Ex-CIA Director John Brennan Accuses Trump of Using Same ‘Political Theories’ as Nazis as President Targets Him
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Former CIA Director John Brennan claimed President Donald Trump’s administration is deploying Nazi-like political strategies after the president accused him and others of attempting to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Brennan joined David Remnick on The Yorker Radio Hour in an episode that dropped on Friday to discuss Trump publicly targeting him and other officials from former President Barack Obama’s administration. Brennan suggested the new attention from Trump was a distraction from MAGA calls for more documents related to Jeffrey Epstein to be released.
“It’s not lost on me that there is a real coincidence in timing between these allegations and the challenges Donald Trump is faced with right now related to the Epstein Files and other things. So is the motivation to put something out there that the MAGA base will respond to because it’s trying to show that the Deep State was a real problem and they’re finally going to have some accountability here?” Brennan said.
Trump reacted to reports of Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey being under criminal investigation by the FBI by telling reporters that the former officials may have to “pay a price.” The probe includes whether Brennan made false statements regarding an investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has claimed that Obama officials used faulty evidence to say that Russia preferred Trump in the 2016 election.
Brennan flatly denied the accusations in his Remnick interview, saying the Russia probe has been laid out clearly in testimony from him and others, as well as in numerous reports concluding Russia tried interfering in the election.
“[Obama] made very clear to us, he wanted us to try to uncover everything the Russians were doing, but also not to do anything that would in any way interfere in the election. So we took great steps, extraordinary procedures to try and protect a lot of this information,” Brennan said.
He revealed that despite the reports of an investigation, no one from the Department of Justice or elsewhere has contacted him.
“Unfortunately right and wrong doesn’t have anything to do, I think, with what’s going on right now,” he said.
Brennan likened Trump’s targeting of political enemies to “political theories” deployed by Nazis.
He said:
I’ve pointed out a number of times, it appears what the Trump administration is doing is following some of the political theories of Carl Schmitt, the German jurist and political philosopher of the 1930s that really served as the basis for a lot of thinking of the Nazi party, which is, you know, if you, especially if you’re going to go after the liberals and the progressives, don’t worry about right and wrong, you know, or good and bad, whatever. You want to do everything possible that’s going to vanquish your enemies. And so you lie, you cheat, you misrepresent, you push out disinformation, you do everything possible because especially liberal progressives are not going to reply in kind.
Check out the full New Yorker interview here.
