By Buck Sexton — 08/20/18 08:15 AM EDT
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Combative spy chiefs cause permanent damage in anti-Trump crusade
There’s a lot to criticize in our intelligence community. Sometimes it gets very important things very wrong. It’s a vast and cumbersome bureaucracy with 17 agencies and hundreds of thousands of personnel (at least). But for all its mistakes and flaws, the underlying ethos of the intel rank and file has always been apolitical. Ultimately, all that mattered was the mission of protecting America, not political ideology or partisan affiliation.
Former CIA directors John Brennan and Michael Hayden, along with former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former FBI Director James Comey (among many other officials) have deployed some of the most extreme rhetorical weapons imaginable to take down this president. They have capitalized on the public’s perception of their classified access to hammer Trump. In so doing, they’ve eradicated the long-held notion of intelligence agency chiefs as nonpartisan actors.
John Brennan has suggested — repeatedly — that the president of the United States is guilty of treason on behalf of Russia. Michael Hayden (whom I worked for years ago at the CIA) shared a photo of a Nazi concentration camp on Twitter and compared it to Trump’s border policy. James Clapper said that Russia likely “turned†the election for Trump. Comey said that “patriots need to stand up†to Trump.
None of these men have produced evidence to back up their most outrageous claims about Russia collusion, though each of them had access to the most sophisticated information collection systems on the planet in the run up to Trump’s election.
http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/402589-washed-up-spy-chiefs-cause-permanent-damage-in-anti-trump-crusade
