(Daily Signal)—Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Recently, Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Trump Department of Justice have said they are running an investigation into James Comey’s and John Brennan’s careers as the respective FBI director and the CIA head during the Obama administration and, in the case of Comey, the first year of the Trump administration.
They are very angry about this, but let’s just review why there might be some culpability.
Take John Brennan. He was a big proponent of waterboarding and enhanced interrogation under President George W. Bush’s administration and the things that went on in Guantanamo. I’m not gonna comment on whether they were right or wrong. But he flipped to condition himself to go into the Obama administration, and then he attacked the very president that he had served, George Bush.
Then he began sounding off about Islam—“Religion of Peace”; “Jihadism is not a violent act”—to condition himself further to be appointed by President Barack Obama, which he was, eventually, a CIA director. But then he started lying. I mean, he always probably lied, but I mean, flagrantly so.
He said before Congress and the media there wasn’t one civilian killed by Obama’s targeted assassination program via Predators on the Afghan or Pakistan border. Actually, there were 50 or 75 innocent people we killed. He was caught in that lie.
Three years later, he went before the Congress and there was information that he had been tapping, his CIA, the staffers for the Senate to get into their computers. He not only lied about it, he did so emphatically—“Oh, we would never do that. That’s horrible.” Then he was forced to say, “Yes, I lied.” In both cases, there were no perjury charges, nothing.
The pièce de résistance for John Brennan was in October 2020, on the eve of the second and critical presidential debate, Joe Biden was in trouble. People were furious about this laptop. There was pornography on it. There was drug use. There were references to Joe Biden as “Mr. Big Guy.” Ten percent that he’d been giving money. He was crooked. People wanted to hear, he had no excuse.
So, what happened? Antony Blinken, his future secretary of state, campaign aid, called Michael Morell, interim CIA director at one point, said, “Round them up.”
So, 51 “intelligence authorities” swore the laptop had all the hallmarks of Russian information. Notice the words: All the hallmarks, escape clause, of Russian information. Not disinformation, but that’s what they meant.
So, what happened in the debate? Donald Trump went right after Biden and said, “That laptop is real. It shows that you’re a crook. It shows your son is a miscreant.”
And Joe Biden’s, “How dare you? Fifty-one Intelligence authorities swear that it’s a product of Russian espionage. Only you and Rudy Giuliani believe that.” And it was effective.
Later a poll showed, the TechnoMetrica poll showed that if people had known that it had been authenticated—and by the way, that laptop was sitting in the hands of the FBI and adjudicated to be authentic and not released to the public at a time when Christopher Wray’s FBI was partnering with Twitter and Facebook to suppress any news story that was accurately reporting that the laptop was authentic.
John Brennan finally accused Donald Trump of being a Russian traitor. He said that after Donald Trump spoke in Helsinki about Russian-American relationships, he said that he is treasonous.
When he said that, I think we all thought: Well, wait a minute. Donald Trump killed the Wagner Group in Syria. He upped the sanctions on the oligarchs. He approved offensive weapons to Ukraine that Obama had canceled. Russia didn’t go into Ukraine under the Trump administration. It had invaded Ossetia under Bush. It went under Ukraine under both Biden and Obama, but not under Trump. He told the Germans, “Don’t cut a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.” He got out of an asymmetrical missile deal. He was the hardest president that we’ve had against Russia.
So, what was John Brennan doing? Here’s what he was doing—and two or three of the most significant scandals of the last 50 years, he was at the center.
You could make the argument that the Russian collusion hoax almost swung the election to Hillary Clinton. You could argue that.
You could argue that the Mueller investigation, based on that stupid dossier, cost Donald Trump 22 months of his first two years in office. Forty million dollars to find nothing.
You could make the argument that if the FBI had just released its investigation of the laptop, told the people it was authentic, John Brennan would not, and his cohorts, been able to lie to the American people that it was cooked up in Russia and that Donald Trump was complicit in that.
That disclosure, that failure to disclose the true nature of that laptop, thanks to John Brennan and 51 intelligence authorities, and the debate by Joe Biden, and the false charges, may have affected the election. As I said, one polling company found that it did.
And finally, we wouldn’t be in this big trouble about the Ukraine war and Russia had John Brennan and people like him not floated the spurious narrative that Donald Trump was working hand in glove with Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin. Russia, Russia, Russia. That colored and poisoned the whole relationship we had with Russia. It affected the Russian-Ukrainian war. And it was all a lie.
And so, here we are with John Brennan mad that he lost his security clearance for being a well-paid MSNBC analyst. He should be better worried, not that he lost his security clearance, that he might be indicted and go to jail. He’s got a lot of culpability, both in not telling the truth and spinning lies and being at the heart of a number of scandals that affected the history of the United States.
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