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Home » John Brennan’s Communist vote

John Brennan’s Communist vote

The New Neo Posted on by

I had previously ignored this story, but it came up again in a comment by “AesopFan” and I thought I’d delve into it.

Here’s the tale as told by John Brennan, who later become director of the CIA under Obama:

John Brennan…recalled being asked a standard question for a top security clearance at his early CIA lie detector test [administered in 1980]: Have you ever worked with or for a group that was dedicated to overthrowing the US?

“I froze,” Brennan said during a panel discussion about diversity in the intelligence community at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual conference. “This was back in 1980, and I thought back to a previous election [1976] where I voted, and I voted for the Communist Party candidate” [Gus Hall]…

Brennan decided to come clean, because he thought the lie detector would detect it if he lied. So he gave the following explanation for his vote:

“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.'”

Obviously, he wasn’t screwed. Not at all. But I find the story rather shocking, particularly since it occurred in 1976 (the year of his vote) and 1980 (the year of the lie detector test).

Brennan was born in 1955. That would make him 21 in 1976, an election in which Jimmy Carter was running against Gerald Ford. If he wanted change, why not vote for Carter, who (I remember it well) presented himself as a breath of fresh air, an outsider to DC who carried his own suitcases?

Brennan speaks in cliches of the time: “the system,” for example. Ah, the system! It’s a bit suspect that someone who was so against “the system” in 1976, at the age of 21, is joining that system big time by 1980. Now, that’s not impossible; minds can change, as we know. But that sort of change requires an explanation, one I’ve not seen Brennan offer, although I can’t say I’ve made an exhaustive search for one. I’d certainly be curious to know.

And if you hate “the system” and want change, let’s assume it’s change for the better. Why, then, would you vote for a Communist as a protest vote? By 1976 it was crystal clear that Communism wasn’t going to represent that change for the better. Brennan wasn’t an impressionable child, either, and this would have been his very first vote for president, which is often a time of great solemnity and importance (at least it was for me). To throw it away like that—if indeed that’s what was happening—is the mark of a rather impulsive and immature person, and that’s putting it kindly.

It’s not as though the 1976 election lacked for people to vote for if a protest needed to be lodged. Here were the major alternatives to Ford and Carter:

Roger MacBride, who had gained fame in the 1972 election as a faithless elector, ran as the nominee of the Libertarian Party.

Eugene McCarthy, a former Democratic Senator from Minnesota, ran as an independent candidate.

Ben Bubar, Prohibition Party nominee.

Frank Zeidler, former mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ran as the nominee of Socialist Party USA, which was founded in a split with Socialist Party of America.

Gus Hall, 4 time Communist Party Candidate.

Lots of choices there, all of them more innocuous than Hall and plenty good for protests, if it was protests Brennan wanted. But somehow it was Gus Hall for whom Brennan decided to vote. Among other things, this was Hall’s position:

Hall had a reputation of being one of the most convinced supporters of the actions and interests of the Soviet Union outside the USSR’s political sphere of influence. From 1959 onward, Hall spent some time in Moscow each year and was one of the most widely known American politicians in the USSR, where he was received by high-level Soviet politicians such as Leonid Brezhnev. Hall defended the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, and supported the Stalinist principle of “Socialism in One Country”.

Brennan was apparently never asked by the CIA to explain his vote in any greater detail than that, and he just went higher and higher in the agency. He describes the incident as a free speech issue, but that’s absurd. I defend his right to vote for any candidate he prefers at any time. But that doesn’t mean that he should be hired by the CIA or has some absolute right to be hired by the CIA whatever his political points of view. The CIA has every right to screen its potential agents for their beliefs about the US and its place in the world. It seems quite clear to me that they didn’t do their job here.

Comments

John Brennan’s Communist vote — 33 Comments

  1. “It seems quite clear to me that they didn’t do their job here.” neo

    This was during the cold war, which begs the question, for how long and how often have they not been doing their job? Perhaps since before FDR?

    Brennan has an affinity for totalitarian ideologies.

    This article is of interest; “Was CIA Director Brennan’s 1976 Vote for a Communist Just a Youthful Indiscretion?”

    “In his graduate thesis which earned him an M.A. in government from the University of Texas in Austin, Brennan denied the existence of “absolute human rights””

    Brennan is the main architect of the policy that “allow the president of the United States to kill Americans by overriding and ignoring constitutional guarantees provided in that Bill of Rights”.

    “On March 5 the Senate Intelligence Committee approved Brennan’s nomination by a vote of 12 to 3, which provoked a strong reaction, and a memorable filibuster, by Senator Rand Paul, who stated:

    “No one politician should be allowed to judge the guilt, to charge an individual, to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual. It goes against everything we fundamentally believe in our country.”

  2. Be interesting to find out just who vetted him.

    Who gave him clearance.

    Who allowed him into The Company.

    And why.

    He seems like just another extreme Left nutter.

    Though it’s pretty clear how he got to be top dog during Obama’s regime.

    (Of course, it may be a case of the CIA trying to show just how incompetent it can be…in order to totally confuse the opposition. According to this theory, there’s more to “Get Smart” than meets the eye. A whole lot more….)

  3. Brennan was just another Gramscian Marxist starting his long march through the institutions.

  4. AesopFan comment on previous thread.

    Anyone who watches The Americans, perhaps the best drama on American television, knows this. And it was revealed long ago by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes that Moscow regularly gave Hall thousands of dollars to enable the Communists in America to carry on their work.”

    Yes, Moscow sent money to Gus Hall and the CPUSA. What is forgotten these days is that the bagman who brought the Moscow Gold to Gus Hall from the late 1950s through the early 1980s was Morris Childs. Morris Childs was working for the FBI. Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin. From the Amazon review:

    Operation Solo is America’s greatest spy story. For 27 years, Morris Childs, code name “Agent 58”, provided the United States with the Kremlin’s innermost secrets.

    Repeatedly risking his life, “Agent 58” made 57 clandestine missions into the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, and Cuba. Because of his high ranking in the American communist party and his [former] position as editor of its official paper, the Daily Worker, he was treated like royalty by communist leaders such as Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Mao Tse-tung. Through first-hand accounts, Operation Solo tells the story of the conflicts within the FBI and American intelligence about the operation, and how the FBI, through extraordinary measures, managed to keep that operation hidden from everyone, including the CIA.

    The FBI concluded that the intelligence that Morris Childs brought back from Moscow was well worth the money it took to keep Gus Hall and the CPUSA going. Morris Childs, unbeknownst to the Kremlin, spoke Russian, so he was able to pick up a lot that that didn’t get translated. When Morris Childs had trained as an agent in Moscow in the early 1930s, he had made friends with Mikhail Suslov. Suslov was the chief ideologue and “grey eminence” of the Kremlin, whom most have pegged as the leader of the 1964 coup to install Brezhnev. This meant Childs had easy access to the Kremlin insiders.

  5. I would like to suggest water boarding for nominees to the position of directors of the FBI, CIA, NSA, and the rest of the 17 ‘intelligence’ agencies. Its kinda like nuking the site from orbit just to be sure, without the heat and fall out.

  8. David Aitken:

    Whether or not he had all the choices he still had plenty of choices. And there’s always write-ins, too.

  9. If the CIA didn’t do its job, what about Barack Obama (who appointed Brennan head of the CIA? Or the Senate, which confirmed him?

  10. “It’s a bit suspect that someone who was so against “the system” in 1976, at the age of 21, is joining that system big time by 1980. Now, that’s not impossible; minds can change, as we know. But that sort of change requires an explanation, one I’ve not seen Brennan offer, although I can’t say I’ve made an exhaustive search for one. I’d certainly be curious to know.”

    You’d have to ask his KGB handlers, but they are all either dead or enjoying their Russian oligarch rewards in houses at the beach.

  11. There is some lawyerly weasel wording on Brennan’s part:

    “Have you ever worked with or for a group … ?”

    Admittedly, we’re hearing his account of his recollections but, he didn’t answer the question. Yes, he voted for this Hall guy, but did he actively work for the CPUSA or any of its candidates?

    ” I said I’m not a member of the Communist Party, …”

    In 1980, when he’s trying to get a security clearance, he’s not a member of the CPUSA. What about in 1976 or before?
    ______

    So Brennan was hired into the CIA anyway, under Jimmy Carter and CIA director Adm. Stansfield Turner. It seems a little unlikely that Turner was a closet leftist.

    He did graduate from Oxford and we know that the MI6 was shot through with communist agents because Cambridge was something of a communism factory. I hadn’t heard anything comparable about Oxford.

    Turner did implement the “Halloween massacre” and eliminated 800 HUMINT positions in the clandestine service, which he later regretted. I’m sure that massacre caused huge celebrations in the Kremlin.
    _____

    I highly recommend watching “The Americans” from the beginning.

  12. Having been interviewed for a Top Secret clearance several times, I find it mind-boggling that Brennan would have passed the interview process the very first time, or even subsequent ones. His Senate confirmation for the Director’s job is less surprising to me: that was a time when America’s post-racial bona fides were being examined at every turn, and any Senator who voted against Brennan’s confirmation would have been accused of racism and every other social transgression imaginable. That was when why Van Jones was able to get nominated for a White House job despite his open Communist party affiliation.

    I still find it very strange that Brennan could have been DCI — there are few more sensitive jobs in the USG, and even in 2012, Russia was still seen as a fairly important adversary.

  14. Brennan went to Fordham. If he would have gone to Creighton, we could have been buddies. No way he would have voted Commie.

    Brennan, Keith Ellison and Bill Clinton all are fabulous failures of Jesuit education.

  15. I wonder if Brennan had a role in the CIA’s report to Bush that Iran had stopped their nuclear program?

    Just wondering how much damage he has done.

  16. Brennan, Keith Ellison and Bill Clinton all are fabulous failures of Jesuit education.

    You might add Fernando Cardenal, a Jesuit and Liberation Theology priest. Other prominent Liberation Theology priests, but not Jesuits would be Fernando’s brother Ernesto Cardenal, Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, and Camilo Torres Restrepo, and Carlos Mujica.

    In The Corpse at the Iron Gate, V.S. Naipaul recorded some rather interesting dialogue with Father Mujica.

    It came as a surprise, this villa miseria or shantytown just beside the brown river in the Palermo district, not far from the great park, Buenos Aires’s equivalent of the Bois de Boulogne, where people go riding. ……
    The priest in charge was one of the “Priests for the Third World.” He wore a black leather jacket and his little concrete shed of a church, oversimple, rocked with some amplified Argentine song. It had been whispered to me that the priest came of a very good family; and perhaps the change of company had made him vain. He was of course a Peronist, and he said that all his Indians were Peronist. “Only an Argentine can understand Peronism. I can talk to you for five years about Peronism, but you will never understand.”
    But couldn’t we try? He said Peronism wasn’t concerned with economic growth; they rejected the consumer society. But hadn’t he just been complaining about the unemployment in the interior, the result of government folly, that was sending two Indians into his shantytown for every one that left? He said he wasn’t going to waste his time talking to a norteamericano; some people were concerned only with GNP. And, leaving us, he bore down, all smiles, on some approaching Indians. The river wind was damp, the concrete shed unheated, and I wanted to leave. But the man with me was uneasy. He said we should at least wait and tell the father I wasn’t an American. We did so. And the father, abashed, explained that Peronism was really concerned with the development of the human spirit. Such a development had taken place in Cuba and China; in those countries they had turned their backs on the industrial society.

    Of these Liberation Theology priests, Camilo Torres and Carlos Mujica lost their lives in guerrilla warfare. The Cardenal brothers and Miguel D’Escoto served in the Sandinista government.

  17. Brennan also converted to Islam, and speaks, rather poorly, Arabic.

    Yes, did all of this from the lectern while in the Middle East.

    You can see him performing his prayers in the film 0 Dark Thirty.

    He’s not identified specifically, but that was thrown in as a sop… the idea being that the GWOT was against AQ not Islam.

    You can see here a VERY consistent pattern whereby Brennan rejects American norms.

    He also figures hugely in Spy Gate, the attempt to reverse the 2016 vote… which was and remains treason in every sense.

  18. Geoffrey Britain Says:
    May 31st, 2018 at 4:18 pm
    “It seems quite clear to me that they didn’t do their job here.” neo

    This was during the cold war, which begs the question, for how long and how often have they not been doing their job? Perhaps since before FDR?
    * * *
    Short answer: yes.

  19. Since I began watching David Horowitz’s talks on YouTube I’ve come to realise just how deeply embedded in American politics the communists were and are. I’m about Horowitz’s age, but grew up in an FDR liberal home while Horowitz was rowing up in a card carrying communist household. Lke other Red Diaper babies he went on the help create the New Left in the 60s before he saw the true face of communism. I could never understand them because I thought of them as fellow leftists and just couldn’t understand why they were different and made me uncomfortable. It turned out it was simple – they were communists boring from within who registered as Democrats and called themselves progressives – just like David Horowitz’s mom. So Obama is a Red Diaper baby, but of a later generation. The camouflage that confused me in 1968, didn’t fool me enough to vote for him 2008. But I didn’t see through it either until I began listening to Horowitz. I think they have gotten subtler and in Obama’s case slicker. Add a generous pinch of Chicago thuggery and you get our very own Neo-Marxist Teflon Don.

  20. So Obama is a Red Diaper baby, but of a later generation.

    Rubbish. His mother was a pest six ways to Sunday, not a Communist.

  21. I wonder if Brennan had a role in the CIA’s report to Bush that Iran had stopped their nuclear program?

    Good point. And the smart money says he did.

  23. The following sentence tells me all I need to know about Brennan: “Brennan decided to come clean, because he thought the lie detector would detect it if he lied.”

    If a person’s reason for telling the truth is fear of discovery then he can and should never be trusted because he has no internal code of honor.

  24. Matthew Continetti, bless his nuanced soul, is still able—still!—in spite of everything (or because of it?) to find the humorous side of the previous administration.
    http://freebeacon.com/columns/the-world-as-it-wasnt/

    And there is a plethora of material.

    (My favorite is Obama’s appointment of Ben Rhodes to be a member in the Holocaust Memorial Council. Well, one of my favorites—there are so many….)

  25. Something is off either with this guy, or with the videos I have been seeing.

    Was he crippled in an undercover operation, or in the service maybe?

    Because if he was not, it seems impossible that the sagging grey haired, overweight, bloated faced physical wreck I have seen limping along in videos, could have been born in 1958.

    I’m not trying to be funny here.

  27. All of this assumes that Brennan is telling the truth today. The results of his security clearance investigation (at least in theory) are protected by the Privacy Act, and voting in the US is by secret ballot, so there’s no way to confirm either of his assertions here. For all we know, he didn’t even vote in 1976, or voted for Carter, and the discussion with his polygrapher never even happened.

    If he was undergoing a polygraph, he’d already been granted a security clearance, so he’d already passed through a fairly thorough background investigation (top secret clearances require a ‘single scope background investigation’, which includes criminal records checks, financial records checks, and personal interviews with family and associated) without red flags.

  28. @ blert: “Brennan also converted to Islam, and speaks, rather poorly, Arabic.”

    Is this even remotely true?

  29. GRA; blert:

    For what it’s worth, see this on the question of Brennan and conversion.

    But Brennan does in fact speak fluent Arabic. He’s a bit less fluent than when he was young, but he can still speak it:

    Note also at the end there he used the Arabic name for Jerusalem. He seems to have been addressing an Arab group here.

  30. Evil comes in many guises: Barack Hussein and his entire coterie, including Brennan.

    The prayer to St Michael the Archangel concludes with a plea to cast into hell Satan and “all the evil spirits who prowl the word seeking the ruin of souls.”

  31. NewYorkCentral Says:
    June 1st, 2018 at 2:06 pm
    All of this assumes that Brennan is telling the truth today.
    * *
    Good point (and one that must always be kept in mind about any speaker without corroborating evidence from someone other than his BFFs), but has anyone seen any contradictory stories?
    If he is lying, would his vetters remember – or leak it – or do they even care?

  32. But – to continue, since editing is down at the moment – why would Brennan make up a story about voting for Gus Hall in the first place?

  33. How many Communists were in the Obama administration? Certainly Jay Carney and his nostalgic and “ironic” communist posters counts.

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