OPINION:
John Brennan put out a call to arms on Twitter for anyone with information on unlawful activities that may have been conducted by President Donald Trump to come forward and report it. Nice. Kind of like calling for a whistleblower movement, right?
He’s digging for dirt and wants anyone in a position to report dirt to hurry up and get it out there. The election dawns, dontcha know.
His tweets have the sour smell of sedition.
“A reminder to federal officials: There is no limit on the number of individuals who can use the whistleblower statute,” he wrote just a few days ago. “If you think you were involved in unlawful activity as a result of a directive from Mr. Trump or someone doing his bidding, now is the time to report it.”
A couple of days before that, Brennan tweeted, “Whistleblower deserves our praise & gratitude. Donald Trump getting very sloppy & careless in corrupt practices & cover up attempts. Democrats & Republicans (those who have a conscience) need to work together to prevent desperate moves by Trump that could wreak further havoc.”
And two days before that, Brennan tweeted: “Impeachment hearings are essential to determine whether Donald Trump, as alleged, engaged in extortion of a foreign government for personal political gain. If the allegations are true, Trump should be impeached, convicted by the Senate, & charged with a federal crime.”
If Brennan could be trusted as a truth-teller — if he could truly lay claim to his Twitter self-identifier as a “Nonpartisan American” — then maybe his tweets could be seen as coming from a genuinely concerned citizen, possessed of genuinely concerned passion for country and government.
But this is a time in U.S. politics when the intelligence community has proven itself untrustworthy, filled with partisan hacks who hate Trump and who will seemingly stop at nothing to tear down this administration — including using anonymous sources accusing outrageous things that are later shown to be false, even defamatory. And this is the guy, Brennan, who led America’s CIA for four years, from 2013 until January 2017, when Trump sent him packing.
Since, Brennan has become a Twitter tool of the far left, espousing angry, hateful rhetoric against this administration for all to see. And when Brennan expresses unhappiness with the status quo, one has to wonder where his mind wanders.
In 1976, Brennan voted for Communist Party leader Gus Hall for president, later explaining it as his way of “signaling my unhappiness with the system and the need for change.”
Brennan also said he was not, and never has been, a member of the Communist Party. OK. But it’s one thing to signal unhappiness with the government; it’s another thing entirely to go down the list of presidential candidates — which that year included Democrat Jimmy Carter, Republican Gerald Ford, Libertarian Roger MacBride, independent Eugene McCarthy, prohibition Ben Bubar, socialist Frank Zeidler — and decline them all until arriving at Communist Hall.
That’s not just extreme. That’s suspicious.
Trusting that Brennan has zero communist sympathies, zero communist tendencies, either then or now, is akin to trusting that Vladimir Putin pushed aside his 16 years of KGB mindset to ring in freedom, sweet freedom, as Russia’s leader. The suspicion lingers.
The red flags remain.
And Brennan is not just a never-Trumper.
He’s a well-connected, politically savvy, intelligence official trained in the finer arts of propaganda and upsetting countries’ governments in covert manners.
His tweets sow seeds of rebellion against this government, and that’s classic textbook sedition.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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