Brennan's government opposition research operation against Trump

George Neumeyer:

nder John Brennan, the CIA operated as an opposition research outfit for the Hillary Clinton campaign. It appears from leaked news stories in the British press that Brennan’s oafish spying on Trump began around April 2016, right after Trump’s biggest primary victories. As it became urgently clear to Brennan that Trump was going to face off against Hillary, Brennan turned to “intelligence partners” in Europe for dirt on Trump. But they didn’t have any, save some pretty skimpy material on “contacts” between Trump campaign officials and Russians.

Whatever Brennan collected was so insubstantial that Robert Mueller hasn’t even interviewed him about it. Consider that for a second: Mueller was supposedly appointed to complete the counterintelligence probe into Trumpworld, and he hasn’t felt the need to talk to the father of it. Brennan has tried to explain this astonishing discrepancy away by vaguely saying that whatever Mueller needs he could find in “CIA files.”

Those files are no doubt as elliptical as the formal document starting the probe. It appears that Brennan’s alleged “tips” were too flaky and unofficial for the Obama administration to commit to print. Brennan had his own partisan hunches, fueled by his feverish hatred of Trump and perhaps a few spit-balling conversations with other Trump-hating spy chiefs abroad (the “special relationship” had turned sinister against Trump, as evident from Britain’s sorry role in this mess), but he had no evidence to meet any reasonable threshold for a counterintelligence probe of a presidential campaign, especially one undertaken by an administration supporting that candidate’s opponent. Brennan’s espionage against Trump was as audacious as a paranoid LBJ wiretapping Nixon’s campaign plane in the thick of a race against LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey.

In his own clumsy way, Brennan knew that he was treading on a political minefield. He referred to the FBI/CIA’s spying on the Trump campaign as an “exceptionally, exceptionally sensitive issue.” That helpful crumb comes from Russian Roulette, the book by David Corn and Michael Isikoff.

Brennan dimly understood that there would be hell to pay if it came out that Hillary partisans in the U.S. government were spying on her opponent’s campaign, making use of opposition research that she had purchased. But Brennan, who was auditioning to be Hillary’s CIA director and choking on his anger at the thought of Trump as president, couldn’t help himself apparently. From April 2016 to July 2016, according to leaked stories in the British press, he assembled a multi-agency taskforce that served as the beginnings of a counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign. During these months, he was “personally briefing” Obama on “Russian interference” — Brennan’s euphemism for spying on the Trump campaign — and was practically camped out at the White House. So in all likelihood Obama knew about and had given his blessing to Brennan’s dirt-digging.

The FBI’s liaison to Brennan was Peter Strzok, whose hatred for Trump equaled Brennan’s. But even Strzok knew that Brennan was blowing smoke about Trump-Russian collusion. Strzok would later tell his mistress that he sensed the probe would prove a crock — that “there’s no big there there.”
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Brennan appears to be a central figure in the coup attempt against Trump once he was elected.  One of the tells is his over the top reaction to the firing of McCade who was a central figure in the FBI operation against Trump and his campaign.  I suspect that Brennan was also a source along with Clapper for several media stories attack Trump and his campaign.