NBC News reported that Attorney General William Barr and Prosecutor John Durham have expanded their examination of the origins of the Trump/Russia investigation. Durham has increased the size of his staff and has pushed out his timeframe.
Durham will be interviewing former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper along with other current and former intelligence community officials. According to NBC:
Durham has also requested to talk to CIA analysts involved in the intelligence assessment of Russia’s activities, prompting some of them to hire lawyers, according to three former CIA officials familiar with the matter. And there is tension between the CIA and the Justice Department over what classified documents Durham can examine, two people familiar with the matter said.With Barr’s approval, Durham has expanded his staff and the timeframe under scrutiny, according to a law enforcement official directly familiar with the matter. And he is now looking into conduct past Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, a Trump administration official said.Although the probe did not begin as a criminal investigation, Justice Department officials won’t comment on whether it has morphed into one.
John Brennan told NBC that Durham’s investigation is “bizarre” and said, “I don’t know what the legal basis for this is.” He doesn’t? Let me refresh his memory.
Brennan’s obsessive fear that Donald Trump might win the presidency may have instigated the whole collusion narrative. He didn’t have to twist many arms to bring others on board, but his exhaustive search for “dirt” on Trump and his insistence that the FBI open a counterintelligence investigation was key.
I’ll never forget writer George Neumayr’s (The American Spectator) description of Brennan’s CIA. He wrote it April 2018, but it was so spot on, I remember it today. He wrote, “John Brennan’s CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign.” Neumayr called the Trump/Russia investigation “the probe from nowhere to nowhere, undertaken simply to satisfy the partisan hunches of John Brennan and other Trump haters in the Obama administration.”
Neumayr wrote that, based upon Brennan’s testimony and his leaks, he started pushing the FBI to open an investigation in the spring of 2016. He would present the FBI with what he called evidence and that Brennan would “shake down” foreign intelligence officials looking for anything to hang on Trump. He would then present the information to Peter Strzok and other government officials. Strzok, as much as he hated Trump, famously told his paramour, Lisa Page, that “there’s no there there.”
Brennan was receiving most of his “intelligence” from British spy Christopher Steele. Neumayr explains:
Brennan’s alleged intelligence from the British on Trump-Russia collusion was just laundered Steele opposition research for Hillary (Steele had been feeding his work to British spies, who contacted Brennan). At the center of almost all the streams of phony intelligence flowing into the FBI was Steele. Through his relationship with the FBI, he served as a direct stream of bad intelligence. Through foreign intelligence agencies, he became an indirect stream of bad intelligence (with anything he gave those agencies re-routed to the FBI through Brennan). He also served as a conduit for opposition research from Hillary partisans at or connected to the State Department (Cody Shearer, a Hillary hatchet man, passed his opposition research through John Kerry aide Jonathan Winer to Steele, who then fed it back to the FBI).
This is similar to the FBI’s use of reporter Michael Isikoff’s Yahoo News article to corroborate Christopher Steele’s dossier when, in fact, Steele was the source of Isikoff’s story.
Brennan leaked news of his “probe” to then-Senator Harry Reid, who toldreporters Brennan had an “ulterior motive” for doing so. Reid said, “The very thought of Donald Trump as president made Brennan see red and caused him to lose all judgment.” But, regardless of what Reid believed, he wrote an open letter anyway to James Comey on August 27, 2016 about the Trump-Russian collusion he had just been made privy to and then the world knew about it.
The FBI knew they could not start an investigation based on the rubbish that Brennan was presenting to them. They needed to find a reason. When Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, had drinks in a London bar with low level Trump advisor George Papadopoulos, who told Downer that he had been approached by a Russian who offered to provide “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, that became a talking point for the FBI. However, according to Devin Nunes, that incident was not mentioned in the Electronic Communication (EC) that originated the counter intelligence investigation.
Nunes and several other Congressmen were allowed to view the document after threatening contempt of Congress charges and possible impeachment votes. The DOJ and the FBI went to great lengths to keep the American people from learning that there was no original intelligence to support the case for collusion. None.
That should have ended the investigation, but of course it didn’t.
Now we have Obama’s DOJ, FBI and CIA, and it looks like they had a little help from the State Department, all colluding to influence the outcome of a presidential election. It’s hardly a stretch of the imagination to believe that Obama knew what was happening.
So, this whole narrative gained momentum as more and more Obama officials and Hillary supporters heard about it and hopped on the bandwagon. The lies were repeated so often, they took on a life of their own and anti-Trumpers began to believe them because they wanted them to be true.
It’s hard to deny that if Brennan hadn’t pressured the FBI, through Peter Strzok who served as the liaison between the CIA and the FBI, and through Harry Reid and others, there would likely be no Trump/Russia collusion investigation. But this was not his only egregious offense.
He was caught in numerous lies during his years in the Obama administration. In 2014, a Senate committee was investigating the CIA’s role in torturing detainees. Brennan lied repeatedly saying “that the CIA had not illegally accessed the computers of U.S. Senate staffers.” The CIA had done so indeed, and when the Inspector General’s report came out, he was forced to apologize.
In sworn testimony before Congress in 2011, he said that Obama’s drone policy had not killed a single civilian noncombatant when, in fact, many noncombatants had been killed.
He has abused his power on many occasions by “leaking” information about everything from the underwear bomber to Stuxnet. In 2012, an asset had to be extracted from Yemen because one of Brennan’s leaks had placed him in grave danger.
These are only a few of many examples that demonstrate Brennan’s long history of poor judgement. He has always played it fast and loose with the truth. Only when he is confronted with irrefutable evidence will he admit wrongdoing.
This is the hangover from the Obama era. It will one day become the legacy of the Obama era. America’s most highly respected and influential institutions were politicized and were used to do Obama’s – and Hillary Clinton’s – bidding. Officials at the highest levels of the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA and possibly the State Department, abused their powers to fabricate a case against Donald Trump because they wanted to marginalize him. Unfortunately for them, Hillary lost the race and America is slowly learning the truth.
Did that jog your memory at all, Mr. Brennan?