High Stakes Treason

My friend Ian Trotter asked me to write the Forward to his new book on John Brennan. Here it is. Enjoy!

John Brennan’s CIA career is, by now, well-known. It’s a tale of a Middle East expert and mid-level manager whose career was going nowhere when he latched into the coattails of a new CIA Deputy Director by the name of George Tenet in the mid-1990s. The two hit it off and Tenet pulled Brennan up with him, ultimately making him the CIA’s Executive Director, the organization’s third-ranking officer. In that position, Brennan was instrumental in the creation and implementation of the CIA’s infamous torture program, something of an inconvenient truth when he became the only former senior CIA officer to eschew both the McCain and Clinton presidential campaigns in 2008 in favor of political upstart Barack Obama.

Brennan was initially named CIA Director by the new and inexperienced young president. But progressives wouldn’t hear of it. We knew Brennan’s history. Despite his protestations of political independence, he was involved in the torture program up to his neck. Obama withdrew the nomination and made Brennan Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism, a position that didn’t require Senate confirmation. He took the opportunity in that position to create the so-called “kill list,” convening an NSC group every Tuesday morning to decide whom around the world to drone to death that week, including American citizens who had never been charged with a crime, like Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. But four years later, the liberals had forgotten about him and Obama was able to name him as CIA Director with no pushback from the left.

Brennan learned an important lesson while he was at the White House. He learned the importance of using lawfare to silence political enemies. Look at it this way:

It’s no accident that Barack Obama became the first president in American history to use the Espionage Act to pursue critics. The Espionage Act was written, passed, and signed into law in 1917 as the United States entered World War I. The initial purpose was to punish German spies and saboteurs. Between 1917 and January 2009, three Americans--Daniel Ellsberg, Samuel Morrison, and Larry Franklin--were charged with espionage for speaking with the media. But in the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency, eight Americans, including me, were prosecuted for speaking with the media. Who was the driving force for this unprecedented lawfare policy? It was John Brennan, Obama’s closest advisor on national security issues.

There is a legal definition of whistleblowing. It is “bringing to light any evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety.” But Brennan decided early on that he would paint whistleblowers as “leakers” and as national security threats and that they would face the full legal consequences of their truth-telling. Besides me (CIA—torture), Brennan’s policy saw the arrests and prosecutions of Chelsea Manning (US Army—war crimes in Iraq), Thomas Drake (NSA—warrantless wiretapping of US citizens), Jeffrey Sterling (CIA—institutionalized racial discrimination), Shamai Liebowitz (FBI—counterintelligence threats), Stephen Kim (State Department—North Korea), Donald Sachtelben (FBI—terrorism threats), and, of course, Edward Snowden, who is under indictment in the federal court for the Eastern District of Virginia, but who has been given safehaven in Russia. Cumulatively, that’s 526 months in prison for speaking truth to power. And all of it was at the insistence of John Brennan.

In my own case, following my arrest, my attorneys received 15,000 pages of discovery from the Justice Department. Among those 15,000 pages, we found three pages of memos between Brennan and then-Attorney General Eric Holder. In the first, Brennan raised my case and said, “Charge him with espionage.” Holder responded a day or two later, saying, “My people don’t think he committed espionage.” Brennan responded quickly to that, saying, “Charge him anyway and make him defend himself.”

That’s exactly what happened. The Justice Department charged me with three counts of espionage, two counts for an interview I had given to ABC News in which I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official US government policy, and that the policy had been approved personally by the president. The third charge was for a follow-up interview that I had given to the New York Times. Brennan knew that the charges were bogus. He knew that they wouldn’t stand up in court. But he ordered them anyway. That’s John Brennan. That’s the kind of person he is.

As Americans, then, we have to ask ourselves if this is the kind of person we want in a position of authority in Washington. And more deeply, is this the kind of person we want to explain world events to us as a talking head on intelligence and terrorism issues for MSNBC and NBC News? Is this the kind of people we want guiding our children as a member of the board of directors of Fordham University, his alma mater? He has been a board member there since leaving government.

I would posit that John Brennan is exactly the kind of person whom we should not want to have anywhere near the power at the top of our government. He’s vengeful. He’s meanspirited. He abuses the power that he has to punish those whose personalities and political positions he does not like. Simply put, Brennan has no respect for the Constitution. He has no respect for the rule of law. The documentary evidence of this is crystal clear, as outlined by Ian Trotter. There should be no place for him in government.