[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
The House Judiciary Committee has referred former CIA director John Brennan for criminal prosecution, charging that he “made numerous willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact” about the bogus Steele dossier and so forth. As the committee and the people should know, more serious offenses emerged in Brennan’s Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies at Home and Abroad.
Law restricts the Central Intelligence Agency to operations abroad but this CIA director first targets “enemies at home.” Brennan’s number-one enemy is the “evil, despicable and vile” Donald Trump, pronounced guilty of “incompetence, dishonesty, and cravenness,” and so on. At the agency, this was not a private opinion.
Consider John Gentry’s Neutering the CIA: Why U.S. Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences. The author, a former CIA analyst, adds, “Some IC [Intelligence Community] agencies that triggered the attacks on Trump remain intact, available for reactivation in the event of another serious candidacy by Trump or the election of another Republican president.”
Both books confirm the judgement of Angelo Codevilla, an authority on the CIA like no other, that “intelligence officials abuse their positions to discredit opposition to the Democratic Party, of which they are part. Complicit with the media, they leverage the public’s mistaken faith in their superior knowledge, competence, and patriotism to vilify their domestic enemies from behind secrecy’s shield.” That’s Brennan all over, but the rot runs much deeper.
As Undaunted explains, Obama did not see counterterrorism as a fight against “jihadists.” So Brennan “pointed to the Islamic teaching that jihad is a holy struggle in pursuit of a moral goal,” and “violence and jihad not necessarily synonymous.” That contradicts a 1400-year record of jihadist attacks and was doubtless the official view of the CIA. Check out Brennan’s description of events on September 11, 2001:
At the very end of the meeting, the head of CIA’s Operations Center opened the conference room and announced that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. He had no further details on whether the aircraft was large or small, and it was unclear at that moment whether it was a tragic accident or the intentional targeting of the iconic twin towers. The staff meeting ended abruptly and we all headed back to our offices with an uneasy feeling about what we had heard and what we might soon find out.
So the mighty CIA failed to prevent the worst attack on the USA since Pearl Harbor, and the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. The secret agency also failed jihadist attacks at Fort Hood (2009), the Boston Marathon (2013), San Bernardino (2015) and Orlando in 2016, all with massive loss of life. This all took place on Brennan’s watch as director, station chief in Saudi Arabia, or assistant to Obama for homeland security and counterterrorism. The people have cause to wonder about his job qualifications for the job and on that theme Undaunted proves enlightening. For example, in 1976:
It was my first time voting in a presidential election, and while I was only 21 years old, I was already disenchanted with the state of partisan politics in America. . . I scanned the seven names listed and stopped at the Communist Party candidate Gus Hall. I was vaguely familiar with the name but knew nothing about him. Without giving it a second thought I pulled the lever and became one of the 58,709 Americans who voted for Gus Hall that year.
The 1976 presidential candidates included Republican Gerald Ford, Democrat Jimmy Carter, former Democrat and independent Eugene McCarthy, Libertarian Roger MacBride, Ben Bubar of the Prohibition Party, Socialist Party USA candidate Frank Zeidler, and Lester Maddox of the American Independent Party. Hall was a high-profile Stalinist on the CPUSA ticket in 1972, so it strains credibility that a Fordham University political science student, with several choices on the left, would vote for Hall “on a lark.”
When Brennan admitted the Communist vote, the CIA should have shown him the door. This was in 1980, six years after the CIA fired James Angleton. As Codevilla noted in Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century, this hurt American counterintelligence “badly.” For 16 years John Walker and associates sold Navy coding machine manuals to the Soviets, without “a hint of this potentially mortal hemorrhage” from the intel squads.
The CIA line on East Germany, Codevilla noted, “had not deviated far from East German propaganda,” so no surprise that the agency “did not see hundreds of millions of people ready to overthrow the communist world.” (emphasis original) In similar style, an agency convinced that jihad is non-violent did not see 9/11 coming.
Tony Snow, a national security advisor to President Clinton, failed to become CIA director partly because he believed Alger Hiss might be innocent. Obama’s pick was John Brennan, who never should have been hired in the first place. As John Gentry noted, Obama “paid no attention to specific operational needs,” and his “focus was domestic and his motive was clearly political.” His chosen successor was Hillary Clinton, so no surprise that Brennan deployed the CIA against her opponent Donald Trump, but there was more to it.
In 2020, Brennan signed the letter calling the Hunter Biden laptop “Russian disinformation,” which he and the other 50 intel community signatories knew was false. Codevilla was already asking “Why Are Brennan and Clapper Not in Jail,” based on their violations of Section 798, 18 U.S. Code known in the intelligence community as “the Comint Statute,” which forbids the disclosure of classified documents.
The judicial committee flags him for lying to Congress, but the bigger crime is transforming the CIA into a partisan force for Democrats. As John Gentry warned, the intel forces that “triggered the attack on Trump” remain intact. These sleeper cells await deployment by the next Democrat to occupy the White House.
President Trump should follow the advice of Angelo Codevilla and break up the CIA. No more lying incompetents, no more political partisans, and above all no more jihad deniers like John Brennan. The people will be watching.
