Recommended Read: The Brennan Dossier

Aaron Mate has written an excellent review of what is known about John Brennan's outsized role in probably the biggest and most dangerous political scandal and hoax in American history--a hoax that has torn at the very fabric of our Constitutional order: The Russia Hoax. Mate's article appears today at Real Clear Investigations: The Brennan Dossier: All About a Prime Mover of Russiagate. It's a long but very readable summary, and I recommend that anyone interested in these matters follow the link and read it for themselves.

I had originally thought of attempting to summarize the article, but I became convinced that it's so compelling that a summary simply couldn't do it justice. Nevertheless, I will present three key excerpts.

The first sets the tone for the Russia Hoax and, in an understated way, describes the enormity of what Brennan was so instrumental in pulling. Of course this in no way excuses or lessens the culpability of his many enablers and active collaborators, who set the health of the American body politic at naught:

In the waning days of the Obama administration, the U.S. intelligence community produced a report saying Russian President Vladimir Putin had tried to swing the 2016 election to Donald Trump. 

The January 2017 report, called an Intelligence Community Assessment, followed months of leaks to the media that had falsely suggested illicit ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin while also revealing that such contacts were the subject of a federal investigation. Its release cast a pall of suspicion over Trump just days before he took office, setting the tone for the unfounded allegations of conspiracy and treason that have engulfed his first term.

The ICA's blockbuster finding was presented to the public as the consensus view of the nation's intelligence community. As events have unfolded, however, it now seems apparent that the report was largely the work of one agency, the CIA, and overseen by one man, then-Director John Brennan, who closely directed its drafting and publication with a small group of hand-picked analysts. 

Nearly three years later, as the public awaits answers from two Justice Department inquiries into the Trump-Russia probe’s origins, and as impeachment hearings catalyzed by a Brennan-hired anti-Trump CIA analyst unfold in Congress, it is clear that Brennan’s role in propagating the collusion narrative went far beyond his work on the ICA. A close review of facts that have slowly come to light reveals that he was a central architect and promoter of the conspiracy theory from its inception.  

... 

The Trump-Russia collusion theory was not propagated by a few rogue figures. Key Obama administration and intelligence officials laundered it through national security reporters who gave their explosive claims anonymous cover. Nevertheless, Brennan stands apart for the outsized role he played in generating and spreading the false narrative.

The second one paragraph excerpt illustrates just what an utter scoundrel--is there any other word?--Brennan is. But, again, this is not intended to in any way lessen the culpability of his many enablers and active collaborators. One of those enablers and collaborators could only have been Barack Obama himself, who was undoubtedly privy to Brennan's plotting (read how Brennan's missives were directed straight to the Oval Office, bypassing all normal channels):

Since stepping down from the CIA in January 2017, Brennan's incendiary rhetoric has fanned the flames. From MSNBC to the New York Times to Twitter, Brennan has denounced Trump as "treasonous," "in the pocket of Putin," and dismissed the president's now substantiated "claims of no collusion," as "hogwash." In the final weeks of the Mueller probe, Brennan boldly predicted a wave of indictments against Trump's inner circle for a Russia conspiracy. When Mueller completed his probe with no such indictments, Brennan changed his tone: "I don’t know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was," he told MSNBC.

Here's a passage that I found personally amusing:

After Trump's election victory in November, Brennan's CIA was the source of yet more leaks. Reports in early December claimed that the agency had assessed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election with the explicit aim of helping Trump. The leaks sparked worry inside the FBI.

"Think our sisters have begun leaking like mad," Peter Strzok, the lead FBI agent on the Russia probe, texted his colleague Lisa Page on Dec. 15. "Scorned and worried and political, they're kicking in to overdrive." In an April 2017 email to colleagues, Strzok worried the CIA was deceiving both the bureau and the public. "I'm beginning to think the agency got info a lot earlier than we thought and hasn't shared it completely with us," he wrote. "Might explain all these weird/seemingly incorrect leads all these media folks have. Would also highlight agency as a source of some of the leaks."

Heavens! Tell me it can't be so! The CIA involved in politics? Deceiving the FBI and the public--both? Disseminating "weird/seemingly incorrect leads"? Oh my goodness! What next? Will we learn that the moon really isn't made of green cheese?

One wonders what has become of the Bureau, if no one told this finest of CI agents at the beginning of his career (as I was told): The beginning of wisdom is distrust of the Agency.

The final excerpt goes into the "get Flynn" motive that undoubtedly played into Brennan's plotting, and should prove of interest to anyone who isn't familiar with the reasons for Flynn hatred in the Intelligence Community:

It is still not clear why the Obama administration, with major media playing along, not only embraced the false Trump-Russia narrative but also used it as a rationale to spy on a presidential campaign and then on a presidency. Brennan’s reasons also remain opaque. 

One early motivation may have been the intelligence community’s broad dislike of Flynn – Trump’s first national security adviser, who was one of the earliest targets of the collusion narrative. 

Flynn had served as Obama’s head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, but fell out of favor by 2014, in part because of his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and the CIA's arming of anti-Assad militants in Syria. Obama had specifically warned Trump against hiring Flynn. 

A longtime critic of the bureaucracy, Flynn earned particular enmity from Brennan’s CIA with an effort to create a new Pentagon spy organization, Foreign Policy reported in 2015. 

One of Trump’s first high-profile supporters, Flynn was also the subject of the first news articles – starting in February of 2016 – portraying members of the Trump campaign as overly sympathetic to Russia. In February 2017, “nine current and former officials” from multiple agencies leaked about him to the Washington Post over his contacts with the Russian ambassador -- an article that helped the Post win a Pulitzer Prize with the New York Times. The episode also brought Flynn much grief, including a widely questioned “process crime” conviction for lying to the FBI, which he is now trying to reverse. Meanwhile, a CIA “whistleblower” hired and placed in the White House by Brennan has provided the impetus for the current Democrat-led impeachment effort against President Trump. 

The Barr-Durham probe is set to determine, among other things, whether Brennan’s actions and faulty information amounted to incompetence or something considerably worse.