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,
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.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
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.
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