Conservative Twitter bubbled over when Politico's Natasha Bertrand and Daniel Lippmann baldly contradicted the facts about Obama CIA director John Brennan's self-defensive lying -- as even Politico has reported.
Bertrand and Lippmann insisted that President Trump has has become “obsessed” with Brennan, who "frequently gets under the president’s skin by publicly questioning his mental acuity and fitness for office, according to a former White House official."
But they could not believe anyone would accuse John Brennan of lying to Congress.
Asked for comment, White House deputy press Secretary Hogan Gidley said: "John Brennan lied before Congress when he got caught spying on American citizens and lied about having Russian collusion evidence that never existed. The only way I’ve ever heard anyone in the White House mention him is as a punchline." It’s not clear what Gidley was referring to—Brennan has not been accused of lying to Congress.”
In July of 2014, Politico's Burgess Everett tenderly described the lying, as Democrats called for Brennan to resign his office:
[Democratic Sen. Mark] Udall railed on Thursday against the CIA’s “tremendous failure of leadership” displayed by Brennan in the aftermath of Feinstein’s March accusation that the CIA accessed Senate computers. The senator said the CIA director was not forthright about the agency’s interference into the torture report and said the IG report “isn’t enough.”
The socialist British newspaper The Guardian wasn't so mild-mannered:
The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, issued an extraordinary apology to leaders of the US Senate intelligence committee on Thursday, conceding that the agency employees spied on committee staff and reversing months of furious and public denials.
Liberal Washington Post opinionator James Downie offered a specific example:
In March, at the Council on Foreign Relations, CIA Director John Brennan was asked by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell whether the CIA had illegally accessed Senate Intelligence Committee staff computers “to thwart an investigation by the committee into” the agency’s past interrogation techniques....
Brennan denied snooping on Senate computers six weeks after Feinstein first made the accusation to the CIA in private, which means either that he was lying, or he had ignored a serious charge against his agency for six weeks, then spouted off about it without any real knowledge — hardly the behavior expected of an agency director.
What Brennan actually said to Mitchell was "As far as the CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn't do that. That's just -- beyond the scope of reason."
Honk if you think Andrea Mitchell's going to talk about this a lot in 2019. NBC/MSNBC hired this man as a pundit!
Author James Hasson knocked Bertrand for not spending a few seconds to consider Brennan's history (even if she was 21 at the time this all unfolded):
There's a technicality here: there's not a video of Brennan lying under oath to Congress, just a video of Brennan lying in public to Andrea Mitchell (and the rest of us). He was certainly leading an agency who issued "months of furious and public denials."
It's fascinating that Washington Post "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler was thinking this must be about Brennan's colleague Jim Clapper, who lied under oath responding to Democrat Sen. Ron Wyden.
Dear Glenn: Does this really imply we should have confidence in MSNBC's Brennan and CNN's Clapper as truthful and nonpartisan sources on Trump's troubles? Or are these networks merely continuing the Obama networking they were doing in a more overt fashion? Chuck Todd is certainly feeling Brennan's pain, complaining “You have been completely character assassinated and eviscerated.”
