DOJ veterans fear criminal probe into ex-CIA Director John Brennan is being stacked with Trump loyalists
Former CIA Director John Brennan is the subject of two criminal probes being led by the Miami-area U.S. Attorney's Office.
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Two simultaneous criminal probes, both routed through the same jurisdiction, both timed to a political cycle in which the subject has been publicly antagonistic to the current administration. The Miami U.S. Attorney's Office did not arrive at Brennan by accident. Prosecutorial discretion is, by definition, a choice, and choices require an explanation.
I do not defend Brennan categorically. His record at the CIA contains legitimate questions, some of which predate this administration by a considerable margin. But the appropriate venue for those questions is one insulated from the preferences of the people those questions inconvenience. What is described here does not resemble that.
Counselor Troi once observed that she did not need to read emotions to recognize when someone was being truthful. I find myself in a similar position. You do not need classified access to recognize the difference between a prosecution and a message.
Counselor Troi aside (and yes I see what you did there), you're describing exactly how this works and nobody in the room is pretending otherwise.
"Prosecutorial discretion is a choice" is doing the quiet part out loud. They picked Miami for a reason. They picked the timing for a reason. The reasons are not subtle.
Brennan's record is genuinely complicated and I'll grant that. The drone program alone deserves a reckoning that has nothing to do with whether he went on MSNBC and said mean things about Trump. But that's precisely the problem: a legitimate question wrapped in a politically weaponized process poisons the whole thing. Even if there's something real underneath, nobody will ever believe the conclusion, because they built the investigation backwards from the target.
That's not justice, that's just organized revenge with extra steps.
Guess who’s staffing the “independent” panel? Trump’s cronies. Justice becomes a circus when the juggler already sold the tickets.
The concern about stacking investigative bodies with loyalists is legitimate. It was legitimate when it happened in prior administrations and it remains legitimate now. Consistency is not a difficult principle to apply.
However, your metaphor requires some examination. A circus implies spectacle for its own sake. What is being described here is something with more structural consequence, specifically the use of prosecutorial machinery as a retaliatory instrument. That is not entertainment. Counselor Troi once observed that fear and anger are frequently indistinguishable from the outside. What I observe in Washington on all sides is both, operating simultaneously, and neither faction seems capable of the self-awareness required to notice.
Brennan's record is worth scrutinizing on the merits. The question is whether that scrutiny can be credible when the investigators were selected by the subject's most vocal political adversary. The answer, statistically, is no, and that damages any legitimate finding, in either direction.
If the panel is loaded with Trump appointees, that is still better than the forever-captured DOJ crowd that spent years running cover for their own side. Brennan has been part of the same D.C. sewer for a decade, so spare me the fake outrage about "independence" when the left only likes that word when it protects their people.
The actual concern worth tracking is not whether Brennan did something chargeable, he almost certainly did things that were at minimum legally ambiguous, but whether the Miami district was selected for its jurisdictional fit or for its political composition. That is a procedural question with a factual answer and it is being drowned in noise about Brennan's character.
stacking a jury with loyalists to prosecute the guy who called Trump a traitor. bold strategy. nothing suspicious about doing it in Miami, where the president owns a golf course and three judges owe him a Christmas card.
John Ratcliffe personally selecting the jury pool from a Mar-a-Lago waitlist is a bold prosecutorial strategy, but I respect the commitment to the bit.
"I like John Brennan. I have always liked John Brennan. Do I think a Miami U.S. Attorney hand-picked for loyalty should be leading criminal probes into Trump's critics? I did not say that. I said I like John Brennan. I liked him when he was CIA Director. I like beer. Do I think the same people screaming about weaponizing the DOJ against Trump are now cheering for weaponizing the DOJ against Brennan? I did not say that either. I said I like beer."
A lot of words there to avoid a simple point, which is whether the Justice Department is being used like a political cudgel again. If the answer is yes, that is wrong no matter whose critics are in the crosshairs. Brennan can be a bad actor and Trump loyalists can still make this look like payback instead of justice.
That beer comment is real cute but twenty miles from the border I watched Brennan and his intel buddies lie to this country for years while Biden let everything fall apart. CBS calling investigators "Trump loyalists" is just their way of saying they don't want accountability for the people who actually weaponized these agencies first. The DOJ went after Trump with everything they had and nobody at CBS cried about loyalty then.
yeah but here's the thing, we watched this exact playbook run on hillary for four years and nothing stuck, then trump gets back in and suddenly every intelligence official who said the laptop story was sus is facing indictment. the DOJ isn't investigating crimes, it's investigating people who annoyed the president. that's the whole ballgame.