Red John Brennan - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Red John Brennan
by
YouTube screenshot

After Robert Mueller laid his egg in March, filing a much-anticipated report that contained no evidence of Trump–Russia collusion, John Brennan, Barack Obama’s CIA director, admitted, if only for a nanosecond, that he had blown it. “I don’t know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more there than there actually was,” he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Having outrageously and repeatedly floated the possibility of Trump as a Russian agent during the course of the Mueller investigation, Brennan suddenly changed his tune: “I am relieved that it’s been determined there was not a criminal conspiracy with the Russia government over our election. I think that is good news for the country.” Usually a cocky loudmouth on Twitter, he meekly counseled his followers to “accept” Mueller’s finding.

This article was originally published in the American Spectator print magazine. Click here for online access!

That was late March. By early April, his hysterical, anti-Trump jackassery had resumed. He broke a couple of weeks of Twitter silence to pronounce Trump subhuman and politically finished: “Your unfitness for office has never been more stark, your lack of humanity never more apparent, your politics never more craven, & your ultimate political ignominy never more certain.”

Brennan’s hilarious self-description on Twitter is “Nonpartisan American who is very concerned about our collective future” — this from the most partisan CIA director in history, whose idea of a “collective future” is Soviet- style collectivism. One of the richest ironies here is that no one loves Russia more than John Brennan — that is, the Russia of Soviet communism. It wasn’t Donald Trump who voted for Gus Hall, the Soviet Union’s plant in American politics, but John Brennan, who once admitted in an indiscreet moment that he feared his vote for the communist might jeopardize his CIA career. Would that it had. Alas, the CIA, even under William Casey, lacked the vigilance to keep Brennan out.

That a Gus Hall voter would rise to the top of the CIA and make anti-Russian obsessiveness his signature issue sounds like a comic novel come to life. Trump once said that Putin is “laughing his ass off” at American democracy’s crippling self-inflicted blows. No doubt one of the most enjoyable for Putin is that a useful idiot like Brennan, claiming Trump–Russian collusion based on nothing more than fragments of what was in all likelihood Putin-planted disinformation, would inflict some of the worst blows. What could be more funny to Putin than seeing a shaggy radical like Brennan become CIA director and then use that prestigious position to call for what would be in effect a coup against an innocent president?

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Russians had to pay Gus Hall to try and screw up American politics. But they got Brennan’s services for free. If anybody has been a stooge for Putin’s manipulations, it is old Red John Brennan. Who needs Gus Hall when John Brennan is around? It wasn’t enough for Brennan to team up with the Trump-hating Peter Strzok (the FBI’s liaison to Brennan, a key fact in this farce) to try and sabotage the 2016 election. Brennan has also called for what amounts to an overthrow of Trump’s presidency. Within weeks of Trump’s inauguration, Brennan was urging members of the executive branch to defy the chief executive. Don’t “carry out” his directives, he exhorted them.

Brennan’s commentaries have been staggering in their recklessness — scarcely believable for any former cabinet official, much less a supposedly sober CIA director. My previous reporting about Brennan bears repeating at length here: Brennan’s favorite and most telling fulmination is that the American people will bury Trump in the “dustbin of history.” After all, it was the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky who coined that phrase. To his political opponents, Trotsky sputtered, “You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history!”

Is it really just a coincidence that John Brennan, who supported the Soviet-controlled American Communist Party in the 1970s, would borrow from Trotsky’s rhetoric in his invective against Donald Trump? That revealing anti-Trump tweet, sent off shortly after the firing of FBI senior official Andrew McCabe, reeked of socialist revolutionary schlock. “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America,” he tweeted. “America will triumph over you.”

Americans will triumph over a president they elected? That’s the raw language of coup. Another hardcore leftist, Samantha Power, who spent the weeks after Trump’s victory rifling through intelligence picked up on his staff, found Brennan’s revolutionary tweet very inspiring. “Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan,” she wrote. That sounded pretty dark and grave. But not to worry, she tweeted later. She just meant that the former CIA director was going to smite Trump with the power of his “eloquent voice.” Americans who have to endure Brennan’s incoherent babblings on MSNBC as its ludicrously appointed “security correspondent” might disagree with that description.

Out of office, aging radicals like Brennan can’t seem to help themselves. They had their shot to stop Trump, and they failed. Yet they remain aggrieved. The adolescent coup-talk of the Brennans, the Comeys, and the Holders grows more feverish with each passing day. We have a former CIA director calling for the overthrow of a duly elected president, a former attorney general (Eric Holder) calling for a “knife fight,” a Senate minority leader speaking ominously about what the intelligence community might do to Trump (“they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said), and assorted former FBI and CIA officials cheering for a coup, such as CNN’s Phil Mudd, who said, “You’ve been around for 13 months. We’ve been around since 1908. I know how this game is going to be played. We’re going to win.”

In all this unhinged chatter, the partisan origins of Obamagate have become clearer. The same anti-Trump hatred on display in Brennan’s tweets and punditry drove the Obama administration to commit the greatest act of political espionage since Watergate.

In an interview with The American Spectator, James Kallstrom, the former FBI assistant director, notes that the “animus and malice” contained in Brennan’s tweet is “prima facie exposure of how he felt about Trump before the election.”

Brennan’s CIA, I have been told, looked like a branch office of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, with his staffers gibbering about Trump while sipping from Hillary for President coffee cups. Brennan was famous for wearing an LGBT lanyard while striding the halls of the CIA. His support for Hillary was so loud he didn’t even need to wear one of her campaign pins.

It bears repeating that all the key figures in the decision to open up a probe on Trump wanted him to lose — from Brennan to James Comey to Peter Strzok, whose anti-Trump machinations included, according to a batch of texts with his mistress, plotting to manipulate a buddy on the FISA court. In one text, Strzok wonders if he can finagle a meeting with his friend by inviting him to a “cocktail party.” The impropriety aforethought on display in that tweet is astonishing, but of course the media has paid no attention to it, preoccupied as it is with such grave concerns as Andrew McCabe’s retirement income and the fragility of James Comey’s ego.

What an amazing collection of entitled creeps and frauds. The Brennans long ago convinced themselves that the “rule of law” is identical to what they see as their sacred right to exercise power in any way they see fit. All the blather about Trump’s violation of the law is simply a projection of their own lawlessness. So far Brennan’s coup has been thwarted. He had hoped to stop him in the campaign through political espionage and wanton leaking (even former Senate leader Harry Reid, to whom Brennan leaked before Election Day the existence of the probe into Trump, has acknowledged the improper intensity of Brennan’s pre-election activities).

But that didn’t work. Then Brennan, Power, Susan Rice, and company tried to upend him through spying during the transition, holding out hope until the very last moment, as evidenced by Rice penning her sham exculpatory note only after Trump’s swearing-in. Now Brennan apparently is pinning his hopes on a dustbin in Jerry Nadler’s office.

Trotsky would have understood the shorthand of all Brennan’s tweets, polemics, and posturing perfectly. They bear no relationship to reality or justice. They are simply an expression of power politics, which doesn’t always end well for its exponents. As even an old Gus Hall supporter like John Brennan must know, those who talk the loudest about their enemies heading for the dustbin of history often end up in it.

This article was originally published in The American Spectator’s fall 2019 print magazine. Click here for online access!

George Neumayr
Follow Their Stories:
View More
George Neumayr, a senior editor at The American Spectator, is author most recently of The Biden Deception: Moderate, Opportunist, or the Democrats' Crypto-Socialist?
Sign up to receive our latest updates! Register


By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive marketing emails from: . You can revoke your consent to receive emails at any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe® link, found at the bottom of every email. Emails are serviced by Constant Contact

Be a Free Market Loving Patriot. Subscribe Today!