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John Brennan gets physical — 23 Comments

1. And in the second video the moderator (?) is doing the beltway’s best to silence the question: “Next, next, next.” Flying air support for Brennan, one of their own. They think they own the government, and do not work for the “smellies.”

2. Matt Taibbi did an excellent follow-up interview with Speciale (he was the questioner in both videos). See https://www.racket.news/p/meet-the-man-who-inspired-former

3. I’m really looking forward to your report on your research on the 51 spy liars.

   In a free and fair election, the government does not censor the truth about either candidate, neither good nor bad truth.
   The letter was used by private companies to censor those facts, Google & Meta two of the biggest. Both were under verbal (maybe written?) pressure from govt officials.

   Censorship of the truth by the govt means the election was not free & fair.
   Thus, rigged / stolen.

4. I have more than read my fair share of books on Bolsheviks from Marx through Stalin. Brennan would be more at home with Bolsheviks than a free press.
   He acts like one and would fit right in in 1940s or 50s Moscow.

5. Didn’t Gina Haspel, Trump’s CIA director at the time, sign off on that letter (i.e., approve it)? I’ve heard that before, it shows the mess we were (and are) in.

   Also it turns out losing in the manner we did in 2020 backfired on them big time. Had they just let Trump go on to a second term, he would be gone now, and his second term would not have been as consequential as it is now.

6. “His demeanor is that of someone accustomed to being able to shutdown…” Shut down, two words. The one-word “shutdown” is the noun.

7. David:

   Yes, thanks, will fix.

8. Don:

   Whether Haspel did that is unclear, according to what I’ve learned so far. Although most of the signers were former intelligence officers, a couple were still active contractors, and she should have been informed. But I couldn’t find any evidence that she actually WAS informed and said okay.

9. Where I come from, chest-poking constitutes a casus belli. If some guy pokes you in the chest during a heated discussion, all bets are off. You have moral license to throw down on the guy.

10. IrishOtter49,
    ‘Where I come from, chest-poking constitutes a casus belli,’
    LOL. My son longs for the days of dueling.
    BTW, if only a single handful of the traitors ever actually go to prison, Brennan is at the top of my list.

11. Maintaining Haspel in that position was one of Trump’s bigger mistakes since her being “in place” essentially prolonged the dishonest criminal proclivities and grotesque, wall-to-wall coverups of the Brennan/Obama regime.

    Maybe Trump got bad advice.
    Maybe he had no real choice.

    Whatever, she’s very bad news all around.

12. @ Sandy Milne > “Matt Taibbi did an excellent follow-up interview with Speciale”

    Taibbi is a goldmine of solid reporting. He got booted off his longtime gig at Rolling Stone for daring to question the Party Narrative about Trump, then was gifted with access to the Twitter Files by Elon Musk, and has really done the work that today’s “journalists” refuse to do: go to the sources, question the actors, and look beyond the press releases.
    He isn’t ever going to be a Republican, but he certainly falls into the “sane Democrat” camp.

    The post from Racket is very informative, covering most of the info flying around the internet about the Brennan-Speciale encounter, but it has a “subscriber paywall” midway through, and a lot of the more interesting stuff is past it.
    I’m a long time subscriber, and this is a brief look.

    The most important part is Speciale’s own credentials: we don’t often get an inside look at what was going on during the 2016 election and Trump’s first term, although it might have been a game-changer if he had blown the whistle on at least some of the conspirators at the time. Maybe that just wasn’t possible, or he didn’t see it as his responsibility. At least he’s playing ball for the right team now

    I asked Speciale about the randomness of the event, particularly the second encounter in the reception area.

    “The funny thing is, I didn’t even know the guy shooting the video,” he says. “I didn’t know anybody else in the room. It was a total stranger. And when I asked my question and [Brennan] poked me in the chest, I knew it got him on a personal level… And I turned and looked, and I saw the guy with the camera and I said, ‘Hey, man, can you send me that so I can post it? And he sent it to me.”

    Speciale, who’s posted an extensive (and, for Russiagate obsessives like me, invaluable) timeline on his site, was at the Defense Intelligence Agency during the summer and fall of 2016, when the FBI and Brennan’s CIA were cooking up various schemes to infiltrate and surveil the Trump campaign. He says it’s not unusual that counterintelligence investigators might have looked at someone like Trump. “The guy’s probably a multi-billionaire. He has no political background, and he’s got hotels all over the world,” Speciale says. “These are the kinds of people that might be recruited by the Russians. It’s a possibility, at least.”

    However, Speciale says, authorities can only investigate for a short time without predication. “The law is very specific,” he says. “You could only do that for 90 days without a predicate of some kind of foreign involvement.”
    …
    As has been determined by an Inspector General report and a criminal case, the FBI falsified its warrant application to use FISA spy authority on the campaign.

    “That’s where the FBI really went off the rails,” Speciale says, “If they’d have just done the initial investigation and determined that he wasn’t a source for the Russians, they should have just closed ‘Crossfire Hurricane.’ It should have just been closed. But they didn’t. They kept it going, and they lied to the FISA court, and they did all these things.”

    That might have gone unnoticed, if not for a historic curveball. “They didn’t expect Trump to win,” Speciale says. “Trump even admitted it on Joe Rogan, where he said, ‘I didn’t even know anybody in Washington.’ He didn’t expect to win either, Matt. He didn’t. He was shocked.”

    The problem with that, Speciale says, was “they had run this illegal Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and [National Security Adviser Mike] Flynn would’ve discovered that. And Flynn would’ve immediately told Trump.”

    [That became very obvious during the persecution and prosecution of Flynn, and apparently they thought he was a big enough danger to go at him with everything they could; IMO and that of others, all they did was raise questions and generate distrust, which eventually backfired on them because they had to keep escalating.]
    …
    The emails Gabbard released this summer show that the intelligence community as of December 8, 2016 was on the cusp of issuing a similar second [ICA] report, saying, “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.” However, the White House instead hastily convened a meeting of its “Principals Committee,” after which a new, broader Assessment was assigned that would come to a much starker conclusion.
    …
    What really happened was more complicated: the narrow cyber report was suddenly stopped, then swapped out for a much broader report. Why? Speciale, who said he was “involved” with helping set up the Principals Committee meeting, offers his thoughts.
    …
    “Here’s the real rub,” he says. “I’ve been saying this for years and years and years and trying to get traction on it. If an intelligence officer from a foreign country comes to, say, the FBI, and gives them a suitcase of bogus intel, but it all looks legit, and he’s doing it at the behest of the foreign government, that’s considered espionage. That’s considered offensive counterintelligence, essentially giving an adversary fake secrets so that they use a lot of resources to either prove or disprove them, or they make decisions based on bad intel.”

    A foreign agent giving bad intelligence, Speciale explains, is called OFCO, or Offensive Counterintelligence.

    “The dossier came from [Christopher] Steele, a trained counterintelligence agent,” he says. “It gets funneled to the FBI. The FBI reads it. They’re like, ‘This kind of sounds a little fishy, but let’s look at it.’ As soon as they picked it up and kept running with it, because they knew it was bullshit, they knew what they were doing, they knew that they were doing an OFCO. And here’s why. Because we now look at the information. The investigations were being leaked to Congress, and then the congressmen and women were leaking it to the American people and saying, Hey, there’s an investigation into Donald Trump for Russian collusion.”

    Speciale insists the operation “wasn’t against Trump, it was against everyone. It was against the entire American electorate.” The creation of the impression that the White House was compromised, the use of resources on bogus investigations, moving public opinion in a direction it largely holds to this day, was the intelligence community taking aim at the whole country. Trump was a major character, but not the whole story. As for the “team sport” emails Speciale pointed to, they’re evidence of collective guilty knowledge, for which there’s a legal term.

    “It’s damning,” says Speciale. “At the very least, seditious conspiracy.”

    Speciale, who’s ensconced in a lawsuit against Virginia gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger (whom he claims issued a defamatory press release regarding his role in the J6 riots), had a lot more to say about Russiagate as well as the Hunter Biden story. The former DIA and DNI officer underscores, for instance, the bizarre fact that the ostensible key piece of evidence justifying the initial “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation of Trump, from the Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, is missing and somehow has never been found, nor has the person who planted two pipe bombs at J6.

    “We can find a goatherd on the top of a mountain making IEDs in Afghanistan and hit him with a Predator missile,” he says. “But we can’t find a guy who dropped two f__ pipe bombs in plain sight in the middle of Washington, DC, our capital? And who in the f___ is Joseph Mifsud? We don’t even know. We don’t even know who that is. We don’t even know if that’s a real person.” He pauses.

    “No way. No f___ way.”

    I asked Speciale if, given his prior advisory role, he had any insight into what kind of conspiracy charge the administration is gunning for. Espionage? Sedition?

    “I’ve had conversations, and I keep saying that I think this is just my suspicion,” he says. “My hope is that they want to have all their Ts crossed and their Is dotted before they level any public accusations of seditious conspiracy. I don’t think they’re going to go for treason. I think they’re going to go for seditious conspiracy, but I hope [Trump] puts the right person on messaging for this. Because from the White House side, not just from the DOJ, but from the White House side, their messaging has to be really, really carefully done to say, listen, ‘We don’t want revenge. We don’t want retribution. We want a restoration of the rule of law.’”

    Jim Jordan’s Judiciary Committee referred Brennan for prosecution two weeks ago. We’ll see what happens, but there’s no question that tensions are high, as last week’s encounter shows.

13. Thanks, AF.

    ‘…However, the White House instead hastily convened a meeting of its “Principals Committee”…’

    Yep, “Principals Committee”…says it ALL.

14. Molly Brown: “if only a single handful of the traitors ever actually go to prison, Brennan is at the top of my list.”

    Mine too. I worked for decades for a defense contractor and had a TS clearance. When I got it and every time thereafter I had to “re-up” I was asked, “Have you ever belonged to an organization that advocated the overthrow of the US government?”. It was like a joke but Brennan voted communist in the 1970s when everyone from 3d grade on up knew the CPUSA was nothing but a front for the Soviet Union, and he got appointed head of the CIA! Though not surprising when you consider who appointed him …

15. He’s the guy. For years I’ve said he was it. HE was the facilitator.

16. FOAF: Precisely. Brennan was a bad dude, and I remember answering that same question, then later wondering how the hell Brennan ever made it through the vetting process. Really strange.

17. “. . . how the hell Brennan ever made it . . . ”

    That’s (always been) an easy one word answer: Obama.

18. I see we are all on the same page regarding Brennan and his comrade Obama.

19. One Big Assed Mistake America

20. Brennan looks like exactly what he is.

21. @Barry Meislin
    Maintaining Haspel in that position was one of Trump’s bigger mistakes since her being “in place” essentially prolonged the dishonest criminal proclivities and grotesque, wall-to-wall coverups of the Brennan/Obama regime.

    Maybe Trump got bad advice.
    Maybe he had no real choice.

    Typical for his first administration.

    He came in expecting to be a normal POTUS. Not be the target he was. He went to the Republican establishment to find many of the people he put in place in the first term. And there’s a limit on who they will accept in the Senate, particularly with respect to AG.

22. @neo,

    Looking around, I found this:

    The highest officials within the CIA were aware of the statement prior to its publication. CIA’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) Andrew Makridis testified that he informed Director Gina Haspel or Deputy Director Vaughn Frederick Bishop about its impending release. This sequence of events suggests that senior CIA leadership had ample opportunity to assess the validity of the statement’s claims. Furthermore, the COO’s office appeared to signal approval of the statement in a move that departed from standard Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB) protocols.
    

    https://intelligence.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1432

23. This episode should illustrate that no institution is above suspicion and organizational courage is dubious at best.

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