The other day, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul came up with a great idea for the President which should probably be applied across the board.
In the wake of former CIA director John Brennan’s tweet calling the President a traitor (“Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”) Paul suggested that former officials who have security clearances—like Brennan—should lose them when they leave government “service”.
It’s so simple I’m left wondering why I didn’t think of it.
Clowns like Brennan do indeed use and monetize those clearances. In 2005, as an example, after leaving government service, Brennan became CEO of The Analysis Corporation, a security consulting business, and served as chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, an association of intelligence professionals. Today, he is a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.
That security clearance was certainly a factor in those hiring decisions.
Brennan isn’t the only one.
And there are people on both sides of the aisle.
But when you call a sitting President a traitor in public—any President—I have a problem. Brennan, as long as we’re on the subject of traitors, acknowledged that in 1976, he voted for the candidate of the Communist Party of America.
And this is the clown we want having a high security clearance?
The deep staters are calling idea of canceling security clearances “petty”.
These are the same people who make a living badmouthing the President in the media.
OK, let’s not be petty.
Let’s just make it a rule that once you have helped the government through a transition and left government service, you automatically lose whatever security clearance you have.
If the government wants to hire you again, you can get a new one.
What’s the problem with that?
This way, you don’t have some overstuffed talking head like Brennan—or anyone else—with a security clearance calling the President a traitor.
If Brennan’s charge is true, there’s certainly no empirical evidence. In fact, I watched the President address the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention and bring a 94-year old WWII vet, Sgt. Allen Jones, to the stage.
The President sure didn’t look like a traitor to me.
Or to anybody else in the Kansas City Convention Center.
Frankly, I’ll take the word of a man who served in WWII and has devoted 70 years of his life to the VFW before I’ll listen to a man who voted for the Communist candidate for President in 1976.
It seems to me that folks in the CIA, the FBI, the NSA are far more worried about how their organizations are perceived by the public than what they actually do in a day.
We’ve seen the worst those organizations have to offer in Brennan, Peter Strozk, the FISA application to spy on Carter Page and a few other parts of what the President rightly calls the Mueller witch hunt.
Enough already. America has had enough.