Obama Appointees Stripped Security Clearance from Man Who Got Too Close to Anti-Trump Spy Ring
President Donald Trump has been massively attacked over security clearance being stripped from ex-CIA director John Brennan. However, when President Barack Obama’s appointees did something similar, there were crickets from the establishment media.
In the midst of the “Russian Collusion” investigation, evidence continues to come to light that there was indeed a conspiracy, but not by the Trump administration. Throughout, advisers, pundits, and the general public have urged Trump to take action such as firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions or revoking the security clearance of various people.
According to The Associated Press, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Trump was considering revoking the security clearance of six individuals. They are “former CIA director John Brennan as well as five other former top national security officials: former FBI director Jim Comey, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, Susan Rice and Andrew McCabe.”
The president did end up stripping Brennan of his security clearance, according to his official statement on the matter published by Fox News. He began by explaining that allowing former officials to keep clearance past the end of their service can be beneficial to the incoming replacements and others.
Then he lowered the boom:
“First, at this point in my Administration, any benefits that senior officials might glean from consultations with Mr. Brennan are now outweighed by the risks posed by his erratic conduct and behavior. Second, that conduct and behavior has tested and far exceeded the limits of any professional courtesy that may have been due to him.
“Mr. Brennan has a history that calls into question his objectivity and credibility. In 2014, for example, he denied to Congress that CIA officials under his supervision had improperly accessed the computer files of congressional staffers.
“He told the Council of Foreign Relations that the CIA would never do such a thing. The CIA’s Inspector General, however, contradicted Mr. Brennan directly, concluding unequivocally that agency officials had indeed improperly accessed congressional staffers’ files.
“More recently, Mr. Brennan told Congress that the intelligence community did not make use of the so-called Steele Dossier in an assessment regarding the 2016 election, an assertion contradicted by at least two other senior officials in the intelligence community and all of the facts.
“Additionally, Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations — wild outbursts on the internet and television — about this Administration. Mr. Brennan’s lying and recent conduct, characterized by increasingly frenzied commentary, is wholly inconsistent with access to the Nation’s most closely held secrets and facilitates the very aim of our adversaries, which is to sow division and chaos.”
Trump then went further, implying others may also soon face the same fate: “More broadly, the issue of Mr. Brennan’s security clearance raises larger questions about the practice of former officials maintaining access to our Nation’s most sensitive secrets long after their time in Government has ended. Such access is particularly inappropriate when former officials have transitioned into highly partisan positions and seek to use real or perceived access to sensitive information to validate their political attacks.”
“Any access granted to our Nation’s secrets should be in furtherance of national, not personal, interests. For this reason, I have also begun to review the more general question of the access to classified information by former Government officials.”
Not unexpectedly, Brennan lashed out on Twitter. His claim was that Trump was attempting to stifle his free speech and criticism of Trump, despite the fact he continues to speak quite freely and criticize the president on television and social media:
Although some have been outraged by Trump’s action and have even claimed “obstruction,” this is not the first security clearance stripped during his tenure. In fact, in May 2017, according to The Washington Times, Obama appointees stripped a Trump supporter of his clearance.
In a move that could be called “obstruction” by some, Pentagon Office of Net Assessment strategist Adam Lovinger “was stripped of his security clearance by Obama-appointed officials.” This came “after he complained of questionable government contracts to Stefan Halper, the FBI informant who spied on the Trump presidential campaign.”
They then “relegated him to clerical chores” in spite of his 12 years of work as a strategist. Lovinger’s attorney, Sean M. Bigley, told The Washington times that Lovinger had actually complained about the “Halper contracts in the fall of 2016.”
“Mr. Bigley filed a complaint July 18 with the Pentagon’s senior ethics official, charging that Mr. Lovinger’s superiors misused the security clearance process to punish him. He said his client complained about excessive ‘sweetheart’ deals for Mr. Halper and for a ‘best friend’ of Chelsea Clinton.”
With all the attention on security-clearance-stripping by the establishment media and the liberal left, there has been little-to-nothing said of this particular incidence. It bears asking why exactly that is, when the topic itself is one in which the aforementioned parties have shown such a clear interest.
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