Collusion Clue: Brennan in the Parlor With the Lead Pipe

Now that Attorney General William Barr and his appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham have officially declared their investigation into Russia collusion a criminal probe — meaning grand juries, subpoenas, and indictments — the fun of picking out who will be fingered as the mastermind can really begin.

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A writer at The Federalist is a lady after my own heart because she believes — as do I — that all evidence points back to former CIA head John Brennan and she’s laid out a pretty convincing case for it starting with Brennan’s own words to Congress.

She recounts how the FBI’s official reason for launching Crossfire Hurricane was Trump advisor George Papadopoulos’ loose lips to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that team Trump was aware that the Russians might have useful dirt on Hillary Clinton. As The Federalist points out, however, Brennan himself said that’s not where the investigation began.

But as the Special Counsel Robert Mueller report made clear, it wasn’t merely Papadopoulos’ bar-room boast at issue: It was “a series of contacts between Trump Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government,” that the DOJ and FBI, and later the Special Counsel’s office investigated.

And who put the FBI on to those supposedly suspicious contacts? Former CIA Director John Brennan.

“I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about,” Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee back in 2017. Whether or not there was collusion with Russia, Brennan didn’t profess to know, but he passed on the information to the FBI to reach a conclusion.

“It’s not CIA’s job to make a determination about whether a U.S. person is cooperating, colluding, or whatever in some type of criminal or legal matter,” Brennan explained, stressing that instead, “it is our responsibility to give the Bureau everything that they need in order to follow that path and make such a determination and recommendation if they want to press charges.”

The evidence suggests, however, that Brennan’s CIA and the intelligence community did much more than merely pass on details about “contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign” to the FBI. The evidence suggests that the CIA and intelligence community—including potentially the intelligence communities of the UK, Italy, and Australia—created the contacts and interactions that they then reported to the FBI as suspicious.

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The writer goes on from there to describe the foreign intelligence assets — who had all worked with the U.S. at some point in the past and a few who even show up in the saga of Retired General Michael Flynn — that were recently visited when Barr and Durham made several trips off-continent to interview these agents.

The Americans returned, as we now know, with Blackberries from Joseph Mifsud and a new direction in their investigation. A criminal one.

The rest of The Federalist piece is well worth the read; if for no other reason, you’ll not likely see any of this covered any time soon in major media outlets. Until they’re begrudgingly forced to talk about it, spinning all the way, once indictments are handed down. So go ahead and get in front of it and read the piece so you’ll know what’s going on when that happens. Let the real fun finally begin.

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