The Crossfire Hurricane ticking time bomb could explode in coup plotters' faces

George Neumayr:

Deep in the New York Times’s account of “Crossfire Hurricane,” the FBI’s codename for spying on the Trump campaign, is a hilariously bland paragraph about John Brennan and James Comey teaming up to dig dirt on Trumpworld. If you blinked in the course of reading the lengthy article, you might have missed it:

The F.B.I.’s thinking crystallized by mid-August, after the C.I.A. director at the time, John O. Brennan, shared intelligence with Mr. Comey showing that the Russian government was behind an attack on the 2016 presidential election. Intelligence agencies began collaborating to investigate that operation. The Crossfire Hurricane team was part of that group but largely operated independently, three officials said.

Contained in that oh-so-nonchalant line — “Intelligence agencies began collaborating to investigate that operation” — is one of Obamagate’s biggest ticking time bombs. When it blows, John Brennan, whose demented partisanship led him to run an anti-Trump spying operation straight out of CIA headquarters, will feel much of the blast.

The gathering winds for Crossfire Hurricane, after all, came largely from that blowhard. Panicking at the sight of Donald Trump’s Super Tuesday wins in March 2016, Brennan had by the following month formed the beginnings of a spying operation against him, and managed to enmesh a bunch of other agencies in it, thinking that would keep the outside of the CIA’s cup clean. How do we know this? Because a “senior” member of the intelligence community — back when such a figure thought talking out of school about such matters would serve the cause of delegitimizing Trump — leaked the existence of the operation to the BBCin January 2017....
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David Corn and Michael Isikoff, authors of Russian Roulette, gingerly refer to this anti-Trump spying operation as the “working group at Langley,” an undertaking so outré that even Brennan called it an “exceptionally sensitive issue.”

Since they are engaged in propaganda and stenography rather than investigative journalism, Corn/Isikoff and the Times are content to leave this part of the story fuzzy. As the most crucial period in this debacle — the period that would bring out its unfounded, partisan origins the most clearly — they don’t want to look too closely at it. Better to dispatch it all quickly with the Times’s line, “Intelligence agencies began collaborating to investigate that operation.”

But make no mistake about it: that the FBI and the CIA, on little more than the say-so of a virulent Trump hater like Brennan, were meeting to spy on the campaign of Hillary’s opponent makes Watergate look like a tenth-rate burglary. Nixon, at his most Machiavellian, wouldn’t have thought to form a “working group at Langley” against McGovern. But Obama, via Brennan, did the equivalent for Hillary.

For all intents and purposes, Crossfire Hurricane did not begin in July 2016 but at the moment Trump emerged as Hillary’s rival. Brennan, shortly thereafter, was bringing CIA agents, FBI agents, NSA agents, and an assortment of Obama’s political aides together in one room at CIA headquarters to bat around ideas on how to smoke out the campaign of Hillary’s opponent. Out of these meetings came the plot to infiltrate the Trump campaign.
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There is much more giving details as the plot moved along.  The set up of Papadopalous is also revealed.  The move was a scam involving an Australian official.  I suspect Halper, who some are alleging was the spy in the Trump camp was also involved in the setup.

I think one of the tells on Brennan's involvement in this plot was his reaction to the firing of McCabe.  It was so over the top that it suggested to me that Brennan had a personal involvement and may have feared that he would be next.