I never viewed a security clearance as an entitlement. With "Need to Know" a security clearance was the opposite of an entitlement.

John Brennan, "when he first applied to join the CIA, and received his polygraph test, he was asked this standard question:

Have you ever worked with or for a group that was dedicated to overthrowing the US?

John Brennan called his support of the Communist Party a mere “indiscretion,” and reminded his audience that the Constitution grants free speech.

He then remembered that he said to himself he could either lie and the polygraph machine would “go wacko” or tell the truth and face the consequences, including possibly being rejected for employment.

He told the audience he voted for Gus Hall because while in college he was unhappy “with the system” and saw the “need for change.”"

CIA Director John Brennan Proudly Acknowledges That He Once Voted for a Communist

This was during the height of the Cold War.

Once a supporter of a Communist for President of the United States, now he seems to be overly concerned with trying to find a relationship between the Presidency and Russia.

Brennan should have never had a Security Clearance.
Should we not be more concerned with the former Director of the CIA's relationship with Russia?

Gus Hall had a reputation of being one of the most convinced supporters of the actions and interests of the Soviet Union outside the USSR's political sphere of influence.

Is it possible Brennan is doing the bidding of the Russian government, trying to damage the Presidency by accusing Trump of collusion with Russia?

The Democrats: Who does Trump think he is? A King? He shouldn't be able to revoke security clearances at his whim!

Also the Democrats: Brennan should have a security clearance for life!

Security clearances are issued when and to whom they are needed to enable working on specific projects and issues. They are not permanent, nor should they be. When the job changes (or is terminated) such that the clearance is no longer needed, then the clearance should be revoked. Of course, a clearance is not an open door to all information about a subject--there is also the "need to know" factor that is supposed to further limit who has access to specific data. It would seem that a lot of upper-level people don't pay much attention to that attribute.

flashguy

I have no problem at all with former senior officers or former DCIs, DNIs, etc..., maintaining a clearance for a certain amount of time.

Their experiences and wisdom could most certainly be of benefit to their successors should they need to be called upon. That just makes sense.

However, a time limit should be set. One year, two years, whatever.

Your average Joe with a clearance? Yeah, that should probably be pulled upon ETSing. The head honchoes though, are a different animal.

With regard to Brennan - had that anti-American, commie, POS been dangling at the end of a rope where he belongs, we wouldn't even need to have this conversation.

I see an ultra partisan here with a large dose of incompetence blended in. Vindictive and misguided, yes. I think a lot of these people really believe they are right.
I'm not sure this guy is smart enough to be corrupt.

Has Brennan ever denounced communism?

Former ex-deputy director blows a gasket and explodes on CNN about the security clearances getting revoked. LMAO!!! This will bring a smile to your face!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEf_D6i_IuI

quote:

Originally posted by kimber1911:

Is it possible Brennan is doing the bidding of the Russian government, trying to damage the Presidency by accusing Trump of collusion with Russia?

So much has went on in the last few years I am not even sure I remember hearing about this:


John Brennan's Secret Trip to Moscow

https://www.americanthinker.co..._trip_to_moscow.html

The Russians say he did, and while some might say, well, these are the same Russians who helped put together the Steele dossier filled with "salacious and unverified" material, and may once again be playing with us, there is evidence that Brennan, the man who voted for communist Gus Hall for president, did make the trip in March 2016 for purposes unknown:

"It's no secret that Brennan was here," claimed Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Oleg Syromolotov. "But he didn't visit the Foreign Ministry. I know for sure that he met with the Federal Security Service (the successor agency to the Soviet KGB), and someone else."

No further remarks clarify what Brennan was allegedly doing in Moscow or what he discussed with the FSB. Syromolotov insists it had nothing to do with Russia's withdrawal from Syria.

Sputnik News, a Kremlin-controlled propaganda outlet, quotes CIA Director of Public Affairs Dean Boyd as affirming that Brennan did, in fact, discuss Syria during the visit. "Director Brennan," he allegedly said, "reiterated the US government's consistent support for a genuine political transition in Syria, and the need for [President Bashar] Assad's departure in order to facilitate a transition that reflects the will of the Syrian people."

The website GlobalSecurity.Org goes into somewhat more detail about Brennan's Moscow trip without clearing up confusion about what the purpose of the trip might have been:

News of the CIA chief's visit to the Russian capital was first made public on Monday by a Russian foreign ministry spokesman and subsequently confirmed by the CIA.

"It's no secret that Brennan was here," the Interfax news agency quoted foreign ministry spokesman Oleg Syromolotov as telling journalists in Moscow.

He added that the visit was not linked to Moscow's decision to start withdrawing military forces from Syria, which President Vladimir Putin announced on March 14.

Dean Boyd, director of the CIA's Office of Public Affairs, confirmed Monday that Brennan visited Moscow.

"Director Brennan traveled to Russia in early March to emphasize with Russian officials the importance of Russia and the Assad regime following through on their agreements to implement the cessation of hostilities in Syria," said Boyd.

He added that Brennan "also reiterated the U.S. government's consistent support for a genuine political transition in Syria, and the need for Assad's departure in order to facilitate a transition that reflects the will of the Syrian people."

Now, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for a CIA director to make a trip to Moscow, but when a Russian deputy foreign minister says he didn't visit the Foreign Ministry itself but did visit the KGB's successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB), it raises some eyebrows.

Consider that John Brennan is a Trump-hating perjurer who lied to Congress about secret surveillance. He is the crown prince of a Deep State fiefdom that has its own agenda. The end justifies the means in their world, and Brennan may have been up to his eyeballs in developing that "insurance policy" against a Trump victory.

Certainly, he ruthlessly defended his CIA turf. The mind hearkens back to the day when an op-ed in the Washington Post, that right-wing rag, called for Brennan to be fired for conducting illegal surveillance of the Senate Intelligence Committee and then lying about it:

Brennan was asked by NBC's Andrea Mitchell whether the CIA had illegally accessed Senate Intelligence Committee staff computers "to thwart an investigation by the committee into" the agency's past interrogation techniques. The accusation had been made earlier that day by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who said the CIA had "violated the separation-of-powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution." Brennan answered:

As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn't do that. I mean, that's – that's just beyond the – you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do. ...

And, you know, when the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.

(You can see the video of Brennan's answer here.)

Now we know that the truth was far different. The Post's Greg Miller reports:

CIA Director John O. Brennan has apologized to leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee after an agency investigation determined that its employees improperly searched computers used by committee staff to review classified files on interrogations of prisoners. ...

A statement released by the CIA on Tuesday acknowledged that agency employees had searched areas of that computer network that were supposed to be accessible only to committee investigators. Agency employees were attempting to discover how congressional aides had obtained a secret CIA internal report on the interrogation program.

Brennan once proudly admitted that he voted for Communist Party leader Gus Hall and openly supports liars and perjurers like Andrew McCabe, James Clapper, and James Comey. The possibility that he went to Moscow to personally obtain a copy of the dossier and similar material is real. As I wrote here recently, Brennan may have colluded with foreign spies to help Hillary Clinton.

There is another scenario as plausible as the one asserting that Team Trump, and perhaps President Trump himself, colluded with the Russians. It is that John Brennan himself colluded with the Russians to help Hillary win to guarantee his continued tenure as CIA director. It involves the infamous anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, used by Brenan and others as a pretext for a Trump investigation bonanza. As the American Spectator reported:

An article in the Guardian last week provides more confirmation that John Brennan was the American progenitor of political espionage aimed at defeating Donald Trump. One side did collude with foreign powers to tip the election – Hillary's.

Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump's candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people[.] ...

The Guardian story is written in a style designed to flatter its sources (they are cast as high-minded whistleblowers), but the upshot of it is devastating for them, nonetheless, and explains why all the criminal leaks against Trump first originated in the British press. According to the story, Brennan got his anti-Trump tips primarily from British spies but also Estonian spies and others. The story confirms that the seed of the espionage into Trump was planted by Estonia. The BBC's Paul Wood reported last year that the intelligence agency of an unnamed Baltic State had tipped Brennan off in April 2016 to a conversation purporting to show that the Kremlin was funneling cash into the Trump campaign.

Any other CIA director would have disregarded such a flaky tip, recognizing that Estonia was eager to see Trump lose (its officials had bought into Hillary's propaganda that Trump was going to pull out of NATO and leave Baltic countries exposed to Putin). But Brennan opportunistically seized on it, as he later that summer seized on the half-baked intelligence of British spy agencies (also full of officials who wanted to see Trump lose).

The Guardian says that British spy head Robert Hannigan "passed material in summer 2016 to the CIA chief, John Brennan." To ensure that these flaky tips leaked out, Brennan disseminated them on Capitol Hill. In August and September of 2016, he gave briefings to the "Gang of Eight" about them, which then turned up on the front page of the New York Times.

Could it be that Brennan himself is the leaker of classified information and is up to his eyeballs in using foreign sources to gather dirt on President Trump for the purpose of keeping him out of the White House? Brennan's briefing of Sen. Harry Reid, which included information from the Steele dossier, certainly is a key indicator of his participation in the campaign to keep or kick Donald Trump out of the White House:

According to "Russian Roulette," by Yahoo! News chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff and David Corn, the Washington bureau chief of the left-wing Mother Jones magazine, Brennan contacted Reid on Aug. 25, 2016, to brief him on the state of Russia's interference in the presidential campaign. Brennan briefed other members of the so-called Gang of Eight, but Reid is the only who took direct action.

Two days after the briefing, Reid wrote a letter to then-FBI Director James Comey asserting that "evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump's presidential campaign continues to mount.

Reid's letter referred to some public reporting about Trump campaign associates' links to the Kremlin, but he also included a reference to information that may not have been made public at the time. He cited allegations that were included in the infamous Steele dossier about Carter Page, an adviser to the Trump campaign at the time.

It would seem that the trip to Russia we should be investigating is not Carter Page's, but rather John Brennan's.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor's Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.

I've been watching this loudmouth Brennan's Twitter for some time now and he's been running his fat yap there daily, often making numerous tweets a day all just blasting away at Trump and the administration.

Now, after his clearance is revoked, this asshole hasn't made a peep since August 15th.

Somebody is running scared all of a sudden!

I hope he isn't the last. If you don't work for the government you don't need security clearances period.

quote:

Originally posted by 9mmnut:
I hope he isn't the last. If you don't work for the government you don't need security clearances period.

????
I never worked for the government. Yet I was required to hold a clearance for 25yrs.

quote:

Originally posted by PeteF:

quote:

Originally posted by 9mmnut:
I hope he isn't the last. If you don't work for the government you don't need security clearances period.

????
I never worked for the government. Yet I was required to hold a clearance for 25yrs.

So who did you work for? Nuclear plant? You would agree that most intelligence/security clearances is gov related, and most intelligence/security clearance folks are gov employees, no?

quote:

Originally posted by PASig:
I've been watching this loudmouth Brennan's Twitter for some time now and he's been running his fat yap there daily, often making numerous tweets a day all just blasting away at Trump and the administration.

Now, after his clearance is revoked, this asshole hasn't made a peep since August 15th.

Somebody is running scared all of a sudden!

He doesn’t need a clearance. He will become a journalist. Those guys can do anything, receive classified, print classified, “Congress shall make no law... abridging... of the press....”

Nobody can make them do anything.

FLASHBACK: When Democrats Demanded John Brennan Resign

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/...nnan-resign-n2511455

Former CIA Director John Brennan is being held as a martyr by the left after President Trump stripped his security clearance last week. They're defending Brennan as a truth teller, even a whistleblower, and claiming Trump is infringing on Brennan's First Amendment rights by denying him access to classified information.

But it wasn't so long ago that Democrats felt very differently about Brennan. In fact, a number of lawmakers on the left side of the aisle have called for his resignation in the past. From The Hill in 2014:

Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) became the first senator to make the call when he issued a statement declaring that he had "no choice but to call for the resignation of CIA Director John Brennan."

“The CIA unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into Senate Intelligence Committee computers,” he said.

“This grave misconduct not only is illegal, but it violates the U.S. Constitution’s requirement of separation of powers,” Udall continued. “These offenses, along with other errors in judgment by some at the CIA, demonstrate a tremendous failure of leadership, and there must be consequences.”

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), another member of the Intel panel, made the same demand later in the day.

“I think that at this point, it would probably be better for the agency, frankly, if he step aside,” Heinrich said in the Capitol on Thursday evening. “I think that the level of trust between the committee and the director has hit a new low and I think today’s revelations largely sorted out who was being accurate in the run-up to this, and it leads to me believe that it’s probably time for him to go."

The New York Times editorial board echoed these sentiments, saying Brennan's head may "need to roll" over the CIA spying on Senate computers, which Brennan lied about.

Some called Brennan an "embarrassment" to President Barack Obama, who appointed him as the nation's leading spy.



And others wondered if Brennan knew too much about drone strikes killing innocent civilians, therefore making him immune to firing.



You get the idea.

The question now is, if Brennan was worth firing, why is taking away his security clearance such an egregious offense?

quote:

Originally posted by bubbatime:

quote:

Originally posted by PeteF:

quote:

Originally posted by 9mmnut:
I hope he isn't the last. If you don't work for the government you don't need security clearances period.

????
I never worked for the government. Yet I was required to hold a clearance for 25yrs.

So who did you work for? Nuclear plant? You would agree that most intelligence/security clearances is gov related, and most intelligence/security clearance folks are gov employees, no?

No. Private industry. There are many technologies and information the government deems critical to US security. Crytography for example.

quote:

Originally posted by 9mmnut:
I hope he isn't the last. If you don't work for the government you don't need security clearances period.

That’s simply not true. We’ve discussed clearances ad nauseam on this forum. Political hacks being a separate issue.

Fine, let them keep their security clearance for 365 days after leaving government. That gives plenty of time for their bullshit consulting with a new administration, even though that probably almost never happens.

This is all about the perks of the job- personal enrichment after the fact, and that's ALL it's about, and it's fucking bullshit, and it needs to cease.

GMAFB

When Trump's opponents are baited into violating norms, they diminish themselves and their cause.

National Review
Rich Lowry

John Brennan may not know it, but he is acting in a drama scripted and produced by Donald J. Trump.

As Eli Lake of Bloomberg perceptively observed, President Trump isn’t trying to silence Brennan by revoking his security clearance, as the former CIA director’s defenders insist, but to elevate him as a foil.

Trump couldn’t hope for a better poster boy for the so-called deep state than a former CIA director who immediately began to sound like a commentator for MSNBC upon leaving government — and, indeed, signed up as a commentator for MSNBC.

It has been the usual practice of former top intelligence professionals to keep their political opinions, and especially their wild-eyed rants, to themselves. They understand that, having been entrusted with some of the most sensitive powers of the United States government, they should show forbearance and restraint lest they undermine the reputations of their institutions.

Brennan has had no such compunction. Granted, he’s acted under provocation. Trump has goaded him on Twitter and launched extraordinary broadsides against the work of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Trump often sounds like the guy popping off down at the end of the bar; he’s transformed Brennan, who is supposed to be the consummate career intelligence official, into the guy down at the other end of the bar.

Advantage: Trump. The president always benefits from the fact that his brand depends on violating norms, whereas if his opponents are baited into violating norms in return, they diminish themselves and their cause.

So it is that a former CIA director is combating a president who maintains the top echelons of the intelligence establishment hated him by demonstrating his hatred for him. Once Brennan made the decision to begin letting loose, he inevitably got sucked into the vortex of the #Resistance — that’s where the Twitter followers, the cable hits, and the adulation of half the political spectrum are.

This element of our politics rewards the most sweeping and thoughtless condemnations of Trump, which Brennan readily provides, despite recently occupying a post that depended on discrimination and care in expression and thought.

In a notorious tweet, he accused the president of “nothing short of treason” for his craven performance at a joint press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.

This was the first time on record that a prominent elected official ever committed treason — which usually involves giving away the nation’s secrets or compromising intelligence assets — at a public event extensively covered by the international media.

What did Brennan mean by his charge? He apparently doesn’t know. Pressed by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, Brennan explained, incoherently, that “I said it was nothing short of treasonous. I didn’t mean that he committed treason.” Oh. Asked point-blank if he thinks that the president is serving the Russian government, he said that “I scratch my head a lot,” not the usual standard for alleging that someone committed a capital offense.

Brennan’s conceit is that there aren’t enough people already saying stupid and inflammatory things on Twitter and TV — the nation needs his voice, too.

This has made him the ideal target for Trump, since even some of the former intelligence officials who oppose the revocation of his security clearance are uncomfortable with how he has conducted himself.

The president’s adversaries may consider this unfair, but the institutions Trump targets are best served by not responding in kind. If the president says that the press can’t be trusted because it’s so biased, the press should react by being less biased rather than more. If he says that he’s being undone by a deep-state conspiracy, former intelligence officials should be more restrained rather than less.

Brennan either doesn’t understand this dynamic or doesn’t care. He has threatened a lawsuit, and Trump has welcomed one. The president is happy for a war with the most unhinged representative of the intelligence community at hand, and John O. Brennan is playing his role flawlessly.

Link

Brennan says he will sue Trump over this. Rush Limbaugh said yesterday Trump should take him on this since Trump could expose Brennan's past actions and would open the door to expose any past actions of anyone else Trump would revoke their clearance. By law Trump could do this in defence of any charges against him.
I doubt Brennan with all the skeletons in his closet will sue and this is just a bluff.