FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Revoking Brennan’s Security Clearance Kicks Up Hornet’s Nest among Putschists
Aug. 16, 2018 (EIRNS)—President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke the security clearance of the Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan has sent some others of the anti-Trump brigade into a tizzy. Former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told CNN—for which he now works as an “analyst”—today that President Trump has sent the intelligence community a “chilling message,” the Daily Caller reported.
Trump said in his statement that, in contrast to usual practice of allowing former officials to retain their security clearances, the need to remove Brennan’s has been “now outweighed by the risk posed by his erratic conduct and behavior” and furthermore, “Mr. Brennan has a history that calls into question his objectivity and credibility.” President Trump demonstrated his assertion with some examples, including that Brennan
“has recently leveraged his status ... to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations—wild outbursts on the internet and on television—about this administration.”
Clapper, talking to CNN, claimed the main issue in the clearance debate is freedom of speech, and said Trump is silencing the First Amendment rights of the intelligence community. “That to me is the larger implication here with this revocation of John’s eligibility and the threat for the others, myself included,” he said, Daily Caller quoted him saying.
“The larger implication here is the jeopardy to our First Amendment rights, and by extension others. And by the way, there is a very chilling message here to people in the intelligence community. If you tee up intelligence that the President doesn’t like, you may risk losing your clearance and thereby your job,”
he said.
Brennan himself responded with an outraged Aug. 16, 2018 New York Times op-ed called, “President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash,” which certainly demonstrated the case for pulling his clearance.
