On Monday, the Trump administration said it was considering canceling the security clearances for six former intelligence and law-enforcement officials, including the former director of the CIA, John Brennan, who served under Barack Obama, and the head of the FBI, James Comey, sacked by US President Donald Trump in May 2017.
Republican Senator Rand Paul also tweeted Monday his intention to ask Trump to cancel Brennan’s security clearance.
”Is John Brennan monetizing his security clearance?” Paul asked, going on to question whether Brennan has been making mammoth sums “divulging secrets to the mainstream media with his attacks on [Trump].”
Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, and Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst turned political activist and journalist, told Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear Tuesday that people who are high-level in the US government routinely leak information to the media, which wants “whatever it can get.”
“[Allowing security clearances for former officials with no governmental responsibility] is actually a courtesy extended to former directors of central intelligence,” McGovern told host John Kiriakou.
“Six weeks from now, John Brennan, James Comey and others at the highest level will have to answer for their shenanigans with respect to the soft coup attempt to prevent Trump from winning the presidency and later to make him impotent to carry out the policies he wished to create a decent relationship with Russia,” McGovern added.
Since departing the CIA in January 2017, Brennan has been a stiff critic of Trump, with the former’s most recent barrage coming in the wake of the latter’s landmark meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, earlier this month. After the meeting, Brennan wrote on Twitter that Trump’s suggestion that US intelligence services were wrong about Moscow’s alleged meddling in the 2016 US presidential election was beyond “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but was rather outright “treasonous.”
Trump, who seemed to trust Putin that Russia had not intervened in the US election, later backtracked, claiming that he had misspoken and that he holds Putin personally accountable for the alleged meddling, something Russia firmly denies.
“This is an extremely disturbing thing, to see both he [Brennan] and [former FBI Director] James Comey, supposedly impartial government officials carrying out their jobs in very important areas… express the kind of extreme bias that they’ve shown now — which I think reflects quite accurately what they were doing back in 2016,” US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte said Monday.
“If John Brennan wants to know what the House Intelligence Committee is getting in terms of classified information, and the House Committee led by [US Representative] Devin Nunes is the only one carrying out a really serious investigation, then all he has to say is, ‘I don’t know about this,’ and he’s cleared,” McGovern told Sputnik.
“We have a situation here where this deep-state stuff is part of what I call the military-industrial-Congressional-intelligence-media complex. The media is the main culprit right now,” McGovern added.
In March, Paul blasted Brennan for suggesting that Trump would go down in history as a “disgraced demagogue,” noting what was actually disgraceful was Brennan spying on Americans while running the agency.
According to Lauria, even though Congress is supposed to have oversight over intelligence agencies, that doesn’t usually end up being the case.
“When it’s convenient for someone high level in the US government, who has access to secrets, such as John Brennan, he can leak these things. [Such people] leak routinely, and the press wants whatever it can get,” Lauria told Sputnik.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
