consortiumnews | What prompted former CIA Director John Brennan on Saturday to accuse
President Donald Trump of “moral turpitude” and to predict, with an
alliterative flourish, that Trump will end up “as a disgraced demagogue
in the dustbin of history”? The answer shines through the next sentence
in Brennan’s threatening tweet:
“You may scapegoat Andy McCabe [former FBI Deputy Director fired Friday
night] but you will not destroy America…America will triumph over you.”
It is easy to see why Brennan lost it. The Attorney General fired
McCabe, denying him full retirement benefits, because McCabe “had made
an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor —
including under oath — on multiple occasions.” There but for the grace
of God go I, Brennan must have thought, whose stock in trade has been
unauthorized disclosures.
In fact, Brennan can take but small, short-lived consolation in the
fact that he succeeded in leaving with a full government pension. His
own unauthorized disclosures and leaks probably dwarf in number,
importance, and sensitivity those of McCabe. And many of those leaks
appear to have been based on sensitive intercepted conversations from
which the names of American citizens were unmasked for political
purposes. Not to mention the leaks of faux intelligence like that
contained in the dubious “dossier” cobbled together for the Democrats by
British ex-spy Christopher Steele.
It is an open secret that the CIA has been leaking like the
proverbial sieve over the last two years or so to its favorite
stenographers at the New York Times and Washington Post. (At one point, the obvious whispering reached the point that the Wall Street Journal saw
fit to complain that it was being neglected.) The leaking can be traced
way back — at least as far as the Clinton campaign’s decision to blame
the Russians for the publication of very damning DNC emails by WikiLeaks
just three days before the Democratic National Convention.
This blame game turned out to be a hugely successful effort to divert attention from the content of the emails, which showed in bas relief the dirty tricks the DNC played on Bernie Sanders. The media readily fell in line, and all attention was deflected from the substance of the DNC emails to the question as to why the Russians supposedly “hacked into the DNC and gave the emails to WikiLeaks.”
This media operation worked like a charm, but even Secretary
Clinton’s PR person, Jennifer Palmieri, conceded later that at first it
strained credulity that the Russians would be doing what they were being
accused of doing.
