John Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force -
Could it become Obamagate?
By Philip Giraldi
November 12, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -
There is considerable evidence that the
American system of government may have been victimized by an
illegal covert operation organized and executed by the U.S.
intelligence and national security community. Former Director of
National Intelligence Jim Clapper, former CIA Director John
Brennan and former FBI Director Jim Comey appear to have played
critical leadership roles in carrying out this conspiracy and
they may not have operated on their own. Almost certainly what
they may have done would have been explicitly authorized by the
former President of the United States, Barack Obama, and his
national security team.
It must have seemed a simple
operation for the experienced CIA covert action operatives. To
prevent the unreliable and unpredictable political upstart Donald
Trump from being nominated as the GOP presidential candidate or even
elected it would be necessary to create suspicion that he was the
tool of a resurgent Russia, acting under direct orders from Vladimir
Putin to empower Trump and damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton.
Even though none of the alleged Kremlin plotters would have expected
Trump to actually beat Hillary, it was plausible to maintain that
they would have hoped that a weakened Clinton would be less able to
implement the anti-Russian agenda that she had been promoting. Many
observers in both Russia and the U.S. believed that if she had been
elected armed conflict with Moscow would have been inevitable,
particularly if she moved to follow her husband’s example and push
to have both Georgia and Ukraine join NATO, which Russia would have
regarded as an existential threat.
Trump’s surprising victory forced
a pivot, with Clapper, Brennan and Comey adjusting the narrative to
make it appear that Trump the traitor may have captured the White
House due to help from the Kremlin, making him a latter-day
Manchurian Candidate. The lesser allegations of Russian meddling
were quickly elevated to devastating assertions that the Republican
had only won with Putin’s assistance.
No substantive evidence for the
claim of serious Russian meddling has ever been produced in spite of
years of investigation, but the real objective was to plant the
story that would plausibly convince a majority of Americans that the
election of Donald Trump was somehow illegitimate.
The national security team acted
to protect their candidate Hillary
Clinton (although she is not Bill is), who represented
America’s Deep State. In spite
of considerable naysaying, the Deep State is real, not just a wild
conspiracy theory. Many Americans nevertheless do not believe that
the Deep State exists, that it is a politically driven media
creation much like Russiagate itself was, but if one changes the
wording a bit and describes the Deep State as the Establishment,
with its political power focused in Washington and its financial
center in New York City, the argument that there exists a cohesive
group of power brokers who really run the country becomes much more
plausible.
The danger posed by the Deep
State, or, if you choose, the Establishment, is that it wields
immense power but is unelected and unaccountable. It also operates
through relationships that are not transparent and as the media is
part of it, there is little chance that its activity will be
exposed.
Nevertheless, some might even
argue that having a Deep State is a healthy part of American
democracy, that it serves as a check or corrective element on a
political system that has largely been corrupted and which no longer
serves national interests. But that assessment surely might have
been made before it became clear that many of the leaders of the
nation’s intelligence and security agencies are no longer the
people’s honorable servants they pretend to be. They have been
heavily politicized since at least the time of Ronald Reagan and
have frequently succumbed to the lure of wealth and power while
identifying with and promoting the interests of the Deep
State.
Indeed, a number of former
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Directors have
implicitly or even directly admitted to the existence of a Deep
State that has as one of its roles keeping presidents like Donald
Trump in check. Most recently, John McLaughlin, responding
to a question about Donald Trump’s concern over Deep State
involvement in the ongoing impeachment process, said unambiguously
“Well, you know, thank God for the ‘deep state’…With all of the
people who knew what was going on here, it took an intelligence
officer to step forward and say something about it, which was the
trigger that then unleashed everything else. This is the institution
within the U.S. government…is institutionally committed to
objectivity and telling the truth. It is one of the few institutions
in Washington that is not in a chain of command that makes or
implements policy. Its whole job is to speak the truth — it’s
engraved in marble in the lobby.”
Well, John’s dedication to truth
is exemplary but how does he explain his own role in support of the
lies being promoted by his boss George “slam dunk” Tenet that led to
the war against Iraq, the greatest foreign policy disaster ever
experienced by the United States? Or Tenet’s sitting in the U.N.
directly behind Secretary of State Colin Powell in the
debate over Iraq, providing cover and credibility for what everyone
inside the system knew to be a bundle of lies? Or his close friend
and colleague Michael Morell’s description of Trump
as a Russian agent, a claim that was supported by zero evidence and
which was given credibility only by Morell’s boast that “I ran the
CIA.”
Beyond that, more details have
been revealed demonstrating exactly how Deep State associates have
attempted, with considerable success, to subvert the actual
functioning of American democracy. Words are one thing, but acting
to interfere in an electoral process or to undermine a serving
president is a rather more serious matter.
It is
now known that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan
created a Trump Task Force in early 2016. Rather than working against
genuine foreign threats, this Task Force played a critical role in
creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the
Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still
surfaces regularly to this day. Working with James Clapper, the
Director of National Intelligence, Brennan fabricated the narrative
that “Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.” Brennan and Clapper
promoted that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the
United States have carried out a broad array of covert actions against
each other, including information operations, for the past seventy
years, but they pretended that what happened in 2016 was qualitatively
and substantively different even though the “evidence” produced to
support that claim was and still is weak to nonexistent.
The Russian “election
interference” narrative went on steroids on January 6, 2017, shortly
before Trump was inaugurated, when an “Intelligence Community
Assessment” (ICA) orchestrated by Clapper and Brennan was published.
The banner headline atop The New York Times, itself an integral part
of the Deep State, on the following day set the tone for what was to
follow: “Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says.”
With the help of the
Establishment media, Clapper and Brennan were able to pretend that
the ICA had been approved by “all 17 intelligence agencies” (as
first claimed by Hillary Clinton). After several months, however
Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were “handpicked
analysts” from only the FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather
unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017, that “the
historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost
genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is
a typical Russian technique,” adding later that “It’s in their
DNA.”
Task Force Trump was kept secret
within the Agency itself because the CIA is not supposed to spy on
Americans. Its staff was pulled together by invitation-only.
Specific case officers (i.e., men and women who recruit and handle
spies overseas), analysts and administrative personnel were
recruited, presumably based on their political reliability. Not
everyone invited accepted the offer. But many did because it came
with promises of promotion and other rewards.
And this was not a CIA-only
operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the Task
Force with the approval of then Director James Comey. Former MI-6
agent Christopher Steele’s FBI handler, Michael Gaeta, may have been
one of those detailed to the Trump Task Force. Steele, of course,
prepared the notorious dossier that was surfaced shortly before
Donald Trump took office. It included considerable material intended
to tie Trump to Russia, information that was in many cases
fabricated or unsourced.
So, what kind of things would
this Task Force do? The case officers would work with foreign
intelligence services such as MI-6, the Italians, the Ukrainians and the
Australians on identifying intelligence collection priorities that
would implicate Trump and his associates in illegal activity. And
there is evidence that John Brennan himself would contact his
counterparts in allied intelligence services to obtain their
discreet cooperation, something they would be inclined to do in
collegial fashion, ignoring whatever reservations they might have
about spying on a possible American presidential
candidate.
Trump Task Force members could
have also tasked the National Security Agency (NSA) to do targeted
collection. They also would have the ability to engage in
complicated covert actions that would further set up and entrap
Trump and his staff in questionable activity, such as the targeting
of associate George Papadopoulos. If he is ever properly
interviewed, Maltese citizen Joseph Mifsud may be able to shed light
on the CIA officers who met with him, briefed him on operational
objectives regarding Papadopoulos and helped arrange monitored
meetings. It is highly likely that Azra Turk, the woman who met with
George Papadopoulos, was part of the CIA Trump Task
Force.
The Task Force also could carry
out other covert actions, sometimes using press or social media
placements to disseminate fabrications about Trump and his
associates. Information operations is a benign-sounding euphemism
for propaganda fed through the Agency’s friends in the media, and
computer network operations can be used to create false linkages and
misdirect inquiries. There has been some informed speculation that
Guccifer 2.0 may have been a creation of this Task Force.
In light of what has been
learned about the alleged CIA whistleblower there should be a
serious investigation to determine if he was a part of this Task
Force or, at minimum, reporting to them secretly after he was
seconded to the National Security Council. All the CIA and FBI
officers involved in the Task Force had sworn an oath to uphold the
Constitution of the United States, but nevertheless were involved in
a conspiracy to first denigrate and then possibly bring down a
legally elected president. That effort continues with repeated
assertions regarding Moscow’s malevolent intentions for the 2020
national elections. Some might reasonably regard the whole Brennan
affair, to include its spear carriers among the current and retired
national security state leadership, as a case of institutionalized
treason, and it inevitably leads to the question “What did Obama
know?”
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is
Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a
501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number
#52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy
in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email
is inform@cnionline.org.
This article was originally published by
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