Despite the paranoid fantasies, Brennan's testimony was widely praised as he suggested that any dealing with Russia or Russians or Russian businesses or possible Russian cutouts could put an American under counterintelligence suspicions because, hey, you never know.
"We see that Russian intelligence agencies do not hesitate at all to use private companies and Russian persons who are unaffiliated with the Russian government to support their objectives," Brennan warned.
No Edward R. Murrow
There was a time when some Democrats, some Republicans and a few courageous journalists objected to this kind of broad-brush challenge to the patriotism of American citizens. CBS News correspondent Edward R. Murrow famously stood up to Sen. Joe McCarthy and his Red Scare in the 1950s. It was then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton who chastised President George H.W. Bush during a 1992 presidential debate for making an issue of Clinton's student trip to Moscow during the Cold War.
After Bush referenced Clinton's Moscow visit, Clinton hit back: "When Joe McCarthy went around this country attacking people's patriotism, he was wrong. He was wrong, and a senator from Connecticut stood up to him, named Prescott Bush. Your father was right to stand up to Joe McCarthy. You were wrong to attack my patriotism."
But that was then. These days, Hillary Clinton and her Democratic allies have led the smearing of Trump supporters as possible Kremlin agents, albeit without proof of the so-called "collusion" or even clear evidence that Russia did "meddle" in last November's election.
And the backdrop for this New Cold War is that since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 -- and the end of the Old Cold War -- many Americans have done business in Russia and many Russians have invested in the United States. A Russian oligarch, Mikhail Prokhorov, even owns the Brooklyn Nets of the National Basketball Association.
The recent tensions are also not entirely the making of Russia or its President Vladimir Putin. The past several U.S. administrations have exploited the disarray from the Soviet collapse to push NATO up to Russia's borders.
U.S. officials also encouraged the violent 2014 putsch in Ukraine that overthrew elected President Viktor Yanukovych. Actively involved in Yanukovych's overthrow were senior U.S. officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, and Sen. John McCain. Several weeks before the coup, Nuland and Pyatt were caught on an unsecure phone line discussing who should take over the Ukrainian government and musing how to "midwife" or "glue this thing."
The coup also followed the specific targeting of Ukraine as "the biggest prize" by neocon Carl Gershman, the president of the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which sponsored scores of political and media operations inside Ukraine. (Gershman is now calling for regime change in Russia.)
But the U.S. mainstream media essentially ignored this evidence of U.S. complicity in the Ukraine coup and accepted the State Department's propaganda line that the post-coup resistance to Yanukovych's overthrow among ethnic Russians in Crimea and eastern Ukraine was simply the result of "Russian aggression." The New York Times even denied that there had been a coup in an article that studiously ignored the evidence that there had been a coup, including the Nuland-Pyatt phone call.
Swallowing U.S. Propaganda
Similarly, the mainstream U.S. media has swallowed every evidence-free claim from the Obama administration's intelligence agencies without any skepticism. Indeed, the MSM has hyped those claims beyond even what the Obame team says by ignoring factual admissions from former CIA Director Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper about the limited nature of the intelligence "assessment" on Russian election interference.
The MSM has so enjoyed claiming that the Russian "meddling" allegations are the consensus judgment of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies that a blind eye and a deaf ear have been turned to Brennan and Clapper contradicting that beloved groupthink.
In recent testimony, Clapper and Brennan acknowledged that the Jan. 6 report alleging Russian "meddling" was actually the work of hand-picked analysts from only four agencies -- the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation under the oversight of the DNI's office. But that fact continues to be ignored by the MSM, with the Post on Wednesday castigating Trump for refusing "to fully accept the unanimous conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies."
If a non-MSM news outlet had published such a misleading claim from a different perspective -- after U.S. senior officials had denied it -- we would be hearing charges of "fake news" or perhaps accusations of "Russian disinformation." But clearly the Post doesn't want to give up on this formulation of unanimity among the 17 intelligence agencies even if it's not true.
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