Im-Politic: Why the Brennan Security Clearance Decision was Completely Reasonable

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Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, free speech, Im-Politic, intelligence community, John Brennan, security clearance, Trump

The latest Trump-era Washington brouhaha – over the President’s revocation of the security clearance of former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief John Brennan – makes embarrassingly clear that, however well former intelligence officials have safeguarded national security, they’re completely muddle-headed (at best) about when these clearances should and should not be denied. For none of their main arguments against Mr. Trump’s Brennan decision can stand up to any serious scrutiny.

The weakest claim made by these former members of the intelligence community, as stated by a letter from twelve former leaders of the nation’s intelligence agencies, and by a statement from sixty former CIA officials, is that Brennan’s loss of his clearance, and the administration’s threat to take similar actions against other former and current officials, is nothing more than “an attempt to stifle free speech” (to quote the leaders’ letter).

Seriously? Has Brennan been thrown into jail? Has he been arrested? Have any of the media outlets on which he’s been speaking out been warned by the government to shut him out or face the consequences? Has the Trump administration sic-ed the Internal Revenue Service on him? Of course not.

A variant on this argument has been made by President Trump’s other critics: that revoking the clearance could inhibit Brennan (and other outspoken former officials in the future) from expressing their views by jeopardizing their post-retirement employment prospects and therefore their incomes. According to this viewpoint, prospective victims would include both former officials whose security clearances give them a cachet that’s appealing to media organizations seeking (seemingly) authoritative commentators, and former officials who need such clearances to advise private sector defense companies on projects that entail classified work.

But if any former officials have marketed themselves to media companies based on their clearance-created access to inside information, then they’re either offering to divulge information already in their possession, or they’re insinuating that the clearances will enable them to reveal classified material that sheds light on ongoing controversies. Keeping the first promise would amount to committing a serious crime, and making the second pitch would be an act of fraud, since these figures have no ability to gain such information proactively.

Further, all these former officials receive government pensions, and all of them were well-paid enough during their careers to accumulate enough savings and invest enough of them in blind trusts to ensure highly comfortable retirements if they managed their personal finances even with minimal competence.

So it’s not as if either they retain their clearances or get thrown into the poorhouse. In fact, this argument sounds an awful like an unintentional admission that former intelligence officials (or other officials with such clearances) are likely to be intimidated by the prospect of losing maximum income – which doesn’t exactly attest to the strength of their principles.

Scarcely (if at all) stronger is the contention that the Brennan decision, and possible similar future decisions, is about his speech rights in the first place, and that President Trump’s overriding aim was meting punishment for expressing “unclassified views on what they see as critical national security issues” (as per the sixty former intelligence officials) or for expressing undesirable “political views” (as per the twelve former intelligence leaders).

Yet the White House statement announcing the revocation specified that the Brennan decision was based on his “erratic conduct and behavior.” Leave aside your opinions as to whether any of Brennan’s recent statements and actions do “cross the line.” Why did both the sixty former officials and the twelve former leaders ignore this accusation – except for brief acknowledgments that unspecified numbers of signers of both documents do not “concur with the opinions expressed by former Director Brennan or the way in which he expressed them” (to quote the former officials)?

Do they believe that a former official’s sense of judgment can never be taken into account in security clearance decisions. If so, what should “the line” be? Criminal behavior (i.e., misusing classified information)? That criterion would seem to ignore a wide variety of troublesome words and deeds that loudly signal deficient judgment. One obvious possible example – the Brennan charge that the President is guilty of treason that it turns out not even Brennan really believes. Talk about loose lips.

Moreover, are these former members of the intelligence community saying that a President shouldn’t be able to draw the line? If that’s the case, who or what should? Congress? Is there any reason to believe that the current generation of lawmakers would make clearance decisions superior to the President’s (at least in the eyes of most of the intelligence community)?

In addition, any number of former intelligence, defense, and foreign policy officials have criticized President Trump relentlessly since he declared his candidacy for the White House. Of them, only a handful have even made a short White House list of former officials whose still active clearances are being reviewed, or whose revoked clearances (due to firings for cause) might still be reinstated. (A final member on this list, Bruce Ohr, still works at the Justice Department.) Therefore, it’s impossible to take seriously the idea that some sweeping campaign is under way against Trump critics who used to be on the public payroll.

Indeed, here’s a prediction for six months from now: Brennan and other former intelligence and other officials will still be hammering the President for any number of crimes, outrages, and mistakes. And one of their main charges will still be that their free speech rights, and those of all their fellow Americans, are in imminent danger of being snuffed out.

Im-Politic: A Neglected Russia Disinformation Objective?

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2016 election, Barack Obama, Central Intelligence Agency, China, CIA, CNN, collusion, cybersecurity, Director of National Intelligence, disinformation, fake news, Im-Politic, intelligence community, James R. Clapper, John O. Brennan, Matthew Rosenberg, MSNBC, NBC, North Korea, Putin, Russia, The New York Times, Trump

Well then. Two passages in a New York Times article from this morning’s print edition were sure conversation-stoppers when it comes to the ongoing uproar about charges that President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia to boost his election odds and ensure soft treatment from his administration. That is, if you read far enough into the long piece to encounter them. In fact, they’re so important that they should have been the main angle – or at the very least, the main theme of front-page stories from now until we ever find out what’s really happened.

The passages (which make the same critical point):

First, according to Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg, by some point last September (at the latest), American intelligence officials were worried that Russia had developed an “operation to create discord inside the American government.”

Second, and more specifically, the intelligence agencies viewed one key part of this operation as feeding information suggesting that Vladimir Putin’s regime could blackmail the President (and/or the candidate) to “United States intelligence agencies and pit them against Mr. Trump.”

And here, in Rosenberg’s words, is the context:

“American intelligence agencies believe that Russia’s spy services see the deep political divisions in the United States as a fresh opportunity to inflame partisan tensions. Russian hackers are targeting American voting databases ahead of the midterm election this year, they said, and using bot armies to promote partisan causes on social media. The Russians are also particularly eager to cast doubt on the federal and congressional investigations into the Russian meddling, American intelligence officials said.

“Part of that effort, the officials said, appears to be trying to spread information that hews closely to unsubstantiated reports about Mr. Trump’s dealings in Russia, including [a] purported video [depicting him in compromising sexual situations], whose existence Mr. Trump has repeatedly dismissed.”

In plainer English, if Rosenberg has it right, the Russians have not only been trying to put Mr. Trump over a barrel and make sure that he defeated his main rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton. They have not only been trying to shake Americans’ confidence in their democratic institutions by hacking into them and unleashing a flood of fake news onto its media platforms, social and conventional. They have not only been trying to cover their tracks by using such fake news and other tactics to discredit the Congressional investigations into election meddling and related reported outrages.

They have also – separately – been trying to whip up antagonism between the President and the intelligence community. Achieving this goal of course would both tend to hamper America’s own intelligence operations and broader foreign and national security policies, as well as undermine the nation’s political system and its underlying social and cultural unity. And the tumult engulfing the capital and the nation as a whole suggests that the Russians are succeeding with this disinformation campaign, and that the intelligence agencies are playing their hoped for role.

Not that this possibility lets Mr. Trump and his aides totally, or mainly, or partly off the hook when it comes to their Russia ties either before or after his election.  For this objective could well have been sought on top of an effort to turn Mr. Trump into a Manchurian Candidate and President, not instead of it. But it does raise the question of how many of the allegations have stemmed from simple, and completely fictitious, plants.

Something else noteworthy about this article: If it’s accurate, then the potentially disastrous loss of America’s cyber-weapons to Russia and perhaps other adversaries that keyed Rosenberg’s piece was just the latest disclosed possibly catastrophic intelligence failures that occurred during Barack Obama’s presidency, and on the watches of the former intelligence agency chiefs, like his Director of National Intelligence (the complex’s top job) James R. Clapper, and one of his Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John O. Brennan – both of whom have been particularly sharp Trump critics.

Two others? China’s penetration of the CIA’s operations in the People’s Republic, which reportedly resulted in the assassination or capture of “more than a dozen sources” (according to press accounts, the breach began in 2010, under Brennan’s predecessor, former General David Petraeus) and the failure to anticipate the speed of North Korea’s nuclear weapons development (which can be laid directly at Clapper’s feet, and which Brennan apparently missed as well).

Clapper, incidentally, is now a “national security analyst” for CNN. Brennan has just joined NBC and MSNBC in the same capacity. Good luck to you if you think there’s any chance these networks’ weekend talk shows tomorrow will raise any of this, including the Rosenberg article, with them?