Below is my column in the Hill on the “wanderlust” of former CIA Director John Brennan and how it might be coming to an end with new disclosures on his role in the origins of the Russian collusion investigation. It is a tragic, almost Shakespearean ending, for a once idealistic kid who joined the CIA to experience the world. However, it is a story all-too-familiar for this city.
Here is the column:
In 1980, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin saw an ad for the Central Intelligence Agency on a bus. John Brennan decided to apply, thinking that such a job would satisfy his “wanderlust.”
This month, the “wanderlust” of John Brennan seems to be coming to an end, as the former CIA director stands accused of false testimony regarding the Russian collusion investigation.
Ironically, Brennan was first selected for his honesty — at least in part. During his entry polygraph, Brennan admitted that he had voted for the communist party candidate for president in 1976. He was impressed that the agency took him anyway.
That honest young man seems like a faint and tragic echo of the man today. When Obama picked Brennan to be the CIA director, he had become the ultimate Democratic insider and loyalist. And it would be choosing loyalty over honesty that would prove Brennan’s undoing.
Newly declassified information contradicts Brennan’s testimony before Congress on the origins of the now-debunked Russian collusion conspiracy theory. There is a particular focus on the intelligence community assessment commissioned by President Barack Obama in December 2016, which suggested that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump.
Obama ordered the assessment after a prior assessment found no evidence of collusion or influence on the election in Trump’s favor. But Obama’s White House effectively quashed that finding from seasoned CIA analysts. To create a new version, Brennan handpicked new analysts, who effectively flipped the earlier finding on its head without any credible basis in the record.
The new assessment relied, to a significant degree, on the Steele dossier, a widely discredited report paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that contained unfounded allegations about Trump.
In testimony on May 23, 2017, Brennan claimed that the Steele dossier “wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done.” In short, Brennan dismissed any reliance on the dossier.
Yet in the material now declassified, Brennan is shown not just discussing the dossier but insisting upon its inclusion in the new assessment Obama had requested. Indeed, he expressly overruled the CIA’s two most senior Russia experts, who said it “did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.”
Analysts were appalled by the use of the Steele dossier and complained that it “ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment.” One CIA analyst told investigators that “[Brennan] refused to remove it, and when confronted with the dossier’s main flaws, [Brennan] responded, ‘Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?’”Brennan expressly ordered its inclusion in the assessment. It would appear not just in an annex but in the main body of the assessment.
The timeline here is important. In July 2016, Brennan briefed former President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s “plan” to tie then-candidate Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” The original Russia investigation — funded by Clinton’s campaign — was launched days after this briefing. The resulting Steele Dossier’s funding was hidden as a legal expense by the Clinton campaign’s general counsel, Marc Elias.
So Brennan and the Obama Administration knew in advance about the planned political hit job. Yet, only months later, Brennan would intervene to force the dossier’s inclusion in version 2.0 of the intelligence assessment. Unnamed officials then leaked false information to the media about non-existent intelligence implicating Trump.
Keep in mind that Obama’s ordering of the new assessment was occurring at the very end of his term. There was a rush to complete the report before Trump took office after defeating Hillary Clinton. The effort seeded the Russian collusion hoax that would consume much of Trump’s first term.
In other words, it worked. However, it required the involvement of John Brennan, as well as then-FBI Director James Comey.
As time went on, Brennan continued to deny prior knowledge of the dossier. He would later become a paid contributor for MSNBC and, in 2018, insisted that he first heard “just snippets about” the dossier in the “late summer of 2016.”
As an MSNBC regular, Brennan accused Trump of “treason,” to the delight of the network hosts and viewers. (He later tried to insist that, when he called Trump’s actions “nothing short of treasonous,” he did not actually mean that Trump had “committed treason.”)
Whatever professional integrity Brennan had left after that, he set it aside in joining more than 50 former intelligence officials in signing a now-infamous letter dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 presidential election as likely “Russian disinformation.”
Joining him on the letter was former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who says that he has now “lawyered up” in anticipation of potential criminal allegations. The laptop, of course, was later found to be authentic and incriminating for Hunter Biden.
Back in 2016 and in the years that followed, this must have seemed to Brennan like just another CIA operation with “plausible deniability.” After all, he knew that he had the Biden administration and the media watching his back. Of course, the public would ultimately reject these hit jobs, not only reelecting Trump but also giving Republicans full control of Congress.
Brennan may be protected from perjury charges by the five-year statute of limitations. However, he is likely to be called again before Congress and asked the same questions. Even if he is not criminally charged, his past statements will remain an indictment of his role in history.
What is now clear is that high-level officials dismissed intelligence and evidence in order to create and spread the Russian collusion conspiracy as widely as they could. Their politicization of intelligence was raw and wrong. It succeeded only because it was an “all-hands-on-deck” effort, from the Obama White House to the CIA, the FBI, and the media.
The rise and fall of John Brennan has the makings of an all-too-familiar Beltway tragedy. People do not lose their idealism in this city in grand moments of corruption. It starts with small lies that steadily reduce your resistance until the biggest lies become happenstance. It can create a type of self-deception as one treats lies as a moral option for the sake of the greater good.
In “A Man for All Seasons,” Sir Thomas More is asked by his loving daughter Meg to sign a false affidavit to save his own life. More tells her, “When a man takes an oath, he’s holding his own self in his own hands like water, and if he opens his fingers then, he needn’t hope to find himself again.”
In Washington, power tends to loosen fingers over time, and the truth drips out to the point that little recognizable remains. That is the true tragedy.
For Brennan, what began as a young man’s wanderlust ended in a quagmire of contradictions and deceit.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
I read just enough of the beginning of today’s MAGA affirmation piece to know thatTurley’s underlying premise is flawed–there was NO “debunking” of the Russian collusion story. Russian hackers did try to help Trump in 2016. From “Law & Crime”–8/18/2020:
“The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday completed its multi-year investigation into Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 election, issuing a bi-partisan report that found extensive contacts and connections between Russian officials and the Trump campaign. The panel’s findings undercut several of President Donald Trump’s most oft-repeated claims, including that Russia did engage in a comprehensive campaign to interfere in the presidential election and did so with the intention of helping him win.
While the report stopped short of declaring that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government, the panel uncovered a great deal of previously unknown communication between the Kremlin and Trump advisers, many of whom were open to receiving the assistance.
“No hoax about it. They wanted Russia’s help. They got Russia’s help,” wrote former head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics Walter Shaub.
https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1295757757388390403?s=20
The panel confirmed that Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort sought to give internal campaign data to Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik, saying Manafort posed a “grave counterintelligence threat” to the United States.
“The Committee found that Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign,” the report stated. “Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”
The report also contradicted Republican politicians’ dubious claims that Ukraine, not Russia, may have been responsible for meddling in the election.”
Sorry, but this tale is stale and it is NOT going to divert attention away from the Epstein scandal.
So not only did you not bother reading the factual information Turley presented, but you didn’t bother reading what you copy+pasted.
Agree. as usual, gigi just lifted and pasted the parts that seem to favor her distortion.
Gigi’s “[tail] is stale and it is NOT going to divert attention away from the media “chum” she poops out after swallowing it.
Hahahahaha, you’re so pathetic GIGI. Do you really think anybody cares what you think?
So a Senate pannel actually found absolutely nothing – please Read the actual report – the WHOLE thing – not favored excerpts – after being lied to by Brennan, Clapped and a slew of others ?
Dems fight Gabbard’s disclosure with faulty Senate report that claimed Steele Dossier wasn’t in ICA
“Cherry-picking from the wrong tree: Obama and other top Democrats are pointing to a faulty Senate report which missed crucial info in effort to ignore declassification revelations, and are pretending that the superseding Ratcliffe report doesn’t exist.”
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/dems-combat-gabbard-declass-pointing-senate-report-which-wrongly?utm_source=referral&utm_medium=offthepress&utm_campaign=home
“Cornyn also said that “while we’ve known there was ZERO evidence of collusion” between Trump and Russia, “it’s become more evident that the entire Russia collusion hoax was fabricated by the Obama admin to subvert the will of the American people.”
Rubio, Cotton, and Cornyn released a statement accompanying the release of the fifth volume of the Senate report in August 2020, where the senators said, “The committee found no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government in its efforts to meddle in the election. … After more than three years of investigation by this Committee, we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion.”
Still spreading lies Gigi?
“The panel confirmed that Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort sought to give internal campaign data to Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik,”
Manafort had hired the Ukrainian-born, ethnic Ukrainian Kilimnik as a translator over ten years before. Kilimnik quickly rose to be Manafort’s right hand man on the Yanukovych/Party of Regions campaigns. Kilimnik ran the office after Manafort returned to the US.
NO US intelligence agency ever told Manafort that the capable Kilimnik was a Russian intelligence officer. Manafort’s old right hand man was naturally curious about how his boss was doing on this new campaign.
One can just imagine the interview:
OBAMA: I’m looking for a CIA Director. You’re a communist? Hey, me too! You’re hired!
It was all a set up.
______________
Newly declassified portions of a key Susan Rice email confirm that Michael Flynn was personally targeted during a Jan. 5 Oval Office meeting with Obama.
And it gets worse.
________________
JUST IN: The corrupt FBI agent who led Clinton server and Trump-Russian collusion investigations, @PeteStrzok
, just deleted ALL of his @X
posts.
I wonder why?
The Russia collusion/hack hoax was the infamous “insurance policy” he wrote about to his main squeeze Page.
Another big hit.
___________________
BREAKING: Sources tell me in 2018 former Trump Nat’l Security Adviser John Bolton received a classified memo summarizing the explosive report exposing how Brennan cooked up Putin-Trump intel, but Bolton stuck it in an NSC safe and never briefed Trump, believing the Brennan intel.
Bolton wanted war and nothing more.
I love how these idiots truly believe that none of that data is stored permanently. Literally everything on the internet is forever, Peter, bwhahaha!!
*. Thanks, PT. Good article.
Kevin Hornbuckle: “Because now the essential role of journalism is to mass produce the delusions required to control the population/electorate.” You have correctly (and aptly) defined the specific work of a POLITBURO, which the Biden-Administration proudly and openly called themselves….
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that Biden stood beside Obama during their Russia-Collusion (Spygate) SCHEME! Biden knew, and should be named as part of the inner-circle and indictments.
Biden was the one who, in a rare moment of lucidity, started the entrapment scheme on General Flynn with their Logan Act garbage. Probably because Biden was around back in the 18th century to vote on it when it came up. Heck, he might have even authored it.
Given that John Brennan has clearly lied and conspired to advance a political objective in this instance, there should be a review of all of his past intelligence reports or recommendations. Perhaps this is not an isolated case.
Dear Prof Turley,
ugh, the lost ‘wanderlust’ of John Brennen! I think I just lost my innocence. .. if I ever had any.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Brennan said in March, soon after Feinstein raised allegations that CIA operatives had been unconstitutionally prying on her panel’s work related to an investigation into the CIA’s use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (i.e. torture). “We wouldn’t do that. That’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we’d do.”
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/213933-cia-admits-to-wrongly-hacking-into-senate-computers/
Partial quotes are misleading, and there is more to the story—Let’s finish your misleading quote, dgs:
“From the unprecedented hacking of congressional staff computers and continued leaks undermining the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program to his abject failure to acknowledge any wrongdoing by the agency, I have lost confidence in John Brennan,” [Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo)] Udall added.”
You don’t say.. . well, I’m glad we cleared that up, Bec.
I suspect the reason we are always talking ‘cross purposes’ (how do you say that in Latin?) is because you simply won’t take yes for an answer.
*You know, Brennen and Clapper were the main reasons young cuz Edward Snowden spilled the beans and flew the coop. .. mores the pity.
Yes, the whole picture needed to be brought into focus, and “cleared up.” Though we may be at cross-purposes, that’snot quite true, because like statistics, truth can also be selected and bent to mean a variety of things when saying just one same-thing….BTW: Snowden is less-central to the story of democrat corruption than, say, Seth Rich and Julian Assange….
The Russia (SPYGATE) against Trump was a massive undertaking by extreme-left ELECTION DENIERS and government-arsonists!
Yeah. Lies, damned lies and statistics.
Ed Snowden was more concerned about the massive undertakings in the Bush/Cheney extreme-right loyal foot-soldiers .. . like Brennen and Clapper.
*you have to understand Bec, most people are not ready to be unplugged .. .
dgsnowden – Bec’s point regarding half truths or half the story is well taken.
From long before Bush Chenney half truths have been used to sell people all kinds of things we would not have accepted otherwise.
Did republicans participate ? Absolutely !
Gabbard is comparing the Collusion delusion to the WMD fiasco,
While on is on republicans and the other on democrats – many of the “deep state” players are the same.
Many republicans shifted their views as a result of the WMD fiasco – though that took a great deal of time.
The current distrust of MAGA for the “deep state” is rooted not just in the false naratives shilled against Trump, but in lies atleast as far back as the WMD’s nonsense.
It is with good reason that lots of people do not trust the “deep state” – regardless of which party they are backing.
hey DG
Now Bolton is in the game too.
Bolton has been in the game since the 20th century Dustoff. .. who do you think drew the bullseye on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, China, Russia and Ukraine in the 21st century?
*Bolton once threatened to invade the Netherlands, the Hague and Piccadilly square if they indicted any US officials for ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.
Cross-purposes? You’re missing the context.
“IF CLINTON HAD BEEN CHARGED, OBAMA’S CULPABLE INVOLVEMENT WOULD HAVE BEEN PATENT.”
– ANDREW C. MCCARTHY, NATIONAL REVIEW, JANUARY, 2018
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/01/hillary-clinton-barack-obama-emails-key-decision-not-indict-hillary/
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Clinton–Obama Emails: The Key to Understanding Why Hillary Wasn’t Indicted
By Andrew C. McCarthy
January 23, 2018 9:25 PM
New FBI texts highlight a motive to conceal the president’s involvement.
From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton–emails caper was President Barack Obama’s call — not the FBI’s, and not the Justice Department’s. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) The decision was inevitable. Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.
These emails must have involved some classified information, given the nature of consultations between presidents and secretaries of state, the broad outlines of Obama’s own executive order defining classified intelligence (see EO 13526, section 1.4), and the fact that the Obama administration adamantly refused to disclose the Clinton–Obama emails. If classified information was mishandled, it was necessarily mishandled on both ends of these email exchanges.
If Clinton had been charged, Obama’s culpable involvement would have been patent. In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton–Obama emails would have been in the spotlight. For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence. More significantly, for Clinton’s defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges.
…
While MacCarthy is correct politically – the President can not mishandle classified documents while president. Not Trump, Not Obama
It’s very odd that both a director of the FBI under Clinton and this smooth tongued director both grew up in the same town and went to the same schools.
OBAMA PHONE???
“Q Link Wireless LLC and its owner, identified as CEO Issa Asad, previously pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit wire fraud and steal federal funds from the Lifeline program that began in the 1980s, Fox News reported Sunday.
The program offers subsidized cellphone services to lower-income people. In 2012, a video emerged of a protester outside a Mitt Romney event who claimed her neighbors received an “Obama phone,” Breitbart News reported at the time.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpAOwJvTOio
Thanks, Abe!
Can’t understand which same town we’re talking about here. Was it Moscow or Bejing. Did they meet the former POTUS Clinton in Moscow holding hands and meditating in “the new world order” too?
Baltimore Sun:
June 1989 A guest column in the Arkansas Gazette by a visiting Soviet journalist noted in passing that Clinton had spent a week in Moscow in the early 1970s and quoted him as saying: “Relations between our two countries were pretty good then. It ++ was a time of detente and the American moon landing had just been shown on Soviet television all over the country. … I love riding the trains in Russia and the black bread, too.”Clinton replied: “I don’t remember that it was called that. I have said repeatedly that I was in two or three marches during the course of my life as an opponent of the Vietnam War. And one time I did go to the United States Embassy, and there were a couple of hundred people there I don’t remember it being a big crowd, and I don’t remember that being the title of it. But I did go there. A bunch of us from Oxford went down for it. . . . I went into Russia and spent a week and then came out through Czechoslovakia, and then went back to England.”
Hasn’t ANYONE remembered the Cambridge Five? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Five
Distraction (n.):
1. An event or scandal that threatens the interests of a Democrat
2. Anything that doesn’t fit the media’s anti-Republican narrative
Too bad the ststute gas run. Would love to see him cross examined
The statute hasn’t run. There has been an ongoing scheme to mislead Congress. That tolls the statute of limitations. Like Turley said, these guys are sweating bullets.
Haven’t people figured out yet that Brennan is the biggest Russian double agent since Kim Philby?
If Brenan were giving Brenan the Brenan treatment, he would pay Brenan to leak to the press that the vote for the Communist presidential candidate in 1976 was a conspiracy to destroy The Agency from within.
Russia, I’m convinced, had nothing to do with Brennen or Trump.
*and it’s dangerous to suggest otherwise .. .
Wonderful column. Thanks for adding history in order to give us a clear understanding of what honesty is!
I’m very glad Prof. Turley is back writing this column again. Today’s is stellar in its poetic depiction of how dishonesty gradually overtakes idealism in Washington D.C. Nobody else could have written this so cogently.
That said, what does a gifted professor of Constitutional law want to do about it (ubiquitous deceitful infowarfare)?
Are we to just put up with it? Expose it long after irreversable decisions were “nudged” using misdirection? Disparage the conniving perpetrators while admitting that they probably will get away with it?
If you’re concerned that a nation constantly bathed in devious infowafare will not be capable of making sound decisions like I am, wouldn’t you want a legal expert to opine on how we might correct this problem? Is that asking too much?
“its poetic depiction of how dishonesty gradually overtakes idealism in Washington D.C.”
I wish that someone would explain to me in simple terms how an avowed Marxist joining the CIA in 1980 (when the Soviet Union was still the most fearsome adversary of the US) to indulge his travel fantasies (and likely also to use that travel to gain more familiarity with Marxist regime, and, I suspect, find some way to aid them in subjugating his own country to their beliefs) constitutes idealism? Because that behavior does not at all conform the the definition of that word, as I understand it.
CIA director teases soon-to-be-released Durham report ‘classified annex’ on origins of Russia probe
“And what that intelligence shows, Maria, is that part of this was a Hillary Clinton plan, but part of it was an FBI plan to be an accelerant to that fake Steele dossier, to those fake Russia collusion claims, by pouring oil on the fire; by amplifying the lie and bearing the truth of what Hillary Clinton was up to,”
CIA Director John Ratcliffe
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/cia-director-teases-soon-be-released-durham-report-classified-annex
Ratcliffe went on to say that Brennan, Clinton and others made statements under oath or to investigators or Congress that are within the statute of limitations and are inconsistent with what’s in this annex.
The statement that “Trump was right about everything!” has been given relevance and legal standing outside of the circles that are publicly tarred as lunatic conspiracy theorists. First the political elite and their corrupted minions fabricated verifiable lies, then they used their miles deep bureaucracy that was controlled by their minions to hide their verifiable lies for over eight years, now the veil of secrecy has been stripped away. Personally I think the statute of limitations in this case should be stripped specifically because they used their corrupt system to intentionally hide their corruption beyond the statute of limitations, this kind of abuse of the system cannot be allowed to stand without severe punishment, throw the book at all of them.
Who knew that the political left were such liars?
Oh wait…
The shameless political left, their Pravda-USA media, and their blind sheeple supporters keep providing evidence proving my quote above to be correct. The Democratic Party has removed their false “liberal” facade and fully revealed the illiberal totalitarian, morally bankrupt, and the blatant cancel culture lying core of their anti-American party.
The left’s constant lies and fear mongering tactical patterns are now quite obvious to anyone that still has a couple of uncorrupted brain cells left to think critically. The political left is fully onboard with the unethical rationalization that “the ends justify the means” and their obsessive ends since 2015 has been pure anti-Trump and almost everything they do and say is in support of that end goal. These people had openly adopted Stalin’s Marxism–Leninism tactics…
These leftist fools have allowed their extreme bias and hate to morally bankrupt and indoctrinate themselves.
The date of discovery of the evidence is the from which the statute of limitations tolls. RICO case law is clear on that. Now, how can the government criminally prosecute a conspiracy to which the government itself was a party?
If the individuals acted outside of their purported job descriptions, then yes. It was once proposed to use RICO against corrupt police officers, though I don’t know if anyone followed through with that.
18 U.S. Code § 242 – Deprivation of rights under color of law
18 U.S. Code § 241 – Conspiracy against rights
The weaponization of the legal and intelligence systems against Trump, the cover-up of Hillary Clinton’s blatant disregard of cyber security, the lying of Brennan, Clapper and Comey as well as the denial of President Biden’s very real mental and physical decline are the very real threats to democracy.
No Chinese spy is more dangerous to the United States than John Brennan and no one will ever know how much secret documents he passed along to America’s enemies. He is a self admitted communist sympathiser who fit perfectly in a Obama regime that was committed to “fundamentally changing America”. The American voter got exactly what they voted for….scary!
Perfect snapshot of modern “news”: a former White House flack masquerading as an anchor, interviewing an ex-CIA chief-turned-paid-MSNBC analyst, masquerading as a guest — with no journalists in the picture. https://t.co/DDzbzckyxv
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) July 26, 2025
See Tulsi Gabbard’s plea for “honest journalism” in her press conference. Why does the modifier “honest” seem necessary? Because now the essential role of journalism is to mass produce the delusions required to control the population/electorate.
“Brennan admitted that he had voted for the communist party candidate for president in 1976.”
It wasn’t his honesty that sold the CIA on him, it was his obvious moral and political plasticity. A young man capable of quickly and mindlessly abandoning the political system of his native country, a system that had already privileged him and his peers greatly, only to a few years later seek to become an agent of that very system’s most duplicitous arm, is a young man who can be molded as needed.
Prof. Turley didn’t provide a link to a source of his account of Brennan’s putative “honesty”. Answering a question from a governmental authority about how one voted might more properly be referred to as “stupidity”. We still have a secret ballot. How can one’s answer to a question that can never be corroborated be evidence of “honesty”? It might be “candor”, but why should anyone believe it? Maybe he was just a clown trying to find out how far he could go and still get away with it.
My suspicion is that Brennan actually voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and by 1980 was embarrassed by Carter’s failed mission in Iran. Being a trickster type, he fabricated the story of voting for the communist. (BTW, the word “communist” modifying “party” makes it a proper noun and so should be capitalized.)
Here’s a link to a CNN article describing when Brennan stated who he voted for. If you don’t believe him, then it’s just another example of his lying, rather than stupidity.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/15/politics/john-brennan-cia-communist-vote/index.html
Thanks very much for the link to that almost nine-year-old story.
Contrast that with Gen. Flynn saying, “I joined the military to fight the Russians.”
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/05/11/k-t-mcfarland-shares-what-gen-flynn-told-her-on-night-he-left-trump-white-house-919773/
“My suspicion is that Brennan actually voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976”
How would that be inconsistent with his claim to have voted for a communist? (sorry, couldn’t resist)