Trump's action against Brennan another step toward abyss
What Donald Trump did Wednesday isn’t supposed to happen in a democracy. A president who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution just carried out a personal political vendetta against a career intelligence officer.
In revoking the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan, Trump took another step toward the abyss. He cited the “risk posed by [Brennan’s] erratic conduct and behavior,” a ludicrous charge coming from our unguided missile of a chief executive.
Brennan’s real crime is that he has been in Trump’s face nearly every day, trading insults on Twitter and cable television. Brennan has taken to using words like “high crimes and misdemeanors” and “nothing short of treasonous” to describe Trump’s behavior and likened him to convicted fraudster Bernie Madoff. Stripping Brennan’s clearances was presidential payback, dressed up in national-security language.
I wrote back in January that I wished Brennan and other former intelligence chiefs would resist slugging it out with Trump — not because their criticisms are wrong, but because they risked tarnishing the credibility and professionalism of their agencies. As I argued, Trump supporters would “fume that the spy chiefs are ganging up on the populist president. Conspiracy theories about an imaginary ‘deep state’ will gain more traction, and the cycle of national mistrust will get worse.”
But let’s be honest: Brennan isn’t a guy who was going to back down in a bar fight, any more than Trump. He’s a tough, stubborn Irish-American with a chip on his shoulder. He’s a guy who, if you write five positive things about him and one negative, only remembers the negative. Once Trump insulted Brennan’s integrity, as he did after he won the presidency, these two were going to end up in a cockfight.
The prevailing media explanation of the Brennan move was that Trump was trying to distract public attention from Omarosa Manigault Newman, a disaffected former staffer who just published a tell-all book about the president called “Unhinged.” But I wonder if that was the real Brennan trigger.
Trump himself offered a clearer (and more damning) explanation in an interview Wednesday with The Wall Street Journal, suggesting that he punished Brennan because he was one of the original instigators of the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller. “I call it the rigged witch hunt, [it] is a sham. And these people led it! So I think it’s something that had to be done.”
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