Trump distrusts the Intelligence Community, thinks they might be less-than truthful. And that is just "outrageous," according to CIA director John Brennan, and, of course, most Democrats, particularly the Vice-Chariman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Dianne Feinstein. Brennan, who served in the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama said as recently as this morning, “There is no basis for Mr. Trump to point fingers at the intelligence community for leaking information or for lying to the American people. There is no interest in undermining the president-elect."
This from a man who's job description is, in part, to lie to the American people.
We can dismiss as an outlier the fact that the intelligence community lied about WMD that got us into a war, because that was just a whoops moment, and other than that they have been virtual upright, forthright Eagle Scouts. Right?
Remember when Brennan told Feinstein and intelligence committee vice chairman Saxby Chambliss in June 2011 that over the previous year there had not been a single collateral death from drone strikes, and, ironically, Feinstein cited 11 instances where civilian collateral deaths occurred from drone strikes, and Brennan responded, "There is no credible evident of civilian collateral damage," and Feinstein then tossed at him CIA documents that seemed credible enough, which detailed not only the 11 instances, but one instance in which 50 Pakistani civilians were killed when in March 2011 a drone struck a meeting that was being held by local tribal elders to iron out a mining dispute? Whoops.
Remember when the CIA flatly stated that they did not engage in torture of any kind, that enemy combatants were treated respectfully according to the Geneva Convention, and that no one in their custody has been harmed in any way, and then the Torture Report came out proving not only was that a lie, but that 108 people had died in CIA custody while being tortured (or, in the case of 25 of them, just blatantly murdered either because they refused to talk or as a means to coerce others into talking), and that the CIA had intentionally destroyed several hundred hours of video that documented the deeds? Whoops.
Remember how, in an effort to prevent the Torture Report from coming out and for other reasons, the CIA hacked the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee and when confronted with the accusation Brennan stated, "Nothing could be further from the truth. That's not something we do or would ever do," and then Feinstein presented Brennan with the Inspector General's report that showed not only did the CIA hack into the Committee's computers, but that Brennan was the one behind it? Whoops again.
Then there was that time in 2013 during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing when Senator Ron Wyden prefaced his questioning of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper by quoting NSA Director Keith Alexander, from a DEF CON speech a year earlier where Alexander stated, "Our job is foreign intelligence. Those who would want to weave the story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people, is absolutely false…From my perspective, this is absolute nonsense." Then he asked Clapper, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Clapper matter-of-factly responded "No, sir." That was a whopper of a whoops moment, because when Edward Snowden saw that, he said to himself, "Enough of enough, I can't stands no more," and promptly released a dumptruck load of documents proving that Clapper and the Intelligence Community were lying their asses off. Two days later Clapper said that he responded "in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner by saying no."
Obama, of course, shrugged all this off as no big deal. Donald Trump looks at it a bit differently. Experts say that Trump needs to build trust with the intelligence community. The experts, are, of course, current and former intelligence officials, and Democrats (like Senator Dianne Feinstein who is livid at Trump for not blindly trusting the intelligence community, and I do love a good irony).
Now we have the Russian hacks of the election process, when the intelligence community really did nothing to prevent, mitigate or stop, and Obama who more or less shrugged it off with complete inaction in failing to respond to the cybersecurity threats by foreign governments and entities, repeatedly waiting until after the fact to retaliate. It is no wonder that questions are being raised on the timing Obama's administration’s decision to release the assessment report. If the hacking was as bad as it is now being portrayed to be (particularly if Hillary's poll numbers were different), something would have been done about it at the time. It appears that the hacking wasn't nearly as bad as it seems, and that it's being used purely for political purposes in an attempt to de-legitimize the presidency.
Hillary had the election in the bag, so it was mostly mum on this stuff, so that, you know, it wouldn't look like Obama is taking sides in the election. Then the unthinkable happened, Trump won, and the informational floodgtates of Russian hacking were opened. Then Obama had the hacking assessment report released juuuust before the Electoral College voted on Dec 19. This is a report that was completed prior to the general election, but its release was held up until after the election. It was then amended and rewritten and released just before the Electoral College.
So, the Democrats want to hypocritically characterize Trump's distrust of the intelligence community as outrageous and beyond the pale, and Intelligence Community chiefs, who's integrity and ethics are self-described as being beyond reproach, play the innocent victim and whine about unfairly be untrusted, and both are focusing on the Evil Bully Russian Hacking of the Election, so that most people won't even pay any attention to the facts and realities of corruption and collusion found in the DNC and Podesta emails. And the media certainly doesn't want to focus on their own collusion confirmed in the emails, so they'll focus on the Evil Bully Russian Hacking of the Election, as well.
Trump shouldn't trust any of them as far as he can drop-kick 'em.
