Continuing from the two posts below, we now look at how powerful elements in the intelligence services defy and try to undermine President Trump.

We know that the former head of the FBI, James Comey, by his own confession leaked information through a friend to the leftist media with malice towards the president. (And for the latest revelation of James Comey’s corruption, see here.)

It is reported that the CIA is leaking its discontent with its new director – the president’s ally, Michael Pompeo – because he is trying to to stop the leaks and change their Obama-set agenda.

And this is from an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily:

The remarks made in recent weeks by two former spy chiefs go well beyond anything ever uttered by previous espionage leaders, calling into question the commander in chief’s competence and sanity. In politics, when considering such vituperative criticisms, it’s always wise to consider the source.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan have both weighed in with scathing remarks about President Trump in recent days and weeks. To be blunt, Clapper and Brennan were political partisans of President Obama, and neither did exactly a bang-up job while in their posts.

Speaking on CNN to left-leaning anti-Trump host Don Lemon this week, Clapper said, “I really question his ability, his fitness to be in this office. And I also am beginning to wonder about his motivation for it. Maybe he is looking for a way out.”

“How much longer does the country have to, to borrow a phrase, endure this nightmare?” he asked, suggesting concern over Trump’s access to nuclear codes.

There’s an awful lot to unpack there.

For one, should a former intelligence chief who admitted to lying before Congress about the extent of National Security Agency spying on average Americans be passing judgment on any politician?

And should we trust the judgment of someone who, laughably, claimed that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was “largely secular,” as Clapper did, and who predicted during Libya’s civil war that Moammar Gadhafi would “prevail” in the end, just months before his dead body was dragged through the streets?

And yet, we’re supposed to take his criticisms of Trump seriously.

As for also suggesting that Trump is “looking for a way out”, that’s by now an old fantasy peddled and re-peddled by angry Obama-ites.

“It’s shocking that a former director of national intelligence takes the discredited ‘Trump wants out’ theme one step further at this late date,” as Paul Mirengoff of the PowerLine blog put it. “What does Clapper mean when he says Trump may be ‘looking for a way out’ by giving what Clapper considers over-the-top speeches? Does he think Trump, for whom winning means everything, wants to be impeached? That he wants to be institutionalized?”

Or, perhaps, is he just trying to sow more confusion, more anger, more inchoate hatred for the president among those who didn’t vote for him, thus obstructing Trump’s ability to govern?

We’d opt for the latter.

Then there’s former CIA chief John Brennan, who has also stepped out of his supposedly apolitical role as a spymaster to make highly charged political comments about Trump.

After Trump’s comments about Charlottesville, Brennan ripped into Trump for making “dangerous” and “ugly” comments.

He’s entitled to his opinion, of course. But it has long been a part of our tradition of government service that former officials serving in a nonpolitical capacity would leave the criticisms of other administrations to the elected politicians. To ignore this tradition runs the risk of tainting the professionalism of the agencies they once headed, and provides evidence that the heavily politicized, entrenched, progressive “deep state” that many Americans believe poses a danger to our republic really does exist.

By the way, Brennan in remarks made last July that can only be called highly questionable suggested that it’s “obligation of some executive branch officials” to refuse to fire Robert Mueller, who is heading up the open-ended investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and its hacking of the 2016 election.

Let’s be clear: Trump, should he want to do so, would be absolutely within his rights as president to seek Mueller’s firing. Whether it would be politically wise to do so is a separate question.

And Brennan’s remarks are incredibly self-serving, since he is the one who initiated the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia last summer, in the heat of the campaign. The Obama loyalist did so, apparently, thinking it would fatally damage Trump’s campaign.

“It was then-CIA Director John O. Brennan, a close confidant of Mr. Obama’s, who provided the information — what he termed the ‘basis’ — for the FBI to start the counterintelligence investigation last summer,” wrote Washington Times national security correspondent Rowan Scarborough last May. “Mr. Brennan served on the former president’s 2008 presidential campaign and in his White House.”

Brennan, by the way, also aided in making up the bogus talking points used by the Obama administration to lie about what happened in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were murdered. Whose interests was Brennan serving?

Far from being a disinterested intelligence official, Brennan is in fact a highly partisan political operative with a far-left background. By his own admission (it came out in a CIA polygraph test administered early in his career), he voted for Communist Party hack Gus Hall for president in 1980.

A mere youthful indiscretion? According to the authoritative Black Book Of Communism, Communist nations in the 20th century slaughtered more than 100 million people around the world. They did so in a (fortunately) failed attempt to impose that inhuman, totalitarian system on free people everywhere. Yet Brennan voted to have that same murderous, totalitarian system imposed on us here in the U.S. And was still given the keys to our nation’s secrets.

Anyone can criticize the president. That’s America. But not everyone should. Neither Clapper nor Brennan have distinguished themselves in recent years, either professionally or politically. America’s intelligence agencies were deeply dysfunctional during the Obama years.

By inserting themselves so dishonestly into a partisan political dispute, Clapper and Brennan have not only damaged the agencies they once headed, but the democracy they once claimed to serve. They serve as Exhibits A and B in why the swamp must be drained, and drained thoroughly.

Daniel Pipes writes:

US President Barack Obama’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, John O. Brennan, conveniently outlined the administration’s present and future policy mistakes in a speech on August 6, “A New Approach for Safeguarding Americans.”…

Disturbingly, Brennan ascribes virtually every thought or policy in his speech to the wisdom of the One. This cringe-inducing lecture reminds one of a North Korean functionary paying homage to the Dear Leader.

Specifics are no better. Most fundamentally, Brennan calls for appeasing terrorists: “Even as we condemn and oppose the illegitimate tactics used by terrorists, we need to acknowledge and address the legitimate needs and grievances of ordinary people those terrorists claim to represent.” Which legitimate needs and grievances, one wonders, does he think al-Qaida represents?

Brennan carefully delineates a two-fold threat, one being “al-Qaida and its allies” and the other “violent extremism.” But the former, self-evidently, is a subset of the latter. This elementary mistake undermines his entire analysis.

He also rejects any connection between “violent extremism” and Islam: “Using the legitimate term jihad, which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve. Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself.”…

[This is] a deeply deceptive interpretation [of the meaning of ‘jihad’] intended to confuse non-Muslims and win time for Islamists. The George W. Bush administration, for all its mistakes, did not succumb to this ruse. But Brennan informs us that his boss now bases US policy on it.

The speech contains disquieting signs of ineptitude. We learn that Obama considers nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists to be “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security.” Fine. But how does he respond? With three feeble and nearly irrelevant steps: “leading the effort for a stronger global nonproliferation regime, launching an international effort to secure the world’s vulnerable nuclear material… and hosting a global nuclear summit.”

Nor can Brennan think straight. One example, requiring a lengthy quote. “Poverty does not cause violence and terrorism. Lack of education does not cause terrorism. But just as there is no excuse for the wanton slaughter of innocents, there is no denying that when children have no hope for an education, when young people have no hope for a job and feel disconnected from the modern world, when governments fail to provide for the basic needs of their people, then people become more susceptible to ideologies of violence and death.”

Summary: Poverty and a lack of education do not cause terrorism, but a lack of education and a job make people more susceptible to the ideas leading to terrorism. What is the distinction? Woe on us when the White House accepts illogic as analysis.

Further, let’s focus on the statement “when governments fail to provide for the basic needs of their people, then people become more susceptible to ideologies of violence and death,” for it contains two stunning errors. First, it assumes the socialist fiction that governments provide basic needs. No. Other than in a few commodity-rich states, governments protect and offer legal structures, while the market provides.

Second, every study on the subject finds no connection between personal stress (poverty, lack of education, unemployment) and attraction to radical Islam. If anything, massive transfers of wealth to the Middle East since 1970 contributed to the rise of radical Islam. The administration is basing its policy on a falsehood.

Where, as they say, is the adult supervision? Implementation of the inept policies outlined by Brennan spells danger for Americans, American interests and American allies. The bitter consequences of these mistakes soon enough will become apparent.