How the Intelligence Community Went from Red to Blue
The CIA and the FBI have always been bastions of the right. It was the FBI that was filled with anti-communist zealots who hunted down those they considered to be “disloyal.” And the CIA patrolled America’s borders, intervening to stop any other country from falling under Moscow’s or Beijing’s spell.
So they should have been in the cheering section saluting a Trump victory with all they had.
But, instead, they recoiled so violently against Trump that they became the key participants in the virtual coup mounted by the rogue spooks to stop him from governing.
The transformation of the intelligence community from red to blue may stand as one of the most enduring achievements of the Obama presidency—or at least one of the hardest to erase.
When Obama and his liberal allies saw Trump about to enter the White House, they decided to deploy their weapon of choice against him: leaks from the intelligence community. Having taken care to scrub the intelligence agencies to expunge any taint of conservative thinking, these agencies were perfectly positioned to do Obama’s will.
And, in the media, he had a compliant, liberal/radical institution only too happy to print the leaks his people would be handing out.
The intelligence community has long realized that it has two ways to influence public policy in Washington. It can go legitimately up the chain of command to the president, arguing the merits of its case. Or it can go outside the process entirely—go rogue—and leak information—or disinformation—to a media willing and eager to do its bidding.
As the abomination of a Trump presidency neared the Oval Office, they decided to kill Trump by leaking.
The Intelligence Community Sentences Trump to Death by a Thousand Leaks
Veteran New York Times Washington correspondent James Reston once said, “The ship of state is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.”1
Every president is as frustrated and tortured by leaks as a dog is by his fleas. President Clinton told Dick Morris, one of the authors of this book, that he decided never to say anything of substance in front of more than one person. That way there would be no leaks. And, if there were, it would be obvious who the leaker was.
Most Washington leaks are designed to burnish someone’s reputation or to steer the debate over an issue in a certain direction. Others are to embarrass an opponent and many are simply to curry favor with an influential journalist or to save the credit for future use.
Leakers keep their names secret so that they won’t antagonize their bosses or let their enemies see their fingers on the knife as they plunge it in.
But the leaks that bedeviled the Trump transition team and continued into the early months of his administration were different, and their goal was much more important. These leakers were seeking to destroy a president as he was taking office.
Everybody knew where the leaks came from. It was right there in the news stories, which would usually cite “sources in the intelligence community” or use some such attribution to satisfy their editors, but protect their informants.
But leaking is a risky business. The federal government recognizes no legal protection for leakers and contends that it has the right to force a reporter to reveal his sources.
New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent eighty-five days in jail for refusing to “out” her source who identified a CIA agent in violation of federal criminal law. A special prosecutor, hired to find the leaker, asked her to identify him under oath. When she refused to do so, she went to jail.
But there was no similar risk to these former Obama employees savaging Trump, since the leaks had been scripted—choreographed—in private deals among the leaker, his federal agency, the reporter, and the news organ. It was a closed loop that gave the leaker a de facto carte blanche to proceed.
Of course, when Trump actually became president, it was a different story since he could, obviously, prosecute the leakers. But the problem was identifying them. The leaker, typically an Obama holdover, was usually embedded in an agency amid like-minded people. The liberal/left ethic that motivated the leaker also helped him or her hide in plain sight, surrounded by supportive colleagues and conspirators. (And, on June 5, 2017, a woman named Reality Winner was arrested for mailing classified material to a news outlet, the first arrest for leaking in the Trump era.2)
The FBI and the Department of Justice, charged with outing the leakers, were themselves compromised by eight years of ideological cleansing by Attorney General Eric Holder. The liberals who manned the desks shared a vision and approved of a holy war against the incoming president. War by leaks.
But the question remains: How did Obama change the intelligence community from red to blue, a feat of ideological alchemy without parallel in recent history?
The saga begins in the late Clinton years, after the CIA and the FBI had been buffeted by two decades of criticism and attacks.
The CIA failed to realize that the Soviet Union was about to fall and that the Shah was doomed in Iran. It missed these two key calls by a mile. Both the CIA and the FBI were bedeviled by the exposure of dozens of spies and traitors within their ranks, who had been successfully selling our vital national secrets—including the names of our agents—to the Russians for more than a decade.
But, oddly, it was their successes more than their failures that doomed them to irrelevance. Once the Soviet Union fell, both agencies lost their sense of purpose.
Former CIA director Richard Helms put it best: “with espionage you’ve got to be motivated. It’s not fun and games. It’s dirty and dangerous. There’s always a chance you’re going to get burned. In World War II, in the OSS, we knew what our motivation was: to beat the goddamn Nazis. In the cold war, we knew what our motivation was: to beat the goddamn Russians. Suddenly the cold war is over, and what is the motivation? What would compel someone to spend their lives doing this kind of thing?”3
A congressional investigation during the Clinton years concluded that the CIA lacked the “depth, breadth, and expertise to monitor political, military, and economic developments worldwide.”4
Both the CIA and the FBI are proud agencies. There are no other federal departments that have a comparable sense of their own history or their mission. They were the civilian equivalent of the Marine Corps, and it was not uncommon for men and women to be willing to give their lives to serve these two agencies. You don’t find that spirit in any other agency. Nobody is going to lay their lives on the line for the Department of Labor or the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
But the shattering experiences of the closing decades of the twentieth century brought the survival and relevance of both agencies into question. How were they to survive? This institutional vulnerability would linger and animate the concerns of the leaders and staff of each agency as Trump, the unknown, came to power.
Bush-43: New Life to Intelligence
President George W. Bush took office with two corpses on his hands: the CIA and the FBI.
Clinton’s first-term CIA director, George Tenet, who served from 1997 through 2004, said that, at the time he took over, “dollars were declining.” He said the CIA’s “expertise was ebbing” and that the organization was “in disarray.”5
James R. Schlesinger, his predecessor as director, said, “The agency is now so battered that its utility for espionage is subject to question.”6
By 1999, 20 percent of the CIA’s top spies and experts had left and another 7 percent retired every year thereafter.
The Agency’s culture was infected. While it employed 17,000 people, the majority stayed behind their desks and never got their hands dirty. Only about one thousand worked overseas in the clandestine service. The bulk of the staff lived comfortable bourgeois lives within the confines of Washington, DC.
Then came 9/11.
All bets were off. Suddenly, the CIA was the hottest ticket in town. The wraps were off. Though 9/11 was the ultimate failure of intelligence, for the CIA it was also the beginning of a new lease on life.
A week after 9/11 President Bush issued a directive to the CIA to hunt, capture, imprison, and interrogate terror suspects around the world.
In the following days, Bush began laying out new rules for the intelligence community, giving it the power, in the words of John C. Yoo, then deputy assistant attorney general, “to take whatever actions he deems appropriate to pre-empt or respond to terrorist threats from new quarters,”7 whether or not they can be linked to the specific terrorist incidents of September 11.
A September 25, 2001, Justice Department memo declared that under the Constitution, decisions regarding the “ ‘amount of military force to be used’ in response to the terrorist threat, as well as ‘the method, timing and nature of the response,’ are ‘for the President alone to make.’ ” And a January 2002 Justice Department memo argued that “customary international law has no binding legal effect on either the President or the military.”8
The New York Times writes that “President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without obtaining a court order on calls and e-mail messages sent from the United States to other countries. He has issued a steady stream of signing statements, signaling his intent not to comply with more than 750 provisions of laws concerning national security and disclosure, most notably one that questioned Congress’s authority to limit coercive interrogation tactics.”9
The administration also claimed that “the president’s war powers gave him the authority to detain people indefinitely and deny them access to lawyers and the courts, a policy that it would later be forced to modify in response to legal challenges.”10
The handcuffs were off.
And the CIA went to town!
Critics like Frederick A. O. Schwarz, Jr., senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, called the president’s actions “monarchist claims of executive power” unprecedented “on this side of the North Atlantic.”11
A lot of liberals and Democrats felt that these extraordinary usurpations of authority by the president weren’t particularly in response to 9/11 but rather were how conservatives like Vice President Dick Cheney thought the country should work anyway.
But lingering behind this broad assertion of executive power lay the pivotal issue of torture of prisoners to extract information.
In the new war on terror, could techniques euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation”—like sleep deprivation, slapping, nudity, and, ultimately, waterboarding—be permitted?
It seemed so. In February 2002, President Bush signed an order declaring that “none of the provisions of [the] Geneva [convention] apply to our conflict with al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world.”12
In 2003, the Justice Department issued a very narrow definition of what constitutes torture, saying it was the causing of “intense pain or suffering” akin to that which is “ordinarily associated with ‘serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in loss of significant body function will likely result.’ ”13
Knowing that the American public’s appetite for such practices was limited and fearing exposure of their use to public view, the Bush administration set upon the practice of “rendition,” where terrorist interrogation was farmed out to other—largely third world—countries that could operate in assured secrecy. Bush’s order to “kill, capture, and detain al Qaeda operatives” included, the intelligence people said, the authority to create these so-called “black sites.”14 Contracting out interrogation of prisoners had drastic—intended or unintended—consequences.
As part of the residue from the Church Committee (the Senate committee investigating intelligence activities—called the Church Committee after its chairman Senator Frank Church [D-Idaho]), the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 established special “FISA” courts to control, limit, and supervise spying on American citizens.
But, in 2002, Bush’s order specifically permitted the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct surveillance without a court-approved warrant, circumventing the FISA statute.
While U.S. intelligence operatives had been pretty rough in their interrogations in the past, the new Bush order gave them the power to turn suspects over to foreign intelligence services for questioning.
Writing in the New York Times, Tim Weiner said that “American intelligence may have to rely on its liaisons with the world’s toughest foreign services, men who can look and think and act like terrorists. If someone is going to interrogate a man in a basement in Cairo or Quetta, it will be an Egyptian or a Pakistani officer. American intelligence will take the information without asking a lot of lawyerly questions.”15
Many felt that the CIA had crossed a line and was becoming a global military police. Under Bush’s order, the CIA began to function that way as it sent prisoners to secret jails in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and Syria.
And then there was the Patriot Act, which, among other things, let the CIA examine banking and other financial records of American citizens and companies. The CIA could now spy on Americans.
Jammed through amid the post-9/11 hysteria, the Patriot Act passed the House by 357 to 66 and the Senate by 98 to 1. Bush signed the Patriot Act six weeks after the World Trade Center towers collapsed.
It authorized indefinite detention of immigrants in terror investigations. Law enforcement officers got the authority to search homes or businesses without the consent or even knowledge of the owner or occupant. In a transaction eerily reminiscent of the lettres de cachet of royalist France—permitting summary arrest and detention without trials—the act expanded the use of National Security Letters, which allowed the FBI to search telephone, email, and financial records without a court order, and expanded access of law enforcement agencies to business records and libraries.
The act succeeded in thwarting dozens of terrorist attacks on American soil, and it is notable that none took place for the balance of Bush’s two-term presidency. But its provisions ran afoul of the norms in which people believed and led to ever greater fears of government encroachment.
It was the best of times but also the worst of times for government spies. The restrictions under which they had been required to labor vanished and they got a carte blanche instead.
But the CIA and the FBI both needed to be careful of what they wished for, because when they got these enormous new powers, the price was public skepticism and hostility.
So it was the worst of times for the intel community, too. One after another all the secrets came out as Americans who worked for intel agencies or their contractors, or just saw what was going on, leaked to the media.
Bush was powerless to stop the leaks. His formal authority did not extend to the individual consciences of Agency employees.
Chief among these hyperactive consciences was that of Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who, while working for a contractor to the NSA, copied and leaked classified information detailing how far Agency surveillance had intruded into the lives of the American people.
Charged with amassing electronic intelligence from foreign sources, it turned out that the NSA routinely scooped up intel about the phone calls, emails, and texts of ordinary American citizens through the collection of metadata.
Normally, a wiretap yields the full text of a phone call. But metadata did not record what was being said, rather who was calling whom, from where, and when. The why could be derived easily once you knew the answer to the broader questions.
When information on American citizens was gathered inadvertently while tapping the phones of foreigners or amassing their metadata, the NSA was at best careless and at worst negligent in how it handled the intelligence.
As the details of waterboarding and other forms of torture became the subject of public debate and the rendition of prisoners to third world jails became widely known, many Americans had cause to regret the blank check they had given the president in the weeks and months after 9/11.
The CIA’s name was further blackened when its assurances that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were found to be false. Since it was this so-called “intelligence finding” that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the subsequent war in which 4,491 American soldiers died, the CIA and the entire intelligence community became a national object of scorn.
Based on CIA intel, Vice President Dick Cheney told America, on August 26, 2002, that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” The VP continued to force his foot further down his mouth: “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”16
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said: “We know they have weapons of mass destruction. . . . There isn’t any debate about it.”17
CIA chief George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee on September 17, 2002, that “Iraq provided al Qaeda with various kinds of training—combat, bomb-making, and chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear.”18
On October 7, 2002—on the eve of the congressional vote authorizing military action in Iraq, President Bush said that Iraq “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons.” He went on to warn that “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists.”19
Only Saddam didn’t have any such weapons. Once Iraq had been fully conquered and was in our grip, the forces of the United States and its allies searched all over for WMDs but came up empty.
The invasion revealed the grim truth that the CIA had made a big, big mistake. Oops. To save face and salvage a mission now transparently based on a falsehood, Bush kept at the war and body bags piled up at American ports.
This was the CIA’s war and the Agency had been wrong.
Disillusionment swept the land. The nation, once united in its purpose after the 9/11 attacks, became sundered by accusations and political attacks. While Bush won re-election after a tough campaign in 2004, the credibility of the president, the intelligence community, the military, and the American government itself was now at the lowest ebb ever.
The CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and the entire panoply of intelligence agencies were under the harshest form of investigation and censure, even mockery. These dedicated men and women had all thought they represented a united nation in its battle against the terrorists who had struck with such devastation on 9/11. But, as the political support for the more extreme of their policies faded—and the absence of WMDs in Iraq cost them their credibility—the intelligence agencies became a political piñata to be kicked around by liberals, Democrats, and dissenters of all stripes.
Foremost among them was Senator Barack Obama.
Obama’s very path to the 2008 nomination was opened because his chief opponent, Hillary Clinton, had voted for both the Iraq War and the Patriot Act in Congress. One beat behind her constituents, she was still a vigorous defender of the war in Iraq even after no WMDs were found. Newly elected as the senator from New York—where most of the 9/11 attacks hit—and aspiring to become America’s first female commander in chief, Hillary Clinton felt she could not be caught out in left field questioning American policy but needed to stand in the middle of the national consensus—even if it turned out to be wrong.
That left Obama with a clear shot.
His campaign was based on what he said were the extreme policies of the CIA and the FBI. He attacked the CIA prison at Guantanamo, the rendition of terror suspects, waterboarding, and degrading or enhanced interrogation, saying that they were not in conformity with our values. His favorite phrase was “that’s not who we are.”20
Elected in a landslide, he set about to reverse the anti-terror policies that were the sum and substance of the Bush administration. The reversal was a mortal threat to the entire intel community.
But the intelligence community had been through rough times before. It was not laid low by Harry Truman’s distrust. It lasted through Eisenhower’s planning and plotting of anti-communist coups. It even survived JFK’s use of its resources to keep his personal scandals at bay. It had weathered the tidal wave of criticism showered on it for helping President Lyndon Johnson attack and suppress domestic dissenters. Even after Nixon tried to hide behind the intel community to cover up Watergate, the agencies had survived. The Iran-Contra scandals besmirched their reputation but did not destroy them. They had survived despite the double agents and intelligence failures of the eighties and nineties. And, even when they were almost totally ignored by President Clinton, they kept their power. Indeed, under Bush-43, they expanded it exponentially.
So why should Obama’s criticism be a unique threat?
Part of the problem was that Obama was dramatically altering the nation’s course. In all the previous scandals, the intelligence community had been doing the bidding of the incumbent president and, after he left office, they found that his successor was of a similar mind. At the very least, each new president was loath to expose the intrusiveness of the intel agencies under his predecessor.
Kennedy was not going to expose Eisenhower for plotting coups. He had some of his own in mind.
Nixon, the pot, could not call Johnson, the kettle, black for the massive intrusion on American civil liberties as the FBI and the CIA did all they could to muzzle dissent under both presidents.
Bush-41 and Clinton followed similar agendas on intelligence and terrorism. And the only criticism Bush-43 had of the agencies was that they had not gone far enough.
But now, a president—overwhelmingly popular and elected with a solid majority—had run on a platform of dismantling the intelligence community and its methods. He had a mandate to go as far as he wanted. Nobody in the hallowed halls of any intel agency was safe or immune.
The very essence of Bush’s intel policies was reversed. Large parts of the Patriot Act were not renewed when they sunsetted (although some key parts were). Waterboarding, torture, and enhanced interrogation were out. Now terror suspects had to be Mirandized and eagerly used their right to counsel. One hundred ninety-six of the 242 Guantanamo prisoners (whom Cheney had described as “the worst of the worst”21) were released to other countries (where they usually shortly went free).
But the policy changes were only the tip of the iceberg. The most significant changes were in people not just in policies.
Frank Gaffney, former acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under Reagan, said that Obama “cut through the entire federal bureaucracy—including the intel community—with a sharp and wide scythe, replacing career intelligence people with liberal political appointees.”22 Even the career people veered left as the new heads of the intel agencies sought to bring like-minded people into the fold.
Throughout the administration, more with each passing year of his term, Obama filled the government with leftists and liberals dedicated to his extreme agenda. The EPA, FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, FCC, FTC, FEC, SEC, ICE, and the departments of State, Justice, and Treasury came to be hotspots of leftist activity. It was as if the leftist ideology of America’s campuses had spilled all over Washington.
Obama did not try to pour new wine into old bottles. With the new policies came new people.
It was vitally important to Obama to make changes that reached down into the very bowels of the intel agencies. It was not enough to bring on new cabinet secretaries and new deputies. The changes had to go much, much deeper.
Obama was seeking not just to adopt some liberal policies and programs but to change the very culture of American governance, particularly when it came to the two traditional bête noires of the left: the FBI and the CIA.
The FBI had been the scourge of the left for decades. It was the agency presidents had used to keep tabs on domestic communists and to ward off what it assured Americans was the perpetual threat of overthrow of our democracy by fifth-column communists. It was the FBI that kept files on dissidents and conducted background checks on presidential appointees.
Abroad, the CIA had come to represent the extreme anti-communism of Kissinger and Nixon, plotting coups and fixing elections at will to tell other countries how they should be governed.
But now there was a special urgency about bringing new people into these two agencies and throwing out the longtime career civil servants: The new technology of spying and surveillance made it imperative that this capability was firmly in liberal hands.
The CIA and the FBI knew too well how to bring down a president or an entire government. They did so in the Watergate scandal of 1974 and abroad in dozens of countries. Now, with the NSA’s tools of surveillance, these two traditionally right-wing agencies packed an especially powerful punch. They had become too dangerous to remain out of control.
Nobody more typified this new generation of leftists than John Brennan, chosen to head the CIA throughout Obama’s second term (2013 to 2017).
Even before Brennan was officially appointed to head the CIA, Michael Hayden, Bush’s CIA director, said that Brennan was, de facto, the “actual national intelligence director”23 throughout both of Obama’s terms.
How far left was Brennan? He was not just a Democrat or even a socialist; he had actually voted for the Communist Party in the elections of 1976.
He explains his curious decision: “I voted for the Communist Party candidate. As I was going to college, [my vote was a way] of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change.”24
But this was no youthful indiscretion. Brennan was twenty-one years old at the time, no callow child.
When he came to head the CIA, the American Spectator reports that he brought with him a coterie of political radicals and left-wing academics and gave them plum positions from which to leak to the press.25
Bill Gertz of the Washington Times explains how Brennan did it: He says that Brennan turned his left-wing hires into “operatives” by fiddling with standards at the Directorate of Operations. These political hacks disguised as apolitical operatives had no more business receiving high-security clearances than Brennan himself did.26
Brennan even encouraged the recruitment of the families of liberal CIA employees as vacancies opened up. “He trusted that they would be easier to control,” one expert said. “He figured family loyalties would run deep and that he could be sure he was getting the liberals he wanted in office.”27
His liberalism ran deep. As an attorney, Brennan’s law firm had, pro bono, represented many of the Guantanamo inmates he was now demanding be freed. He enthusiastically backed reading terror suspects their rights, including telling them, helpfully, that we would pay for a lawyer for them if they wanted.
Brennan so deeply opposed waterboarding terror suspects to extract information about possible forthcoming attacks that he said he would resign rather than allow it on his watch. “I can say that as long as I’m director of CIA,” Brennan said, “irrespective of what the president says, I’m not going to be the director of CIA that gives that order [to waterboard]. They’ll have to find another director.”28
Even on social issues, his liberalism was apparent. In particular, he advertised his commitment to gay rights and the LGBT community. The Daily Caller reports that he was “known for walking around [CIA] headquarters wearing a rainbow lanyard to show support for the LGBT community and signal his commitment to diversity.”29
Brennan told the Wall Street Journal, “I just think that having those varied perspectives really adds great color and dimension and diversity to how we look at problems.”30
Diversity became the watchword for new hires under Brennan. In 2011, he developed a program specifically to recruit gays for the Agency. But his agenda was not merely social; he thought that gays could be counted upon to be ideologically leftist when it came to intra-agency battles.
When Brennan took over as CIA director, he initiated a total reorganization of the Agency. In the past, the bureaucracy was stratified by function. The National Clandestine Service oversaw spying and covert operations. The Directorate of Intelligence provided insights on global developments to policy makers. Other Agency employees were organized into a third directorate that focused on science and technology and a fourth that worked on logistics.
But Brennan wanted to organize the Agency along the same lines as the U.S. military, where all those focused on a certain geographic area were pooled in one command regardless of the specific role they played.
His move was widely seen as a denigration of the field operatives, who had always been the elite of the CIA. Many quit. Much of the cream of the old guard at the top of the CIA moved on rather than live under the new organization. Brennan had more vacancies to fill with liberals.
But some see a more sinister motivation in Brennan’s actions. A person intimately familiar with the CIA and its top officials says that Brennan’s reorganization bleached out the best intelligence at the Agency. Important information was diluted as the critical mass of intelligence gatherers were dispersed throughout the Agency.
This source deeply believes that the very purpose of the reorganization was to dumb down the intelligence we got so as to make it more malleable by the top officials of the Obama administration. Particularly where Iran was concerned, this source believes, Brennan wanted to downplay the bad intentions of the Ayatollah to facilitate public acceptance of any deal the president would negotiate.31
In fact, on February 23, 2012, the intelligence community published an assessment of Iranian intentions saying that Iran was not actively trying to build an atomic bomb. It “concluded that Iran halted efforts to develop and build a nuclear warhead in 2003.” The report was represented as the consensus of sixteen intelligence agencies.
The assessment said that while Iran was pursuing research that “could put it in a position to build a weapon, it has not sought to do so.”32
Anyone with a smidgen of knowledge would know that Iran is so determined to build a bomb that it has weathered crippling sanctions, assassinations, and malware to do so. Its conduct since that CIA assessment—and even since the Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2015—makes it perfectly clear that building a bomb is the top priority in Tehran.
But reorganizing the CIA is not the only way in which Brennan weakened its ability to gather important intelligence. Part of the impact of Brennan’s outspoken opposition to enhanced interrogation, detention, and Guantanamo has been that it is increasingly difficult logistically to capture and interrogate a terror suspect. If a suspected terrorist were questioned in the United States, he would be protected by the rights guaranteed by our Constitution, even if he was not a citizen. It’s hard to imagine a successful interrogation with a lawyer watching every question and whispering in the suspected terrorist’s ear before each answer. And Obama pledged not to ship him to another country for questioning. And Obama barred further incarcerations in Guantanamo. So, if we captured a terrorist and wanted to interrogate him, where could we do so?
Indeed, when Ahmed Abu Khatallah—the mastermind of the Benghazi attack that killed our ambassador—was captured, he was placed aboard a U.S. ship that cruised around the Indian Ocean while he was interrogated. He could not go to Guantanamo. He couldn’t be turned over to another country, and we didn’t want him to be able to consult with an attorney, so questioning on U.S. soil was out. So the Navy took him for weeks on end on its own version of a cruise to nowhere.
The result of Brennan’s and Obama’s restrictions on interrogation was that the United States pretty much stopped capturing terrorists, preferring to kill them with drone strikes rather than deal with the messy business of extracting information. As a result, our ability to detect and deter future terror attacks declined. Under Bush-43—after 9/11—there were no lethal terror attacks on U.S. soil. Under Obama, there were dozens.
The American Spectator explains how Brennan’s personal leftist agenda, his liberal hires at the CIA, and the anti-Trump leaking from high up in the Agency combined to assure that Trump inherited a hostile intelligence apparatus. Brennan’s people, it said, “marched through the institutions, stayed long enough to find the exits, and now booby-trap them as they file out. The trail of McGovernite liberalism ends as it began, in lawlessness, with a departing CIA director who behaved no differently than Daniel Ellsberg.”33 (Ellsberg was one of the authors of the Pentagon Papers and was responsible for its release in 1971. It was a classified history of the Vietnam War.)
The Spectator continued: “Now those aging radicals break the law out of hatred for a Republican president.”34
“Nested within intelligence agencies,” the magazine wrote, these Brennan operatives “have fed a series of criminal leaks to a press corps that functions like an anti-Trump dirty tricks operation.”35
As soon as Trump was elected, Brennan probably did his share of the leaking that aimed to destabilize the new presidency.
President Donald Trump, himself, has publicly speculated that Brennan might be one of the criminal leakers who has been using his high position in the outgoing Obama administration to try to spread negative disinformation about the incoming president. In January 2017, he tweeted, singling out Brennan, “Was this the leaker of Fake News?”36
Former CIA analyst Tony Shaffer also suspects Brennan as one of the leakers. He said on Fox Business Network that the leaks that forced Michael Flynn out can be laid “squarely at the feet of”37 Brennan, among other embittered Obama aides.
White House chief of staff Reince Priebus responded with a veiled threat, telling Fox News Sunday that Brennan was responsible for many of the negative stories about friction between the incoming president and the intelligence community. “I think that John Brennan has a lot of things that he should answer for in regards to these leaked documents,”38 he said.
Even during the 2016 campaign, Brennan did nothing to hide his aggressive leftism. The Spectator reports that even though it was a government agency, “John Brennan’s CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump. An official in the intelligence community tells TAS [The American Spectator] that Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with ‘Hillary for president cups’ and other campaign paraphernalia.”39
While John Brennan was trying to fill the CIA with liberals who would do his bidding, Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general, was trying to drive out the right-wing career intelligence people who had controlled the CIA.
Holder Drives the Intel Community to the Left
Reflexively, we have come to identify the Federal Bureau of Investigation with J. Edgar Hoover, communist hunting, and right-wing, law-and-order G-men.
But that was before Obama appointed Eric Holder attorney general. Called “Obama’s enforcer” by authors John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky,40 Holder radicalized the Department of Justice and the FBI to an extent no liberal ever dreamed could happen.
Fund and Spakovsky write that Holder “filled the career ranks of the Justice Department with political allies, cronies, and Democratic Party donors, in clear violation of civil service rules.”41
One of the longtime Justice Department officials said that the Obama-Holder administration “racialized and radicalized the [department] to the point of corruption. They embedded politically leftist extremists in the career ranks who have an agenda that does not comport with equal protection or the rule of law; who believe that the ends justify the means; and who behave unprofessionally and unethically. Their policy is to intimidate and threaten employees who do not agree with their politics, and even moderate Democrats have left the department, because they were treated as enemies by administration officials and their lackeys.”42
Holder has particularly politicized the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ).
With a budget of $145 million, it is one of the DOJ’s largest divisions. Holder has vastly expanded the Civil Rights Division and has gone out of his way to hire new people in civil service slots—so they can’t be removed—who are radical, liberal lawyers. Byron York, of the National Review, says the division is “bigger, richer and more aggressive than ever, with a far more expansive view of its authority than at any time in recent history.”43
Holder, a strong backer of choice, has used the DOJ to go after pro-life activists. But, on education, where he opposed school choice, he came down hard on voucher plans to give parents a choice as to which school their child attends. A strong backer of gay rights, he has attacked schools whose dress codes don’t allow boys to come to school dressed in drag.
He has been especially vehement in attacking election laws designed to stop voter fraud as well as those that require verification of citizenship in order to vote.
Central to his view of civil rights is the doctrine of disparate impact, which says that even if no actual discrimination can be found or proven, if minorities get shorter shrift in employment, pay, or benefits, illegal discrimination can be inferred.
Bob Driscoll, a former chief of staff in the Civil Rights Division, says that today’s Justice Department “is more like a government-funded version of an advocacy group such as the ACLU or the NAACP Legal Defense Fund than like government lawyers who apply the facts to the law.”44
Holder’s own inspector general—appointed by President Obama—said the DOJ is rife with “polarization and mistrust.”45
Fund and Spakovsky write that in the DOJ, career civil service employees who their colleagues feel are conservative or Republican—or who simply believe in racially neutral enforcement of the laws—“are subjected to racist comments, harassment, intimidation, bullying, and even threats of physical violence.”46
Above all, Holder worked to assure a staff that is radical and extremely left wing. “The career lawyers in the Civil Rights Division are overwhelmingly liberal and have always manipulated the hiring process to ensure that the staff remains that way.”47
According to a 2013 inspector general report, Holder told his DOJ section chiefs he would personally “take control” of the hiring process if slots were not filled quickly (by liberals). The IG reports that the chiefs “got the message loud and clear.”48
Holder set up a hiring system designed to maximize the number of liberals brought on board. No longer did it matter much if the job applicants went to top law schools or scored high on proficiency tests; the key new requirement was that they had worked for a civil rights group, invariably liberal.
Fund and Spakovsky write that “100 percent of all of the lawyers hired by Eric Holder for career civil service positions in the Civil Rights Division have been Democratic activists or ideological liberals and firebrands.”49
The 2013 inspector general report found that in the voting section alone, 56 percent of those hired since 2009 came from only five organizations: the American Civil Liberties Union, La Raza, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, the NAACP, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The IG report says that the “Voting Section passed over candidates who had stellar academic credentials and litigation experience with some of the best law firms in the country, as well as with the Department” in order to hire those they considered to have a “commitment” to “traditional” civil rights (liberals who support quotas and ethnic and gender entitlements).50
Bob Popper, a former deputy chief who finally left the division in 2013 out of frustration, says he was “routinely excluded from hiring decisions” starting in 2009 because he was perceived as a “conservative.”51
Retired lieutenant colonel Tony Shaffer, the former analyst for the CIA, described how the Obama administration staffed the FBI and the CIA with its own liberal people.
The problem is this: you have a lot of folks who are either career members of the intelligence community who are skeptical of the current situation or who were at one point political appointees who have burrowed themselves into the infrastructure who are now career intelligence officers.
Shaffer said that many of these people have retained loyalties to the Obama administration. He said this “causes them to [judge] for themselves what they should or should not do regarding intelligence.”
Shaffer explained that some of the career members were selected because of their political orientation.
“What we’ve seen over the past eight years is a manipulation of the intelligence community,” Shaffer said. He blames the manipulation on the tendency of people like the former director of national intelligence James Clapper, and the former director of the CIA John Brennan, to hire “people like themselves.” He says that “some of those professionals were selected because of their [political] reliability, not because of their professional ethics.”52
On becoming attorney general, Eric Holder also reached across to the CIA to threaten those who had always been our best defense against terrorism with dismissal, disgrace, and prison.
During Obama’s campaign, Holder railed against the CIA for its overaggressive interrogations and use of rendition, charging that the “government authorized the use of torture” under Bush and vowing that “we owe the American people a reckoning.”53
His day of “reckoning” came in August 2009 when he asked a special prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham, to reinvestigate the CIA’s handling of about one hundred high-value terrorists captured by American forces on the battlefield. Bush’s administration had already charged a team of long-term, career Justice Department prosecutors with that task. Their painstaking investigation of each agent concluded that the CIA had only followed the rules laid out by the Justice Department on how to interrogate terror suspects. The investigators published hundreds of pages of evidence to bolster their findings, called declination memos (in which they explained their reasons for declining to prosecute the intelligence officers).
But Holder wanted a do-over. In fact, he revealed that he had not read many of the declination memos he was seeking to overrule.
Seven former CIA directors who had served from the sixties onward protested Holder’s decision to reopen the cases. They said it would create “an atmosphere of continuous jeopardy” for CIA employees and would “seriously damage the willingness of many other intelligence officers to take risks to protect the country.” As they pointed out, “Those men and women who undertake difficult intelligence assignments in the aftermath of an attack such as September 11 must believe there is permanence in the legal rules that govern their actions.”54
Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA at the time, was so upset over Holder’s decision that he engaged in a “profanity-laced screaming match” with the attorney general at the White House.55 Panetta was so upset that the cases were being reopened that he offered to pay the legal expenses of the agents Holder had ordered be investigated.
But Panetta and the former directors had it wrong. It was precisely Holder’s intention to create “an atmosphere of continuous jeopardy” by reopening the investigations. Holder wanted to drive the interrogators out so he could put his own radicals in their places.
Fund and Spakovsky put it well when they say that the decision to launch a new investigation was part of an “ideological crusade” against the CIA.56
Eventually, Holder found nothing. Nobody was prosecuted or even dismissed, but the cloud of doubt and fear hung over the CIA for years.
But still, Holder’s gambit worked. The reign of terror wore on our career intelligence officers and they left their jobs.
Marc Thiessen, a former speech writer for Bush-43, said that the lives of the CIA employees who were investigated—twice—“will never be the same. They have spent much of the decade since Sept. 11 under threat of prosecution, fighting to defend their good names even as they worked to keep us safe.” As a result of Holder’s “witch hunt,”57 talented, capable counterterrorism officials have left the CIA and others have chosen wiser, safer careers, free from political backbiting by those they tried to serve.
Holder even went to great extremes to bring into the intelligence community those who had fought, tooth and nail, on behalf of the inmates at Guantanamo. These attorneys who had volunteered their time to try to free the inmates now held sway over the jailers of their former clients. It was as if the world had turned upside down and those who had vigorously prosecuted terrorists found themselves under the gun for serving their country.
Of those Guantanamo inmates these volunteer attorneys succeeded in freeing, over one hundred have been confirmed by the director of national intelligence to have taken up arms against us again, and another seventy-four are suspected of doing so.
Holder, for example, hired Jennifer Daskal in the National Security Division that oversaw counterterrorism operations and prosecutions. While Daskal’s resume was devoid of any experience as a prosecutor, she was a left-wing activist who had represented al Qaeda terrorists at Human Rights Watch before joining the DOJ. The fox was hired to guard the henhouse.
The New York Post wrote that “Daskal never missed a chance to give Gitmo detainees the benefit of the doubt while assuming the worst about US government intentions.”58
The Post explained that she never accepted the guilt of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four of his fellow terrorists, despite the outburst from one of the five at the end of his hearing: “I hope the jihad will continue and strike the heart of America with all kinds of weapons of mass destruction.”59
Omar Khadr was a special object of Daskal’s sympathy. A terrorist, he was caught in Afghanistan after he killed Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer. Daskal, Khadr’s lawyer, objected to his prosecution, saying that it would violate his rights as a child since he committed the murder at the tender age of fifteen.60
Holder’s own firm defended eighteen enemy combatants and successfully urged the federal court to extend to them new rights under the Fifth Amendment and the Geneva Accords.
While law firms are supposed to offer pro bono aid to indigent clients, the decision to specialize in accused terrorists likely indicates a mind-set not altogether welcome in the future head of the Department of Justice.
Fund and Spakovsky liken it to hiring a mob lawyer at the Organized Crime Task Force or a lawyer for the Klu Klux Klan to work at the Civil Rights Division.
So when Trump unexpectedly won the election, he was interrupting a transformation of American government almost without precedent in our history. Particularly in the intelligence community, the FBI and the CIA, long stalwarts of conservatism, had now become home to hundreds of activist liberals determined to remake their agencies.
Trump was anathema to them and all they stood for. He took office as president presiding over a nest of vipers determined to destroy him.
But these were not ordinary political vipers with whom Trump had to contend. They were experts in the fine arts of propaganda, media leaks, character assassination, and even manipulation of the political process.
The agencies they worked for—the CIA and the FBI—had honed their skills by destabilizing and, ultimately, overthrowing democratically elected governments in Chile, Iran, Guatemala, and dozens of other countries.
These folks knew how to screw up an incoming president in his early, most vulnerable days.
The anti-Trump partisans had already amassed a dossier purporting to show compromising material—“kompromat”—that was shown to be totally phony and unverifiable. Now, they also proceeded to use the vast skills their agencies had evolved over the years in overthrowing elected governments—combined with the latest technology—to discredit the new president.
And they were ably assisted in this task by a sycophantic media corps equally determined to bring down the Trump presidency.
The CIA/FBI playbook for bringing down governments they didn’t like centered on using a compliant media to publish anonymous leaks to create a narrative—a facade—of incompetence, corruption, infighting, and treachery around the new administration.
Any thorough play-by-play discussion in a new administration is not likely to inspire confidence. During the dry run, plenty of mistakes are made and the ship of state needs frequent adjustment and repair.
Otto von Bismarck, ruler of Prussia, once said (and Mark Twain echoed): “Laws are like sausages. It is best not to see them being made.”61
But Donald Trump did not have the luxury of taking his shakedown cruise in private. Instead, his every move—and every mistake—was broadcast clearly around the world by an intelligence community and a media that hated him.
And always the leaks tried to keep the issue of Russia front and center. The slightest whiff of any doubt of Trump by any Republican senator was magnified into a life-and-death challenge to the president. Speculation became headlines. And, when Trump fired FBI director James Comey, the media positively boiled over with speculation that it was to derail the investigation of Russian meddling.
But before they could get to Trump in their efforts to destabilize and destroy his administration, they chose a lesser target—former general Michael Flynn, whom Trump named as his national security advisor.