Deception & Misdirection
Young John Brennan’s Own Russiagate
John Brennan, former CIA director, testifies before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on May 23, 2017. Credit: U.S. House of Representatives.
The origins of Russiagate have been coming into clearer focus over the last few weeks, thanks to collaboratively produced investigative reports from Public and Racket News. The revelations, relying on multiple inside sources, have been mostly and predictably ignored by the regime media.
John Brennan, CIA director through the end of the Obama administration, plays a starring role in the Public/Racket accounts. Without Brennan’s assistance, both as CIA director and then as a paid parakeet for NBC/MSNBC, the Trump-Russia collusion delusions couldn’t have survived.
Ironically, before becoming a CIA officer John Brennan faced his own Russiagate. But that time it was real and of his own making.
The New Revelations
Public and Racket are Substack news pages managed, respectively, by journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi. Taibbi in particular has been reliably correct, and reliably careful, on the Russiagate beat since shortly after the hoax was hatched. Believing Taibbi all along, rather than the blathering of Brennan on MSNBC, would have left you far better informed on the non-scandal scandal.
Assuming Taibbi, Shellenberger, and their sources are accurate again this time, their reporting has obliterated all remaining remnants of evidence that once supported the Russiagate myths.
Many headlines tease what can be found on the subscriber-supported news pages:
Former CIA Director Gina Haspel blocked the release of “binder” with evidence that may identify her role in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax
CIA Had Foreign Allies Spy On Trump Team, Triggering Russia Collusion Hoax, Sources Say
United States Intelligence Community targeted 26 Trump advisors for foreign spy agencies to “reverse target” and “bump”
WMD, Part II: CIA “Cooked The Intelligence” To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016
Russia didn’t fear Hillary Clinton. “It was a relationship they were comfortable with,” some CIA analysts believed, but intelligence was suppressed. On the fall of the last great Russiagate myth
Obama Partisan Wrote False 2017 Russia Intelligence Assessment, Says Insider
House Intelligence report that debunked the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian election interference was written by “introverted, wonky, and nerdy professionals” not “political hacks”
The Racket/Public sources accuse Brennan of manipulating the Intelligence Community Assessment by excluding the opinions of analysts who disagreed with his position that Putin was putting the thumb on the scale to favor Trump in 2016. These are not the first such allegations against Brennan, just the most recent.
As Taibbi has written, many other fine journalists have previously defied the regime media to get the story out:
Many Reporters Paid for Covering the Russiagate Story
Media figures who exposed illegal surveillance, manufactured intelligence, and other abuses in the Trump-Russia investigation almost always paid a price
The cooked intel, allegedly still classified despite an order from Trump to declassify it, supposedly includes evidence that some of our intelligence analysts thought Putin actually favored a Clinton victory. And it was on Brennan’s watch that the CIA is alleged to have used foreign intelligence services to do for the CIA what it could not do legally on its own: spy on 26 Trump campaign advisors during the 2016 election.
From the beginning, Russiagate’s animating principle was that Trump was either a willing (at worst) or unwitting (at best) tool of Putin. Our InfluenceWatch profile of Trump-Russia Collusion Claims notes that Hillary Clinton directly called Trump a “puppet” of Putin on multiple occasions, and that just hours after her election loss ordered her senior campaign staffers to blame the setback on Russian interference.
Young Brennan’s Russiagate
The InfluenceWatch Russiagate profile also recounts a much older connection between John Brennan and Russia:
In early September 2016, during what New York reported was “panel discussion on diversity in the intelligence community,” Brennan revealed that he had voted for Communist Party USA (CPUSA) presidential candidate Gus Hall during the 1976 Presidential election. The New York profile was titled “CIA Director Reveals He Was Once a Communist Sympathizer.”
The CPUSA and Gus Hall’s campaigns were funded directly by the Soviet Union both before and long after Brennan voted Communist in 1976. The InfluenceWatch profile of the Communist Party USA explains:
Hall was (until the end of the Soviet Union itself) a reliable supporter of the policies of every one of its leaders, with his favorite reportedly being Leonid Brezhnev. Soviet archives unveiled after the Cold War revealed that between 1971 and 1990 Hall and the CPUSA had received subsidies of $40 million from the Soviets.
In 1980, four years after voting for the Russia-influenced presidential ticket, Brennan was seeking employment with the CIA and admitted to his 1976 support for the CPUSA. The New York magazine profile quoted his recollection:
I said I was neither Democratic or Republican, but it was my way, as I was going to college, of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change. I said I’m not a member of the Communist Party, so the polygrapher looked at me and said, ‘OK,’ and when I was finished with the polygraph and I left and said, ‘Well, I’m screwed.’
Brennan is a native of New Jersey and was a student at Fordham University in New York City in 1976. Whichever state he voted from that year, his “unhappiness with the system” ballot options included not just the reliable Russian puppet candidate of the CPUSA, but also the Libertarian Party (then running its first ever presidential campaign) and the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyite bitter rival of the CPUSA.
On the ballot in New Jersey was also Eugene McCarthy, the U.S. Senator from Minnesota running as an independent who finished third overall in the 1976 popular vote, with the support of more than 740,000 Americans.
McCarthy’s name wasn’t on the ballot in New York, but thousands wrote in his name in anyway. That option was also available to a sharp college student disgusted with the system who was not otherwise inclined to side with the Moscow-financed candidate.
Of course, as it turned out, Brennan wasn’t “screwed” when he told the CIA of his CPUSA support. Brennan stayed at the CIA until he rose to the very top, where he may have become the person most responsible for launching the Russiagate hoax against Trump.
The CPUSA was still funded by Moscow when Brennan signed on at the CIA. One might say he was an expert on the subject of Russian election interference before it became so popular.
