Trump’s quest for vengeance against John Brennan

Source: Politico | October 22, 2019 | Natasha Bertrand and Daniel Lippman

In Attorney General William Barr’s review of the Russia probe, some see a presidential target.

President Donald Trump’s obsession with former CIA director John Brennan could be on a collision course with an ongoing Justice Department probe as Attorney General Bill Barr takes a more hands-on approach to examining the intelligence community’s actions in 2016.

Barr has been meeting with the U.S.’ closest foreign intelligence allies in recent months, making repeated overseas trips as part of an investigation he is overseeing into the origins of the Russia probe and whether any inappropriate “spying” occurred on Trump’s campaign.

As part of that investigation, Barr and John Durham, the federal prosecutor he appointed to conduct it, have been probing a conspiracy theory for which there is little if any evidence, according to several people with knowledge of the matter: that a key player in the Russia probe, a professor named Joseph Mifsud, was actually a Western intelligence asset sent to discredit the Trump campaign — and that the CIA, under Brennan, was somehow involved.

Trump, meanwhile, has become “obsessed” with Brennan, who frequently gets under the president’s skin by publicly questioning his mental acuity and fitness for office, according to a former White House official. On Brennan, “it was always, ‘he’s an idiot, he’s a crook, we ought to investigate him,’” this person said, characterizing Trump’s outbursts.

Since the beginning of his presidency, Trump has also repeatedly attacked Brennan publicly, tweeting about the former CIA director more than two dozen times. He’s questioned Brennan’s mental acuity and called him a liar, a leaker and blamed him for having “detailed knowledge of the (phony) Dossier,” a reference to the raw intelligence reports on Trump’s alleged Russia ties by British former MI-6 officer Christopher Steele. He also tried to unilaterally strip Brennan of his security clearance—a process the White House reportedly never went through with — and urged the House to call him in for questioning.

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The emerging focus of the Barr-Durham investigation — the CIA and intelligence community’s work with the FBI on the Russia probe — emphasizes the increasingly blurred lines between politics and law enforcement in the Trump era. In May, Trump gave Barr unprecedented authority to review the intelligence community’s “surveillance activities” during the 2016 election, issuing a sweeping declassification order that granted Barr “unprecedented” powers over the nation’s secrets, former officials said.

It was a break with protocol that Trump’s allies see as a necessary check on the so-called “deep state” but that critics have lambasted as an attempt to create the impression of scandal—especially given Barr’s comments earlier this year hinting at a predisposed belief that inappropriate “spying” occurred in 2016 and that the Steele dossier may have been Russian disinformation.

Barr’s evidently close involvement with the Durham probe is in keeping with his reputation as a micromanager—and a fierce advocate of presidential prerogatives. As attorney general during the George H.W. Bush administration, he described later for an oral history interview, he comes across as a seasoned, bare-knuckled bureaucratic brawler who closely coordinated his actions with the White House counsel’s office.

“He was very competent and very detail-oriented,” said Bill Kristol, who was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and worked with Barr back then. Barr was “a very involved manager” of his department, Kristol said.

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“Is the IG report going to say we made mistakes? Yes,” said one of the former officials. “But it won’t say we did so for some nefarious purpose. So the report will be a dry hole for Trump and his supporters. Which is why [Barr and Durham] have now gone to this other theory, positing that the CIA was engaged in some rogue operation to overthrow Trump and therefore feeding the FBI bullshit,” he said. “It’s complete nonsense.”

“Haven’t you heard?” said another former FBI official, sarcastically. “Brennan was a puppet-master and we were just his puppets.”

Brennan has spoken openly about working closely with the FBI on counterintelligence investigations, and acknowledged in an op-ed last year that he had “many conversations” with former FBI Director James Comey in 2016 “about the potential for American citizens, involved in partisan politics or not, to be pawns in Russian hands.”

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“The CIA was focused on Russia’s interference in the election and the role that Russian officials played,” said Nick Shapiro, who served as Brennan’s chief of staff at the CIA and is now his spokesman. “In our government, the FBI is who conducts counterintelligence investigations on U.S. citizens. What Barr and Trump are reportedly up to not only doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, but it is yet another dangerous abuse of power, something that seems to now happen on a daily basis in this administration.”

“Any investigation into John Brennan by this corrupt administration must — on its face — be viewed with a minimum with maximum skepticism,” said former CIA spokesman George Little. “The intelligence community deserves the respect of the president and his Cabinet, not politically motivated investigations.”

A source close to the White House said the president has been “warned repeatedly by smart legal minds around him to stay out of” the investigation. But he also claimed that “a big chunk of the Barr-Durham investigation” is believed to involve “top Obama administration officials, including Brennan.”

Another person close to the president said that Brennan is a “topic of conversation” in the White House. He said he didn’t know for sure whether Trump told Barr to focus on Brennan, but “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

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Barr has also been fixated on the question of how the intelligence community determined that Russia intervened specifically to help Trump win rather than to just sow chaos and distrust in the Democratic process, according to the New York Times. But as POLITICO first reported, that question has already been asked and answered at the CIA’s highest levels — by Mike Pompeo, a Trump loyalist.

Just after Pompeo took over as CIA director in 2017, he conducted a personal review of the CIA’s findings, grilling analysts on their conclusions in a challenging and at times combative interview, people familiar with the matter said. He ultimately found no evidence of any wrongdoing, or that the analysts had been under political pressure to produce their findings.

The intelligence community also released a joint assessment in January 2017 concluding that Putin directed a wide-ranging interference campaign aimed at harming Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report detailed dozens of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians in 2016.

Trump has refused to accept the intelligence community’s conclusions, however, instead pointing the finger at Ukraine, the Obama administration, and the private cybersecurity firm that confirmed the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee.

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