Cartoonist Scott Adams of “Dilbert” fame told his huge political fan base on Thursday that Obama-era CIA Director John O. Brennan may send the U.S. into chaos due to his inability to get a joke.
The author of “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter” said President Trump appears to be dealing with a dangerous political witch hunt because Mr. Brennan thought a public roasting of Hillary Clinton and her secret email server as secretary of state was influenced by Russian propaganda.
The former CIA boss, writing in an op-ed for The New York Times published Thursday, admonished then-presidential candidate Mr. Trump’s call during a 2016 campaign event for Russia to find the thousands of emails deleted from Mrs. Clinton’s private server.
“The already challenging work of the American intelligence and law enforcement communities was made more difficult in late July 2016 … when Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, publicly called upon Russia to find the missing emails of Mrs. Clinton,” Mr. Brennan wrote. “By issuing such a statement, Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen, but also openly authorizing his followers to work with our primary global adversary against his political opponent.”
Mr. Adams — one of the first political commentators to predict the billionaire’s electoral success — said the decision to strip the former CIA boss of his security clearance is completely rational.
Mr. Adams told his Twitter audience of nearly 270,000 people that only a dangerous person would use Mr. Trump’s joke as the pretext for jumping down an investigative rabbit hole.
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“So Brennan may have started one of the most important political witch hunts in history based on not recognizing a joke — and I’m not even making that up,” he said. “I feel fairly confident in saying that what I just said is literally true: that the head of the CIA has almost destroyed the United States because he didn’t understand that an obvious joke was a joke.”
Scott Adams talks about CIA directors who can’t recognize jokes, RBS scumbags, and coffee. https://t.co/wR8JuMymw3
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) August 16, 2018
The cartoonist said that another option was that Mr. Brennan was waiting for any excuse to tie Mr. Trump to a nefarious Russian plot.
“Now he might be lying about that,” he said. “It could be that he’s just using that as an excuse and say, ’Oh, it was really about that thing [Mr. Trump] said that didn’t look like a joke to me.’ So maybe it’s just something he wanted to do when he just needed what I call a ’fake’ because, you know, he was already inclined to do it but he wanted to wait. So we don’t know.
“Now, if you’ve got a guy who’s willing to put the entire stability at risk because he can’t tell the difference between a joke and a serious statement, then that guy has got to lose his security clearance at least,” Mr. Adams continued. “I wouldn’t want him anywhere near a decision. Would you? After seeing how Brennan responded to a public joke would you want him to make any important decisions about anything? I mean, that’s some scary stuff.”
Mr. Brennan claimed in his op-ed that the president is full of “hogwash” regarding ties to Russia.
“The only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of ’Trump Incorporated’ attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets,” Mr. Brennan said.
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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