Looking for anti-Trump leakers, President Trump needs to be as concerned about the CIA as the NSA.
Few remember that it was John Brennan’s private security company that was responsible for the breach of State Department files which sanitized the passport records (still never seen by the public) of presidential candidate and then-Sen. Barack Obama prior to the 2008 presidential election.
On March 21, two unnamed contract employees for the State Dept. and a third were disciplined for breaching Obama’s passport files. Two were found to be employees for Stanley, Inc., a security firm based in Arlington, Virginia, that was headed by former CIA agent John Brennan, who was then serving as an advisor on intelligence and foreign policy to Sen. Obama’s presidential campaign.
Brennan was an undergraduate at the American University in Cairo in the 1970s, where he studied Arabic. In 1976, he voted in the presidential election for Communist Party USA candidate Gus Hall. He speaks Arabic fluently, having served in the CIA as station chief in Saudi Arabia.
On Feb. 13, 2010, as President Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor in the White House, Brennan hosted a public forum, co-hosted by the White House Office of Public Engagement and the Islamic Center at New York University, where he quoted a lengthy statement in Arabic which he didn’t translate for his English-speaking audience.
Previously, in a speech Brennan delivered on Aug. 9, 2009, to a conference sponsored by Center for Strategic and International Studies, Brennan attempted to legitimatize the term “jihad,” arguing it signified an internal moral struggle of peaceful introspection, and not the advocacy of violent Islamic terrorism.
At this conference Brennan also tried to argue that Hezbollah was no longer an Islamic terrorist organization, arguing instead that it had “evolved,” such that Hezbollah now has “members of parliament in the cabinet; there are lawyers, doctors, and others who are part of the Hezbollah organization.”
In Egypt, Obama administration supported the Muslim Brotherhood when the “Arab Spring” ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and elected Muslim Brotherhood-backed Mohamed Morsi as president on June 30, 2012.
Under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt has since criminalized the Muslim Brotherhood and is determined to root out its members that gained positions of authority in parliament and government under Morsi.
Yet, even today, support for the Muslim Brotherhood remains strong in a CIA still dominated by Brennan loyalists.
On Feb. 8, Politico reported that Trump administration officials pushing to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization are being opposed by CIA analysts who claim it “may fuel extremism” and damage relations with America’s allies.
According to Politico, a CIA internal document, dated Jan. 31, boasts that “a minority of Muslim Brotherhood members have engaged in violence, most often in response to harsh regime repression, perceived foreign occupation, or civil conflicts.”
“MB [Muslim Brotherhood] groups enjoy widespread support across the Near East-North Africa region and many Arabs and Muslims worldwide would view an MB designation as an affront to their core religious and societal
Through a spokesman, Brennan declared he was “deeply saddened and angered at Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandizement” when Trump traveled to CIA headquarters and delivered a speech before the agency’s memorial to CIA officers deceased in the line of duty.
Departing his position at the CIA, Brennan criticized Trump’s approach to national security, suggesting Trump should not be “talking and tweeting” without understanding Russia’s threat to the United States. Brennan also took “great umbrage” at Trump’s suggestion that intelligence agencies biased against him were behaving as if the U.S. were Nazi Germany.
“Now that he’s going to have an opportunity to do something for our national security as opposed to talking and tweeting,” Brennan told Fox News Sunday, on Jan. 15. “He’s going to have tremendous responsibility to make sure that U.S. and national security interests are protected. I think he has to be mindful that he does not have a full appreciation and understanding of what the implications are of going down that road.”