On July 16, Republican U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, appearing on Fox News said, "John Brennan was a disaster as CIA director. He was a disaster as the counterterrorism official. He was a member of the Communist Party during the Cold War." [Italics mine]
DeSantis added: "…this is not exactly the guy I would listen to about Russia."
So, this poison pill of nasty innuendo—that Brennan was a member of the communist party--close-to-the-edge slander (if it is not true)—made its way into the social media’s sewer pipe and has gone largely unchallenged for more than a month. It is not, by the way, the first time “deep state” accusations have been leveled against Brennan. One need only to refer to Snopes’ discrediting the bizarre claim that Brennan was a converted Muslim after his tour of duty in the Middle East.
If one reads or watches videos from Fox (most recently a Fox host referred to “communist Japan”), or peruses the Daily Intelligencer, The America Spectator, or subscribes to any number of conservative journals or cable news outlets, there is no dearth to the Brennan-as-communist storyline. My favorite for sheer headline boldness, has to be FrontPage Magazine’s JOHN BRENNAN VOTED FOR A COMMUNIST, A PARTY RUN BY THE RUSSIANS, WHY DON'T RUSSIAGATERS CARE?
I think I went through a dozen or so pubs and videos excoriating Brennan for his Marxist-sympathizer, dear-comrade, fellow-traveler activities, and those sources just confirmed my observation that today’s polarized world has no middle ground on such matters. I sought out books, magazine, and national and international newspapers for even the faintest glimmers of editorial revelation about Mr. Brennan’s communist ties. Either I’ve lost my touch as a researcher (unlikely), or the evidence is simply not there. But that is never enough for some folks who just want to believe what they are told to believe.
Some people are going to believe the sky is just a crystal dome over a 6,000-year-old earth around which the sun revolves. They believe the moon landings and pictures of Jupiter are just typical examples of the NASA-Disney collaboration to produce computer generated images. They believe our current president about the size of his…inauguration. These are the same people who have no idea what the lyrics to “A Fool on the Hill,” really mean. So, of course they believe John Brennan is a commie. After all, haven’t so many important people like DeSantis and retired Brigadier General Anthony Tata said it is so on Fox News Insider?
Let’s bring out the full list of all notable public figures who not only have worked with Brennan, but who have been a part of his confirmation hearings, and who employed him in the highest positions of trust and who have publicly stated Mr. Brennan is or was a communist: there is no such list.
Now, let’s bring out a list of all the intelligence community leaders and senior staff who just signed a letter to president Trump denouncing his stripping of Brennan’s security clearance, including, William H. Webster, former Director of Central Intelligence (1987-1991), George J. Tenet, former Director of Central Intelligence (1997-2004), Porter J. Goss, former Director of Central Intelligence, (2005-2006), General Michael V. Hayden, USAF, Ret., former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2006-2009), Leon E. Panetta, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2009-2011), General David H. Petraeus, USA, Ret., former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2011-2012), James R. Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence (2010-2017), John E. McLaughlin, former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (2000-2004), Stephen R. Kappes, former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2006-2010), Michael J. Morell, former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2010-2013), Avril Haines, former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2013-2015), David S. Cohen, former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2015-2017).
So far the list is 75 intelligence professionals long, and very, very public/ There are at least two on the list I know well and worked with. Do you think all those people like Mr. Brennan? No, not all of them do. I’m sure some think he is a hot-headed SOB or worse. Was he the best possible CIA director? No, probably not, in the eyes of a lot of professionals. But do any of the men and women on the list think Brennan is or was a communist? Perhaps down the road some will right books in which they say so, but for now, not one of them has publicly supported Mr. DeSantis’s or BGen. Tata’s claims.
Is there any scintilla of truth to the communist allegation? I wanted to know. So, putting my old professional researcher’s hat back on, I went digging. Bear in mind, I have no informed personal or professional opinion on Brennan; I don’t know him, never worked for him, never saw him up close, was never personally or professional affected by his duties, and, therefore, I’m not entitled to an opinion about his character. But I can be curious.
My first (and easiest stop was at Politifact, which, while some may not always take as gospel, I do use as a starting point for fact-finding. Here is Politifact’s take:
“We found Brennan has acknowledged voting for a communist presidential candidate [Gus Hall] in 1976. That does not mean he was a member of the Communist Party.”
“Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and pundit Sebastian Gorka are examples of Republicans who framed similar criticism of Brennan more accurately, singling out the vote but not going as far as saying he belonged to the party itself.”
The Politifact’s decision: the claim that Brennan was a member of the communist party is “mostly false.”
On September 15, 2016, a CNN story reported, “John Brennan on Thursday recalled being asked a standard question for a top security clearance at his early CIA lie detector test: Have you ever worked with or for a group that was dedicated to overthrowing the US?
"I froze," Brennan said during a panel discussion about diversity in the intelligence community at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's annual conference. "This was back in 1980, and I thought back to a previous election where I voted, and I voted for the Communist Party candidate,"
Brennan was responding to a question about barriers to recruiting diverse candidates for the intelligence fields, including whether past records of activism could hurt someone applying for a clearance later in life.”
Brennan said of his CIA polygraph interview: "I said I was neither Democratic or Republican, but it was my way, as I was going to college, of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change. I said I'm not a member of the Communist Party, so the polygrapher looked at me and said, 'OK,' and when I was finished with the polygraph and I left and said, 'Well, I'm screwed.'"
But he soon got his admission notice to the CIA and was relieved, he said, saying that though the agency still had long strides to make in accepting gay recruits and minorities, even then it recognized the importance of freedom.
The CNN piece concluded, "So if back in 1980, John Brennan was allowed to say, 'I voted for the Communist Party with Gus Hall' ... and still got through, rest assured that your rights and your expressions and your freedom of speech as Americans is something that's not going to be disqualifying of you as you pursue a career in government."
Brennan’s Wikipedia bio, (always subject to a reasonable doubt regarding some citations), includes this paragraph:
While riding a bus to class at Fordham, he saw an ad in The New York Times that said the CIA was recruiting. He decided that a CIA career would be a good match for his "wanderlust" and his desire for public service.[5] During his application to the CIA he admitted in alie-detector test that he had voted for the U.S. Communist Party candidate for president, Gus Hall, in 1976. He explained to the interviewer that his vote was a way of "signaling my unhappiness with the system," and he later described his vote as a protest against partisanship of the Watergate era.[19] He emphasized after leaving office that his entry into the CIA showed that freedom of speech in the U.S. does not disqualify a person for a career in government.
Note this excerpt from the New York Times citation (19), which reads,
“As Brennan tells it, he applied to join the C.I.A. around this time, after seeing a newspaper ad. An interviewer strapped his arm to a polygraph machine and asked if he had ever been a member of an organization that sought to overthrow the government of the United States. Brennan, not wanting to carry even the smallest deception on his conscience, said that he voted for Gus Hall, the Communist Party candidate for president, in 1976. (Decades later, Brennan volunteered the story of his Communist vote to a young woman who had asked him if participating in protests might disqualify her from working for the C.I.A. Reports of Brennan’s vote reached right-wing critics of the Obama administration, who tried to use this nearly 40-year-old vote as evidence of ongoing Communist sympathies. Brennan now says that it was cast in protest against the partisanship of the Watergate era.)
It is important to note that even the NYT citation includes a rewind of the CNN reporting of Brennan’s comments before the Congressional Black Caucus’s 2016 conference on diversity. Nonetheless, it should be reasonable by this time to conclude that had any major news organization, not including CNN of Fox, uncovered more about Brennan than his vote for Gus Hall, neither the CIA nor the Congress nor any of the Intelligence Community’s leaders would have remained silent about a “known communist party member” in their ranks.
I have had the privilege to work closely with many senior officials of the intelligence community during my time in government, and I’ve worked on certain tasks that required very close ties to men and women who deal daily in the silent depths of our intelligence operations. I have no need to poll any of them to determine their position on the matter of John Brennan’s link to the communist party. To a person, including those who worked with Mr. Brennan, they are the sort of career and appointed intelligence agency employees who would not for one moment countenanced a member of the communist party in their midst. They may have problems with his style, or doubts about his public statements, of concerns about his leadership qualities, but they would be the first to speak out if they believed Mr. Brennan harbored some deep-seated affection and ties to the communist party.
It stretches credulity—with the exception of those who waive credulity in favor of hatred, disruption, lies, prevarications, misdirections, political gain, and personal aggrandizement—to believe that for all the years Mr. Brennan has been in public service, for all the clearances he’s held and had to account for, for every microscopic look into his background, his foundation as a member of the communist party, then or now, has not been cracked and revealed to the public eye.
Let’s agree that in 1976 Mr. Brennan voted for Gus Hall, communist and presidential candidate. Let us also agree that Mr. Brennan’s future employer, the CIA, after their normally rigorous examination, hired him. The train of evidence must stop there. As Newsweek reported on August 15, “While this vote has regularly been scrutinized by his critics, there is no evidence that he was a member of the Communist Party.”
So far the list is 75 intelligence professionals long, and very, very public/ There are at least two on the list I know well and worked with. Do you think all those people like Mr. Brennan? No, not all of them do. I’m sure some think he is a hot-headed SOB or worse. Was he the best possible CIA director? No, probably not, in the eyes of a lot of professionals. But do any of the men and women on the list think Brennan is or was a communist? Perhaps down the road some will right books in which they say so, but for now, not one of them has publicly supported Mr. DeSantis’s or BGen. Tata’s claims.
Is there any scintilla of truth to the communist allegation? I wanted to know. So, putting my old professional researcher’s hat back on, I went digging. Bear in mind, I have no informed personal or professional opinion on Brennan; I don’t know him, never worked for him, never saw him up close, was never personally or professional affected by his duties, and, therefore, I’m not entitled to an opinion about his character. But I can be curious.
My first (and easiest stop was at Politifact, which, while some may not always take as gospel, I do use as a starting point for fact-finding. Here is Politifact’s take:
“We found Brennan has acknowledged voting for a communist presidential candidate [Gus Hall] in 1976. That does not mean he was a member of the Communist Party.”
“Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and pundit Sebastian Gorka are examples of Republicans who framed similar criticism of Brennan more accurately, singling out the vote but not going as far as saying he belonged to the party itself.”
The Politifact’s decision: the claim that Brennan was a member of the communist party is “mostly false.”
On September 15, 2016, a CNN story reported, “John Brennan on Thursday recalled being asked a standard question for a top security clearance at his early CIA lie detector test: Have you ever worked with or for a group that was dedicated to overthrowing the US?
"I froze," Brennan said during a panel discussion about diversity in the intelligence community at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's annual conference. "This was back in 1980, and I thought back to a previous election where I voted, and I voted for the Communist Party candidate,"
Brennan was responding to a question about barriers to recruiting diverse candidates for the intelligence fields, including whether past records of activism could hurt someone applying for a clearance later in life.”
Brennan said of his CIA polygraph interview: "I said I was neither Democratic or Republican, but it was my way, as I was going to college, of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change. I said I'm not a member of the Communist Party, so the polygrapher looked at me and said, 'OK,' and when I was finished with the polygraph and I left and said, 'Well, I'm screwed.'"
But he soon got his admission notice to the CIA and was relieved, he said, saying that though the agency still had long strides to make in accepting gay recruits and minorities, even then it recognized the importance of freedom.
The CNN piece concluded, "So if back in 1980, John Brennan was allowed to say, 'I voted for the Communist Party with Gus Hall' ... and still got through, rest assured that your rights and your expressions and your freedom of speech as Americans is something that's not going to be disqualifying of you as you pursue a career in government."
Brennan’s Wikipedia bio, (always subject to a reasonable doubt regarding some citations), includes this paragraph:
While riding a bus to class at Fordham, he saw an ad in The New York Times that said the CIA was recruiting. He decided that a CIA career would be a good match for his "wanderlust" and his desire for public service.[5] During his application to the CIA he admitted in alie-detector test that he had voted for the U.S. Communist Party candidate for president, Gus Hall, in 1976. He explained to the interviewer that his vote was a way of "signaling my unhappiness with the system," and he later described his vote as a protest against partisanship of the Watergate era.[19] He emphasized after leaving office that his entry into the CIA showed that freedom of speech in the U.S. does not disqualify a person for a career in government.
Note this excerpt from the New York Times citation (19), which reads,
“As Brennan tells it, he applied to join the C.I.A. around this time, after seeing a newspaper ad. An interviewer strapped his arm to a polygraph machine and asked if he had ever been a member of an organization that sought to overthrow the government of the United States. Brennan, not wanting to carry even the smallest deception on his conscience, said that he voted for Gus Hall, the Communist Party candidate for president, in 1976. (Decades later, Brennan volunteered the story of his Communist vote to a young woman who had asked him if participating in protests might disqualify her from working for the C.I.A. Reports of Brennan’s vote reached right-wing critics of the Obama administration, who tried to use this nearly 40-year-old vote as evidence of ongoing Communist sympathies. Brennan now says that it was cast in protest against the partisanship of the Watergate era.)
It is important to note that even the NYT citation includes a rewind of the CNN reporting of Brennan’s comments before the Congressional Black Caucus’s 2016 conference on diversity. Nonetheless, it should be reasonable by this time to conclude that had any major news organization, not including CNN of Fox, uncovered more about Brennan than his vote for Gus Hall, neither the CIA nor the Congress nor any of the Intelligence Community’s leaders would have remained silent about a “known communist party member” in their ranks.
I have had the privilege to work closely with many senior officials of the intelligence community during my time in government, and I’ve worked on certain tasks that required very close ties to men and women who deal daily in the silent depths of our intelligence operations. I have no need to poll any of them to determine their position on the matter of John Brennan’s link to the communist party. To a person, including those who worked with Mr. Brennan, they are the sort of career and appointed intelligence agency employees who would not for one moment countenanced a member of the communist party in their midst. They may have problems with his style, or doubts about his public statements, of concerns about his leadership qualities, but they would be the first to speak out if they believed Mr. Brennan harbored some deep-seated affection and ties to the communist party.
It stretches credulity—with the exception of those who waive credulity in favor of hatred, disruption, lies, prevarications, misdirections, political gain, and personal aggrandizement—to believe that for all the years Mr. Brennan has been in public service, for all the clearances he’s held and had to account for, for every microscopic look into his background, his foundation as a member of the communist party, then or now, has not been cracked and revealed to the public eye.
Let’s agree that in 1976 Mr. Brennan voted for Gus Hall, communist and presidential candidate. Let us also agree that Mr. Brennan’s future employer, the CIA, after their normally rigorous examination, hired him. The train of evidence must stop there. As Newsweek reported on August 15, “While this vote has regularly been scrutinized by his critics, there is no evidence that he was a member of the Communist Party.”
There is simply no more track laid down ahead of that train of youthful whim, and the station at which it stopped—an election 42 years ago—has been bypassed and left to decay along with all the nasty rumors promulgated by malcontents and Daffy Ducks of politics.
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