Trey Gowdy: Brennan was either inaccurate or incompetent!"

What was the most important event to happen today? John Brennan was interviewed today by John Durham. Gowdy: "My suspicion is that John Brennan knew exactly what was happening exactly when it was happening!"

Rand Paul answers John Brennan

You want to know what’s a mockery of public service, John? Killing 500 people outside of any judicial system. Drone strikes on American citizens. Approving British spies to present a dossier of lies paid for by Hillary. Lying to Congress. Your shame alone should shut you up. https://t.co/u2ERmv4gE8

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) February 5, 2020

Why no FBI or CIA whistleblowers on the spying on the Trump team?

Because it was being run at the highest levels of the FBI and CIA in coordination with Susan Rice, Obama's National Security Advisor!

A prime mover

Aaron Maté writes a thorough post in Real Clear Investigations about the actions of Obama CIA Chief John Brennan in undermining the presidency of Donald Trump. Read it here.

"It all started with Brennan!"

In the Federalist, Margot Cleveland writes a story with this headline and sub-headline:

All The Russia Collusion Clues Are Beginning To Point Back To John Brennan
The evidence suggests John Brennan’s CIA and the intelligence community did much more than merely pass on details to the FBI. It suggests they fabricated events completely.

...The evidence suggests that the CIA and intelligence community—including potentially the intelligence communities of the UK, Italy, and Australia—created the contacts and interactions that they then reported to the FBI as suspicious.

Read more here.

Referring John Brennan for criminal prosecution

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance writes,

CIA Director John Brennan didn’t stop with simply originating the FBI investigation, he went on to promote additional material from his knowledge of the Christopher Steele Dossier.

This is the part that John Brennan has denied; however, the evidence proving his lies is overwhelming.

...Brennan was leaking to the media and pushing hard on this same Russia narrative during the transition period. It’s almost bizarre to see Brennan now saying “perhaps he had bad information”… BRENNAN IS THE INFORMATION !!

...In essence we can see that John Brennan was the initiator manipulating everything, somewhat behind the scenes, for all of the activity (tangentially noted by Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in their text messages about the CIA leaks). After the 2016 election, Brennan continued pushing the Steele Dossier into the media bloodstream as it carried the Russian Conspiracy virus he created.

...Lastly, unlike other DOJ and FBI officials connected to the fraudulent exploitation of the FISA court, John Brennan is not attached to the ongoing DOJ Inspector General investigation being conducted by IG Horowitz. The inspector general is only looking at the process, procedures and people who were involved in submitting an unverified and likely fraudulent FISA application. The list of the participants does not include anyone outside the DOJ and FBI process.

This means John Brennan, or any other Obama-era official outside the DOJ and FBI, can be referred for criminal investigation and that referral will not impede any ongoing investigation by IG Michael Horowitz.

That’s why Devin Nunes could likely submit a criminal referral for ¹John Brennan.

¹Or, NSA Advisor Susan Rice, ODNI James Clapper, or former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power (unmasking); or any other administration official who may have engaged in leaking and/or disseminating classified intelligence information.

Read more here.

"Then the American people can decide who is the real traitor."

Julie Kelly writes in American Greatness,

...For two years, Brennan has tried to finish what he failed to do while in office: Doom the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Senator Paul should follow through on his threat to have Brennan appear before a public congressional committee as soon as possible. President Trump should authorize the immediate declassification of Brennan’s January 2017 Intelligence Community report to determine whether any of the evidence included political opposition research authored by a British operative and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Then the American people can decide who is the real traitor.

Read more here.

"...leaving a security clearance in his hands is actually just empowering him to receive leaks and then disseminate them in the future."

Ace of Spades weighs in on Brennan's loss of security clearance:

...the assumption seems to be, deep down, that Brennan has "earned" this thing and has a vested interest in it which apparently trumps the president's estimation of his future value as a trusted security-cleared adviser, or his estimation that he has no such future value.

The president has determined that Brennan is likely a leaker, with very good reason, and that leaving a security clearance in his hands is actually just empowering him to receive leaks and then disseminate them in the future.

Read more here.

On John Brennan losing his security clearance

David Reaboi tweeted,

Right now, the media you see white knighting the loudest for John Brennan are mostly the folks who ran his leaks.

Tucker Carlson calls Brennan and Clapper "Left-Wing political pundits. John Brennan is unbalanced, unhinged, an out-of-the-closet extremist!"

The Ringmaster

Kim Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal,

The Trump-Russia sleuthers have been back in the news, again giving Americans cause to doubt their claims of nonpartisanship. Last week it was Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Peter Strzok testifying to Congress that he harbored no bias against a president he still describes as “horrible” and “disgusting.” This week it was former FBI Director Jim Comey tweet-lecturing Americans on their duty to vote Democratic in November.

But the man who deserves a belated bit of scrutiny is former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan. He’s accused President Trump of “venality, moral turpitude and political corruption,” and berated GOP investigations of the FBI. This week he claimed on Twitter that Mr. Trump’s press conference in Helsinki was “nothing short of treasonous.” This is rough stuff, even for an Obama partisan.

That’s what Mr. Brennan is—a partisan—and it is why his role in the 2016 scandal is in some ways more concerning than the FBI’s. Mr. Comey stands accused of flouting the rules, breaking the chain of command, abusing investigatory powers. Yet it seems far likelier that the FBI’s Trump investigation was a function of arrogance and overconfidence than some partisan plot. No such case can be made for Mr. Brennan. Before his nomination as CIA director, he served as a close Obama adviser. And the record shows he went on to use his position—as head of the most powerful spy agency in the world—to assist Hillary Clinton’s campaign (and keep his job).

...Mr. Brennan then took the lead on shaping the narrative that Russia was interfering in the election specifically to help Mr. Trump—which quickly evolved into the Trump-collusion narrative. Team Clinton was eager to make the claim, especially in light of the Democratic National Committee server hack. Numerous reports show Mr. Brennan aggressively pushing the same line internally. Their problem was that as of July 2016 even then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn’t buy it. He publicly refused to say who was responsible for the hack, or ascribe motivation. Mr. Brennan also couldn’t get the FBI to sign on to the view; the bureau continued to believe Russian cyberattacks were aimed at disrupting the U.S. political system generally, not aiding Mr. Trump.

The CIA director couldn’t himself go public with his Clinton spin—he lacked the support of the intelligence community and had to be careful not to be seen interfering in U.S. politics. So what to do? He called Harry Reid. In a late August briefing, he told the Senate minority leader that Russia was trying to help Mr. Trump win the election, and that Trump advisers might be colluding with Russia. (Two years later, no public evidence has emerged to support such a claim.)

But the truth was irrelevant. On cue, within a few days of the briefing, Mr. Reid wrote a letter to Mr. Comey, which of course immediately became public.

...Clinton supporters have a plausible case that Mr. Comey’s late-October announcement that the FBI had reopened its investigation into the candidate affected the election. But Trump supporters have a claim that the public outing of the collusion narrative and FBI investigation took a toll on their candidate. Politics was at the center of that outing, and Mr. Brennan was a ringmaster. Remember that when reading his next “treason” tweet.

Read more here.

John Brennan's proven lack of veracity

Victor Davis Hanson never forgets! He reminds us in National Review about John Brennan's history of lies.

1) In 2011, Brennan, then the country’s chief counterterrorism adviser, had sworn to Congress that scores of drones strikes abroad had not killed a single noncombatant — at a time when both the president and the CIA were both receiving numerous reports of civilian collateral deaths.

2) In 2014, John Brennan, now as CIA director, lied emphatically that the CIA had not illegally accessed the computers of U.S. Senate staffers who were then exploring a CIA role in torturing detainees. Or as he told Andrea Mitchell: “As far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. . . . We wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the, you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we do.” Brennan’s chronic deceptions drew the ire of a number of liberal senators, some of whom echoed the Washington Post’s call for his immediate resignation. After months of prevarications, but only upon release of the CIA inspector general’s report, Brennan apologized to the senators he had deceived.

3) Brennan, in May 2017, as an ex-CIA director, again almost certainly did not tell the truth to Congress when he testified in answer to Representative Trey Gowdy’s questions that he neither knew who had commissioned the Steele dossier nor had the CIA relied on its contents for any action. Yet both the retired National Security Agency director, Michael Rogers, and the former director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, have conceded that the Steele dossier — along with the knowledge that it was a Clinton-campaign-funded product — most certainly did help shape the Obama’s intelligence communality interagency assessments and actions, often under the urging of Brennan himself. There are also numerous reports that, despite his denials about knowledge of the dossier, Brennan served as a stealthy conduit to ensure that it was disseminated widely, at least in the sense of meeting in August 2016 with Senator Harry Reid to brief the senator about its unverified contents in hopes that he would pressure the FBI to further its investigations, which Reid did in a call two days later to James Comey.

There is much more here.

John Brennan’s transformation of the CIA into a branch office of the Hillary campaign

At The American Spectator, George Neumayr writes,

...John Brennan’s transformation of the CIA into a branch office of the Hillary campaign will go down as one of the grossest abuses in the agency’s history.

...So until election day, the “working group at Langley” was trying to dig up dirt on the Trump campaign and wasn’t coming up with any. But Brennan didn’t want his efforts to go to waste, so he leaked to Senator Harry Reid the existence of the counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign. He couldn’t leak any damning findings from that probe because there weren’t any. But he could inflict political damage by getting Reid to tell the press darkly of the probe’s existence. He also got Reid to write a public letter to Comey about the probe, which was designed to deepen the FBI’s reliance on Hillary’s paid dirt-digger, Christopher Steele. Reid, as a reliable Democratic hack in the tank for Hillary, went along with Brennan’s scheme, but he felt manipulated enough by Brennan that he complained to Corn and Isikoff about Brennan’s odd intensity — an “ulterior motive” that Reid sensed in Brennan.

The scope of that ulterior motive encompassed several elements: a hysterical hatred of Trump (now on display in Brennan’s unhinged tweets), a desire to continue as CIA director under Hillary, and a special animus toward Michael Flynn, whose determination to rip up Obama’s “re-set” with the Islamic world, a matter near and dear to Brennan’s heart, sent him into red-faced rages. Brennan, notorious for his Islamophilia, had refused to take his oath as CIA director on the Bible, regarding that practice as the disgusting relic of a once-Christian America. He had played a leading role in Obama’s outreach to the Islamic world and saw Flynn as an odious threat to that work. What Brennan’s “working group at Langley” couldn’t achieve in nailing Flynn was accomplished later by Sally Yates and Comey through entrapment and Mueller’s leveraged prosecution in which he got Flynn to confess to a crime he didn’t commit.

Read more here.

The Russian Fable

George Neumayr writes at the American Spectator,

One wouldn’t expect Seymour Hersh, a lefty journalist par excellence, to pop the Trump-Russia propaganda balloon Obama’s CIA director John Brennan released last year. But he has. Hersh has been quoted as saying that the collusion claim is a product of “disinformation” — “a Brennan operation,” as he puts it.

Hersh says that Trump is not the villain but the victim in this story, and that the press has served as a shameful stenographer for Brennan to smear Trump. It has shown no skepticism toward any of his claims or the supposedly nonpartisan reports his cronies and political hacks assembled after the election. Hersh calls Brennan an “asshole” and a “buffoon.”

Indeed, it tells you all you need to know about the rottenness of the ruling class that such an open fraud could rise so high in Washington. Brennan, owing to his treasonous support for the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War (he voted for Gus Hall and supported the Soviet-controlled American Communist Party in the 1970s), should not have been allowed within a hundred-mile radius of Langley. Instead, he was hired and rose to the top of the CIA.

A tool of the Muslim Brotherhood (during a stint in Saudi Arabia he says that he grew to admire Islam and the concept of jihad), Brennan refused to take his oath as CIA director on the Bible. His hatred for Michael Flynn and Trump stems in large part from his Islamophilia and his nostalgia for the socialism and the atheism of the Old Soviet Union.

His Russian fable — which was itself a product of his collusion with foreigners from Estonia to England — fed off his disdain for Russia’s turn to Christianity and America’s turn away from Islam. For Brennan, any stick would do, and he found one in a bag of bogus intelligence supplied to him by Kim Philby types from Britain, socialists in Scandinavia and Germany, and Putin haters from the Baltics.

While running this operation of political espionage, he was auditioning for a job under Hillary and turning CIA headquarters into a branch office of her campaign.

In this hothouse atmosphere of pro-Hillary partisanship, any and all contacts between the Trump campaign and anyone even remotely connected to Russia became occasions for “unmaskings.”

Instead of exposing this blatant political espionage, the media became a conduit for it. Hersh notes that the New York Times was in effect under the editorship of John Brennan last year. He could plant any smear he wanted against Trump on its front page.

It is obvious that Brennan’s circle was responsible for many if not most of the criminal leaks. Why doesn’t the FBI raid Brennan’s home and rifle through his records? The reason that won’t happen is that the ruling class and deep state, which are composed largely of aging radicals, protects traitors while punishing patriots — a conclusion to which the improbable testimony of Seymour Hersh adds still more credence.

This is the consequence you get when you "slow-roll"

Debra Heine reports at PJ Media,

In a recent broadcast of the John Batchelor Show, Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) of the House Select Intelligence Committee confirmed that all three subpoenas his committee sent to senior Obama administration officials seek details about the unmaskings of American citizens. He also said that it was "very unusual" for an ambassador like Samantha Power to unmask names of American citizens "under any circumstances." The chairman made clear that he and his colleagues would not be requesting the information if they didn’t have "probable cause that there was an abuse of power” and that his investigation into possible illegalities was just beginning.

“Oh, this is only the beginning," Nunes said. "There are many more officials that we have concerns about abusing the intelligence programs.”

Nunes joined Batchelor and Mary Kissel of The Wall Street Journal editorial board last Thursday to discuss the subpoenas sent to former CIA director John Brennan, former national security adviser Susan Rice, and former UN ambassador Samantha Power.

Via John Batchelor at The Daily Beast:

“The subpoenas,” Nunes explained, “actually went to the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, requesting specifically, of those three individuals that were named, the unmaskings they have done, that they did, from the time period of 2016, the entire year, leading up to Jan. 20 of this year.”
Quickly Nunes focused on the politics of the unmaskings.

“I can’t get into why we chose those individuals, but clearly this is just further escalation in the concern we have of the unmaskings of Americans by the senior leaders of the Obama administration. Americans that didn’t know about it, and, of course, potentially Trump transition officials.”

Nunes clarified his concerns.

“Every American is masked. The intelligence agencies are bound by law to mask all American citizens that get picked up in foreign collection. What has to happen, if you want to find out who the American is—there’s a process and procedure in place for that. It’s actually very uncommon in most cases, and seldom happens. But the concern I have had, that I expressed publicly, quite publicly, actually, a couple months ago, was that it became excessive. That Obama administration officials were unmasking people in the Trump transition, and it made me quite uncomfortable.

...Asked if former FBI director James Comey has obstructed the investigation into the unmaskings, Nunes was blunt. “It’s unknown at this point. We will see whether or not the FBI produces the unmaskings that were done by these three individuals. If the FBI continues to not provide the information to Congress—or the NSA or CIA, for that matter—”

Nunes did not finish the thought.

The agencies have until Wednesday, June 7, 2017, to deliver the information requested by Nunes.

"Look, we want to work with the intelligence agencies," he said. "We didn’t want to have to subpoena, but the process was moving way too slowly. So we picked these three individuals whom we have a particular interest in, and hopefully, they [the agencies] are expedient. That they have till next week to give us the unmaskings that these three individuals have done. I think they know now that we are serious.”

Read more here.

Is that really something we want the Director of the C.I.A. to admit?

IA Director John Brennan participates in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing on worldwide threats on Capitol Hill in Washington on Feb. 9, 2016. (Associated Press) **FILE**

Kellan Howell reports at the Washington Times,

The head of the CIA says American spies knew the Islamic State terror group was plotting an attack days before militants slaughtered 130 people in Paris last year.

CIA director John Brennan told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that the “system was blinking red” shortly before the terrorists launched a string of gun and bomb attacks in the French capital on Nov. 13.

He said the CIA was aware of the impending attacks, but was unable to intercept messages the terrorists were using to plot the massacre because of new cellphone-encryption technology.

Read more here