appointed by Barack Obama to lead the agency. But now, ex-CIA director Brennan is questioning the patriotism of Obama’s successor, accusing the president of being an agent of Moscow. “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors,’ Brennan wrote on Twitter. “It was nothing short of treasonous.”
Comrade Brennan would know, right? But no—a dumb college kid’s vote for the CPUSA is no more treasonous than a president who takes a less adversarial approach to Russia than Democrats demand. Brennan has evidently never had a good grasp of the U.S. Constitution, whether as a Communist-voting student or the nation’s top spy. That he now turns policy disagreements and personal disgust into “nothing short” of treason is par for the course.
Sen. Rand Paul, the Republican who votes against Trump more often than any other in the U.S. Senate, has called on the president to strip Brennan of his inactive security clearance. Trump is considering doing just that. He’s contemplating depriving Michael Hayden, Susan E. Rice, James R. Clapper Jr., and other former intelligence officials who have been critical of him of their clearances as well. Democrats claim that this is intimidation, though the question on many observers’ minds is: why do so many ex-officials have these clearances in the first place?