Latest news with #CentralIntelligenceAgency
The Hill
an hour ago
- Politics
- The Hill
Brennan, Clapper: Trump administration seeks to ‘rewrite history' with Obama claims
Former CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper used a joint op-ed to push back on claims from the Trump administration that Obama-era intelligence officials misrepresented conclusions about its review of Russia's effort to influence the 2016 election. 'Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the Central Intelligence Agency director, have over the past month claimed that senior officials of the Obama administration manufactured politicized intelligence, silenced intelligence professionals and engaged in a broad 'treasonous conspiracy' to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump. That is patently false,' the duo wrote in The New York Times. The intelligence community concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election with the aim of aiding President Trump in the contest. The pair then list a suite of reports that backed that conclusion, from Trump-appointed special counsel John Durham to a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report prepared under now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio. 'Every serious review has substantiated the intelligence community's fundamental conclusion that the Russians conducted an influence campaign intended to help Mr. Trump win the 2016 election,' the two wrote. Amid pressure on the Trump administration to release files related to the prosecution of deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein, the Trump team has released several other tranches of documents. Gabbard, in particular, has released a memo and documents she said shows Clapper withheld information from the American public, including that there was 'no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count.' That was never in dispute though, and intelligence officials said at the time that Russia was unable to manipulate vote counts. The documents released by Gabbard show intelligence officials discussing that Russia was unable to change any votes. Gabbard later released a report from House Intelligence Republicans casting doubt on whether Russia aimed to help Trump versus sow chaos in the U.S., but most other assessments back the conclusion the adversary did so with the hopes of boosting the president. But beyond the documents released, Gabbard and others have largely talked about the intelligence community's review of the 2016 election as part of a conspiracy to damage Trump, undermine his victory, and boost the largely-debunked Steele Dossier. 'Contrary to the Trump administration's wild and baseless claims, there was no mention of 'collusion' between the Trump campaign and the Russians in the assessment,' they wrote. 'We have testified under oath, and the reviews of the assessment have confirmed, that the dossier was not used as a source or taken into account for any of its analysis or conclusions,' they added. They also reiterated that the assessment made no judgment about the impact Russia's moves had on the outcome of the election. 'While some state and local electoral boards and voter information and registration systems were accessed by Russian intelligence, the assessment made clear that none of those types of systems were involved in counting votes,' they wrote. 'Russian influence operations might have shaped the views of Americans before they entered the voting booth, but we found no evidence that the Russians changed any actual votes.' Clapper and Brennan go on to describe efforts to keep their intelligence work shielded, understanding the influence it would have on the election, calling it a 'remarkable irony' to have Trump figures release it now. 'The real politicization is the calculated distortion of intelligence by administration officials, notably Mr. Trump's directors of national intelligence and the C.I.A., positions that should be apolitical. We find it deeply regrettable that the administration continues to perpetuate the fictitious narrative that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election,' they wrote. 'It should instead acknowledge that a foreign nation-state — a mortal enemy of the United States — routinely meddles in our national elections and will continue to do so unless we take appropriate bipartisan action to stop it.'
Time of India
2 hours ago
- Business
- Time of India
Want to join the CIA? Here's how students can get in through internships and scholarships in 2025
For those drawn to the world of intelligence, global analysis, or covert operations, the Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA ) offers highly selective entry routes in 2025. Prospective recruits must combine academic credibility with discretion, clear intent, and strategic preparation before applying. The CIA is the United States' civilian foreign intelligence agency. It collects, analyses and acts on intelligence from around the world, supporting decisions at the highest levels of government. The Agency's structure includes directorates for Operations, Analysis, Digital Innovation, Science and Technology, and Support. Success here requires critical thinking, sound judgement and firm ethical grounding. Here's how students in the US can explore internships, scholarships, and early career roles with the CIA. Confirm eligibility All student applicants must: Be US citizens (dual citizenship is accepted) Be at least 18 years old Be ready to relocate to the Washington, D.C. area Maintain a minimum GPA of 3.0 Pass medical, security and polygraph screenings Register for Selective Service if applicable Eligibility also requires lived experience in the US for security clearance purposes. From application to clearance, expect a process lasting six to twelve months. Choose a student pathway The Agency offers several accredited programs in 2025: Directorate of Operations Undergraduate Internship (DOSI): Over two consecutive summers (2026 and 2027), students work full time in roles such as Staff Operations Officer, Collection Management Officer, or Targeting Officer. This requires completion of one semester and no graduation before December 2027. Interns earn approximately $58,700 annually and receive federal benefits. Undergraduate and Graduate Internship Program: Year-round opportunities across fields such as economics, engineering, IT, foreign languages, and finance. Co‑op and internship formats are available in partnership with universities. Stokes Scholarship Program: Awarded to students demonstrating financial need. This includes paid summer internships, tuition assistance (up to $25,000 annually for STEM), and guaranteed post-graduation employment. Retention requires service commensurate with award value. Study with purpose Certain fields align well with Agency needs: • STEM disciplines: Computer science, engineering, mathematics, data analytics • International affairs, economics or military history • Foreign languages: Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Korean, Russian, Urdu • Support disciplines: Business administration, finance, communications Pro tip: Language fluency and analytical writing skills are highly prized. Build a strong profile To stand out as a candidate, it helps to build a portfolio that combines academic depth with real-world application. Experience as a tutor or research assistant demonstrates intellectual discipline and collaborative ability. Participation in Model United Nations (MUN), student government, or leadership forums reflects initiative and public engagement. Language immersion programs and study abroad opportunities indicate cross-cultural fluency, while certifications in cybersecurity or coding show technical proficiency. Volunteering in civic or cultural initiatives adds a layer of social awareness. Alongside these, maintaining a clean digital presence and a reputation for integrity remains essential throughout the recruitment process. Apply early and submit carefully The CIA expects applications six to twelve months before the desired start date. Use their MyLINK portal to submit: Cover letter expressing motivations and relevant skills Transcript verifying GPA Resume with leadership, analytical and technical experience Participate meaningfully during internships Students selected for CIA internships are expected to contribute meaningfully to ongoing work alongside career intelligence officers. These roles are not observational; interns are involved in actual analysis, planning, and casework, depending on the directorate they are placed in. Those interning within the Directorate of Operations or Analysis may assist in research briefs, targeting support, or intelligence assessments. Strong performance during these internships can lead to consideration for the CIA's Professional Trainee Program, a structured path toward full-time employment post-graduation. U pon completing their degrees, successful interns may be offered full-time positions in a range of roles, including Intelligence Analyst, Collection Management Officer, Cyber Threat Analyst, or Regional and Language Specialist. Final selection depends on demonstrated capability during the internship, organisational requirements, and the applicant's ability to maintain an active security clearance. The CIA demands more than academic excellence. It seeks individuals with integrity, cultural awareness and strategic judgement. If you are prepared to balance intellectual rigour with national service, and to pursue clarity over glamour, this is a path worth pursuing. TOI Education is on WhatsApp now. Follow us here . Ready to navigate global policies? Secure your overseas future. Get expert guidance now!
The Wire
4 hours ago
- Politics
- The Wire
Peter Thiel's Transhumanism and the Fear of Human Finitude
Saroj Giri Silicon Valley's attempt to technologically eliminate human finitude in search of a supposed immortality is both phony and philosophically boring. A sort of controversy recently made news following Peter Thiel's long and winding interview with the New York Times. Thiel who is a direct backer of J.D. Vance and very close to Donald Trump, is regarded as a highly niche brain among the Silicon Valley tech gurus – one of those supposedly super-intelligent humans for whom every major advance in technology and AI is too little and too late, a sign of a deep-rooted inertia. Thiel pitches his work and vision at the level of epoch-making disruptions that would end human finitude and usher in eternal immortality. Thiel and others like Marc Andreessen talk as though they are offering liberation to humankind. The guy who gave the world PayPal payments system and the Palantir surveillance system working closely with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is also offering the path of human liberation. Palantir's creation myth has it that the firm helped track Osama Bin Laden. Now they are closely aligned with Trump's very own deep state, as Palantir gets an even deeper foothold. How can we not notice them? Liberation and human finitude For a broad contextualisation of what is going on, think of the many promises of liberation the world has seen from the time of the great saints and prophets. Buddha showed humanity the way to liberation. And so did many other great saints and prophets from Lord Mahavira, Lord Jesus to Prophet Mohammed. No matter how one estimates these great endeavours, we can agree about the following. In each case, the liberation of humans remained true to the character of humans as finite, limited and suffering beings. Liberation was not about humans striving to be what they are not, humans aspiring to be Gods, humans replacing Gods. Hubris could not be admitted here. The Buddha shunned such hubris. For him liberation was all about hard ardent work (meditation) on the finite self and body, this little five-foot long body. While rejecting attachment and desire, the Buddha still regarded our earthly existence as who we really are, as fundamental to us. Liberation was to occur from within the human condition. The human condition was no limit, no disability, no handicap, but the condition to take us to transcendent levels. The finite is the enabling condition for the infinite. Indeed, closer to our time, Jacques Derrida gave a famous interpretation of Descartes's well known, 'I think therefore I am'. Derrida showed that Descartes here wanted to highlight our mortality and finitude as precisely what enabled us to soar higher, that is, engage in limitless thought. The latter 'I' in 'I am', which is the living being subject to death, lives on beyond death as thought, as 'I think'. Hence, 'I think therefore I am'. Not just that. Our finiteness and mortality is integral to us as human beings. It is as mortal beings that we could, as thought, transcend and become universal. Will humans endure? But today there are many who seek to achieve liberation not by transcending the limited, finite character of humans but by denying it. They want to somehow exit the human condition and directly devolve into a sovereign and autonomous machinic intelligence, forever immortal and perhaps timeless. In this approach, humans must cease for immortality to appear. And hence intelligence must be outsourced so that it is no longer subject to the finitude and mortality of humans. In the interview with the New York Times, Peter Thiel proposed that the trans-in transexual or transgender should be stretched all the way to trans-human or trans-humanism. He proposed transcending the human condition, into immortality. 'The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body'. Ross Douthat, the interviewer, asked, do you think humans will endure? Thiel paused looking rather blank. Douthat seemed restless and jumped right in, gleefully exclaiming, 'This is a long hesitation', clearly feeling vindicated. Here was something sensational, a viral gotcha moment, a scoop, for the NYT. As intended, cheap theatrics followed. Soon word went around that Thiel does not want humans to endure and wants big tech to take over the world. Critics of Thiel would see in his vision the Doomsday dystopia where humans would be slave to machine intelligence – conveniently forgetting that precisely this formulation is flipped around by Thiel and presented as the promise of immortality. 'Humans shall not endure' then does not as such put Thiel and his cohorts on the defensive, for this is precisely see a promise of immortality for the new humans or rather humanoids. Also, not to forget: this long path towards this tech-driven immortality is already a lived experience for much of the world today as it translates into immediate plans. Large tracts of land in the fields of California and the coasts of Honduras are dedicated to the project to build new city-states funded by Peter Thiel among others. The reports title says it all, From Praxis to Prospera, Silicon Valley longs to break free. We know of Freedom cities dreamed of by Trump not in his MAGA moment but in his Peter Thiel moment. We also know of Trump's backing of blockchain and crypto that are supposed to take care of all decisions as no one, no authority or even elected representative will have to decide anything. In a clearly libertarian mode, they propose the model of zero governance, ushering in frictionless efficiency. But it is not just about the new forms of organising society and economy, but of a new biologically superior breed of super-humans, as we know from this report in the Washington Post, 'Inside the Silicon Valley push to breed super-babies'. Inhuman superintelligence In other words, for Thiel, machinic intelligence and algorithmic reasoning are not similar (or homological) to human philosophical thought. Thiel would reject any such homology or isomorphism. This allows billionaire tech bros to present what is essentially a social process of technological advancement as their own exceptional creation, innovation or invention. No wonder Thiel, Musk, Marc Andreessen are touted as super-intelligent billionaires, those working so hard to take us beyond our finite, limited suffering condition and rocket us into immortality. We are supposed to think of them as something like the Nietzschean Ubermensch of the digital nomadic age, striving to raise humanity out of their self-imposed mediocrity and slave morality! What we get is immortality through superintelligence monetised into billions and billions of dollars. The equivalence between this supposed super-intelligence and tremendous concentration of wealth is established in a way which looks increasingly unassailable to the usual discourses about inequality and income disparities. At one level, this retailing of immortality does look no different than the medieval Church offering redemption and forgiveness by selling well-priced indulgences that the rich could buy. For now Silicon Valley seeks to sell immortality through machinic intelligence and by stealing data from citizens. The difference is of course that now it is about being a higher superior non-human, rather than trying to address a specifically human issue, the problem of suffering or sin. The corruption of the Church selling indulgences was very human, while the intended clean break with the human that machine intelligence promises, is inhuman – and in fact phony, misleading. Now it is a relation of the inhuman (rather than superhuman) with the human, a higher intelligence lording over humans. Thus we already hear of the rise of a 'cognitive elite', what Yuval Noah Harari calls a superior biological caste. But when immortality gets tied to super intelligence or to a particular purportedly all-powerful mind then it does becomes pertinent to ask: which mind? The collective, social mind or the mind of the avant-garde higher caste elite lording over humans? Transhumanism and Marx We must here take a pause here and broaden our view. For we soon realise that at one level, indeed at a more fundamental level, there is no problem with transhumaniam as such. For when have humans not been about transformation, change, revolution and disruption? Humans have always transformed nature and in that process transformed themselves. Such were the views that Karl Marx expressed in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The cooperative powers of humans produce an intelligence which is homological to the social dimension. In this view, intelligence cannot be privately appropriated and presented as the super-intelligence which produces billionaires. But this is what capitalism does. Marx understood and explained that capitalism is really like an incubator of a new kind of intelligence, based on private appropriation of social intelligence. Such are his views in his 1858 Fragment on Machines. Capital, in its outer limits, constantly tends towards what Marx called 'general intellect'. Capital exploits labour-power but ideally it would dream of generating value without labour-power. Marx notes capital's tendency to 'reduce labour time to a minimum'. He writes: 'capital itself is a moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth'. There is an ardent desire to detach the capacity of work from the worker. The desire to extract and store the creative powers of labour-power once and for all so that, from then on, value can be created freely in perpetuity. Think of it as a version of killing the goose who lays the golden eggs. You want to kill the goose and still have all the golden eggs forever! Exploitation of labour-power generates a tendency towards finding an apparatus, a paraphernalia, productive assets or GPUs and servers, to freeze and preserve the capacity and the intelligence. This historical tendency of capital is so clearly seen in machine learning which is at at the very basis of machine intelligence and AI. Humans train machines, and the point is to train them such that human intelligence is congealed in them such that they will now function autonomously, as the new sovereigns. Capitalist exploitation of labour would appear as the pre-history to the emergence of capital as now completely free of its dependence on labour. Labour would have eventually outsourced its real qualities and capacities. That is part of the impossible capitalist utopia which Marx is well aware of in the late 19th century. That this will also be suggested as the path of liberation is perhaps a more recent development. Future in the present: Terminator But look at the crucial difference in the way Marx saw the role and function of this utopia and promised liberation, and the way in which this is presented by the tech bros and others today. The transhumanist narrative is such that it wants us to be preoccupied with incremental tech advances that are supposed to be 'revolutionary' even as they are all always already obsolete. Each moment is only an anticipation of whats next. This constant state of incitement means that there is never a Now-time, the time of the now, never a present we can really talk about. Every moment is borrowed time, in a disorienting swirl, where the present is always mortgaged to the future. Recall how in the James Cameron movie of the same name, the Terminator (1984) is from the future – in fact, it necessary had to be from the future. The Terminator survived the nuclear holocaust which took place in the future yet to come. Viewers will remember how the lead female actor (Sarah Connor) is all bewildered by this presence of the future yet-to-come. The present is 'complete' only with this all important artefact from the future. The present is held in place by the future. Your present, your time-of-the-now dissipates into nothingness when you realise that the present is already mortgaged to the future, that the present is a bizarre extension of the future. Isn't this our experience when we read a story like this: that we are about to reach the point of technological advancement which will make it possible to cryogenically preserve the super-intelligent after death, or send those like Elon Musk into outer space where they will eternally live and attain immortality? Even though such a 'technological advancement' is mostly non-actionable, perhaps such a news item, for most of us, it casts a shadow on your inner psychic life or the unconscious. You will perhaps be reminded of best-sellers like Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. Such self-help spiritual guides only create that extra pressure on individuals who start blaming themselves for not harnessing the 'power of the mind'. I had written earlier that the now-time is really crucial for making sense of what is going on, not however to create your own little island of peace and calm (as Eckhart Tolle pushes us towards), but precisely to contend with all the forces of past and future that constantly define the present, to be aware as to what presses on us from all sides. Thus it is easy to buy into Doomsday or apocalyptic narratives that are as abstract – which is precisely what the NYT ended up doing by sensationalising Thiel's worldview. Critique here seems to work only on the back of the sensational and the viral. However Marx shows that the promised utopia and liberation of the General Intellect works in a different way. He shows that the promised Utopia of capitalist freedom is not tied to this or that particular technological discovery or breakthrough which pushes further the tendency to 'reduce labour-time to a minimum'. It is always already at work right since the very inception of capital. This utopia is what is necessary for the mundane, everyday capitalism to work. In fact this utopia lives on nowhere else but as embodied in everyday normal capitalism, in our ordinary material ritualistic practices. It doesn't exist as belief for we do not need to believe in them, but as what Slavoj Zizek calls objectified belief. If you hold that capital was already formed in say the 19th century or at least much before the present day technological advances, then that promise, the utopia of an Intelligence freed from human finitude was always at work, much before the rise of the digital mode. Some scholars seem to identify the beginnings of this utopia at the time of the transition from tools to the machine in the Industrial Revolution. Once energy could be stored, once information about a series of mechanical movements to be performed could be uploaded, a small slice of future work was already freed from its dependence on living labour. James Watt's steam engine is already such a machine, way back in the late 18th century. Intelligence gets a tad bit dissociated from living labour, from the human being. Shall we say then that the steam engine is that machine whose apogee is AI today? Marx's notion of the general intellect then allows us to 'think forwards' about machine intelligence, algorithmic reason as well as 'backwards' with respect to the steam engine. That would be about 250-year history of capitalism which we can traverse in terms of its essential logic. We can then properly understand that philosophically speaking the tech advancements are following a long-forecast script. Conversely, we can then also decipher what is new. Cult of life Silicon Valley's attempt to technologically eliminate human finitude in search of a supposed immortality is both phony and philosophically boring. The attempt to replace or downgrade philosophical reason and thought by machinic intelligence is not just out-of-sync with the human condition as a given fixed a-historical species-being – it is in fact a symptom of a faux dynamism, a stagnancy in the midst of all the hype around futuristic accelerationism. In effect, immortality is here reduced to a drab cult of life, or maybe a more edgy vision of eugenics to produce a superior caste of humans. A cognitive elite is prepared to rule the world, a new caste order. Cult of life entails a fear of death and a clinging to life which is rendered lifeless. I am reminded of what Georges Bataille said of art in relation to life and death. He was dismissive of art for a good reason: 'art, which puts us on the path of complete destruction and suspends us there for a time, offers us ravishment without death'. The cult of life is ravishment without death, a ravished life which tries to outsource the power that death can bring to life. Steeped deep in the cult of life, a kind of libertarian celebration of competition and anti-altruism, it might look like tending towards the Nietzschean ubermensch, particularly if you look at the so-called doomsday survivalist community Peter Thiel wants to build somewhere in New Zealand – but no, it has nothing to do with the Nietzschean vitality of life and tends more towards a postmodern neofeudal order of a new aristocracy, midwifed by liberalism and social democracy. Saroj Giri teaches politics at the University of Delhi. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
Hans India
5 days ago
- Politics
- Hans India
Minor boy detained for alleged links to anti-national posts
Kolar: In a sensitive development raising national security concerns, a 15-year-old boy from the KGF taluk in Karnataka's Kolar district has been detained and questioned by officials from the Internal Security Division and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) over alleged involvement in anti-national activities. The minor is accused of sharing social media posts linked to extremist organizations and repeatedly browsing content related to such groups. The boy, a resident of Dyavara Halli village near Bethamangala, was reportedly under surveillance for suspicious online behavior. Authorities claim that the minor had been posting and interacting with material believed to be associated with certain terrorist outfits. Acting on the findings, central and state intelligence officials picked up the boy for interrogation and questioned him for an entire day before handing him over to Bethamangala police. According to police sources, the boy belongs to a Muslim family originally from Ramakuppam in Andhra Pradesh. The family had migrated to Bengaluru's Medahalli area several years ago for work and had recently moved to Kolar district. The boy was working at a local chicken shop near Bethamangala, having joined the job just 20 days prior to his detention. Officials from the central and internal security agencies had reportedly been monitoring his online activity for several days before initiating action. After the preliminary probe, Bethamangala police booked the minor under charges related to sedition and anti-national activity. He is currently being held at the KGF juvenile home. Police say a detailed investigation is underway to determine whether the boy acted independently or was influenced or instructed by external groups. Authorities are also verifying the nature and origin of the content he accessed and shared. Security agencies have not ruled out the possibility of broader connections and are continuing to track digital footprints related to the case.
The Hill
5 days ago
- Politics
- The Hill
The rise and fall of John Brennan
In 1980, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin saw an ad for the Central Intelligence Agency on a bus. John Brennan decided to apply, thinking that such a job would satisfy his 'wanderlust.' This month, the 'wanderlust' of John Brennan came to an end, as the former CIA director stands accused of false testimony regarding the Russian collusion investigation. Ironically, Brennan was first selected for his honesty — at least in part. During his entry polygraph, Brennan admitted that he had voted for the communist party candidate for president in 1976. He was impressed that the agency took him anyway. That honest young man seems like a faint and tragic echo of the man today. When Obama picked Brennan to be the CIA director, he had become the ultimate Democratic insider and loyalist. And it would be choosing loyalty over honesty that would prove Brennan's undoing. Newly declassified information contradicts Brennan's testimony before Congress on the origins of the now-debunked Russian collusion conspiracy theory. There is a particular focus on the intelligence community assessment commissioned by President Barack Obama in December 2016, which suggested that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump. Obama ordered the assessment after a prior assessment found no evidence of collusion or influence on the election in Trump's favor. But Obama's White House effectively quashed that finding from seasoned CIA analysts. To create a new version, Brennan handpicked new analysts, who effectively flipped the earlier finding on its head without any credible basis in the record. The new assessment relied, to a significant degree, on the Steele dossier, a widely discredited report paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign that contained unfounded allegations about Trump. In testimony on May 23, 2017, Brennan claimed that the Steele dossier 'wasn't part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done.' In short, Brennan dismissed any reliance on the dossier. Yet in the material now declassified, Brennan is shown not just discussing the dossier but insisting upon its inclusion in the new assessment Obama had requested. Indeed, he expressly overruled the CIA's two most senior Russia experts, who said it 'did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.' Analysts were appalled by the use of the Steele dossier and complained that it 'ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment.' One CIA analyst told investigators that '[Brennan] refused to remove it, and when confronted with the dossier's main flaws, [Brennan] responded, 'Yes, but doesn't it ring true?''Brennan expressly ordered its inclusion in the assessment. It would appear not just in an annex but in the main body of the assessment. The timeline here is important. In July 2016, Brennan briefed former President Obama on Hillary Clinton's 'plan' to tie then-candidate Trump to Russia as 'a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.' The original Russia investigation — funded by Clinton's campaign — was launched days after this briefing. The resulting Steele Dossier's funding was hidden as a legal expense by the Clinton campaign's general counsel, Marc Elias. So Brennan and the Obama Administration knew in advance about the planned political hit job. Yet, only months later, Brennan would intervene to force the dossier's inclusion in version 2.0 of the intelligence assessment. Unnamed officials then leaked false information to the media about non-existent intelligence implicating Trump. Keep in mind that Obama's ordering of the new assessment was occurring at the very end of his term. There was a rush to complete the report before Trump took office after defeating Hillary Clinton. The effort seeded the Russian collusion hoax that would consume much of Trump's first term. In other words, it worked. However, it required the involvement of John Brennan, as well as then-FBI Director James Comey. As time went on, Brennan continued to deny prior knowledge of the dossier. He would later become a paid contributor for MSNBC and, in 2018, insisted that he first heard 'just snippets about' the dossier in the 'late summer of 2016.' As an MSNBC regular, Brennan accused Trump of 'treason,' to the delight of the network hosts and viewers. (He later tried to insist that, when he called Trump's actions 'nothing short of treasonous,' he did not actually mean that Trump had 'committed treason.') Whatever professional integrity Brennan had left after that, he set it aside in joining more than 50 former intelligence officials in signing a now-infamous letter dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 presidential election as likely 'Russian disinformation.' Joining him on the letter was former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who says that he has now ' lawyered up ' in anticipation of potential criminal allegations. The laptop, of course, was later found to be authentic and incriminating for Hunter Biden. Back in 2016 and in the years that followed, this must have seemed to Brennan like just another CIA operation with 'plausible deniability.' After all, he knew that he had the Biden administration and the media watching his back. Of course, the public would ultimately reject these hit jobs, not only reelecting Trump but also giving Republicans full control of Congress. Brennan may be protected from perjury charges by the five-year statute of limitations. However, he is likely to be called again before Congress and asked the same questions. Even if he is not criminally charged, his past statements will remain an indictment of his role in history. What is now clear is that high-level officials dismissed intelligence and evidence in order to create and spread the Russian collusion conspiracy as widely as they could. Their politicization of intelligence was raw and wrong. It succeeded only because it was an 'all-hands-on-deck' effort, from the Obama White House to the CIA, the FBI, and the media. The rise and fall of John Brennan is an all-too-familiar Beltway tragedy. People do not lose their idealism in this city in grand moments of corruption. It starts with small lies that steadily reduce your resistance until the biggest lies become happenstance. It can create a type of self-deception as one treats lies as a moral option for the sake of the greater good. In 'A Man for All Seasons,' Sir Thomas More is asked by his loving daughter Meg to sign a false affidavit to save his own life. More tells her, 'When a man takes an oath, he's holding his own self in his own hands like water, and if he opens his fingers then, he needn't hope to find himself again.' In Washington, power tends to loosen fingers over time, and the truth drips out to the point that little recognizable remains. That is the true tragedy. For Brennan, what began as a young man's wanderlust ended in a quagmire of contradictions and deceit. .'
