Juan Cole evaluates this significance of this interview in Former CIA Dir.: Trump is afraid of Putin Kompromat Informed Comment 11/13/2017:
The former director of the Central Intelligence Agency openly alleged the real possibility that the sitting president of the United States is being successfully blackmailed and that policy is being made as a result of Trump’s fear of exposure.I've never felt comfortable with Democrats or liberals puffing that they're shocked! shocked! I tell you shocked! that Republicans or anyone else would dare question our sacred intelligence agencies. That's a silly and even irresponsible position to take.
Brennan was clear that he has no proof that Trump is compromised.
But Brennan would not make this allegation unless he had at least circumstantial evidence of “kompromat” or compromising materials in the hands of Putin, of the release of which Trump is deeply afraid.
James Clapper was Director of National Intelligence (DNI) under Obama (2010-2017), Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under Shrub Bush and then Obama (2007-2010), Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under Old Man Bush and Bill Clinton (1991-1995). He is a hawkish Democrat affiliated now with the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).
John Brennan was Director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Shrub Bush (2004-2005), Homeland Security Adviser to Obama (2004-2005), and Director of the CIA under Obama (2013-2017).
I might look at those backgrounds and wish that President Obama had been more cautious about appointing people to senior positions who had been comfortable working in high positions from an irresponsible warmongering like George W. Bush.
But by the same token, it would be difficult to look at those backgrounds and honestly conclude that these were liberal Democratic ideological hacks.
It is also important to remember that some of the claims about the 2016 election interference that were accepted by the Democrats and the press didn't pan out exactly the way they were publicized. This MSNBC segment includes a reminder that the "17 intelligence agencies" trope that Hillary Clinton used in a debate with Trump was not actually true. The most relevant intelligence agencies - the CIA, the FBI and the NSA, endorsed by the Director of National Intelligence - did find that there was real Russian interference.
What Happened To America First? | Kasie DC | MSNBC 11/13/2017;
Dana Priest provides some useful perspective in this piece looking at whether we should fault the US intelligence agencies and the Obama Administration for failing to report publicly during the election campaign what they believed they knew with confidence on Russia interference, Russia’s Election Meddling Is Another American Intelligence Failure New Yorker 11/13/2017.
I found this observation particularly interesting:
Government analysts have always viewed open-source information, or OSINT, as it is called in the intelligence world, as a poor substitute for classified information. Intelligence officials often dismiss the importance of public pronouncements by foreign leaders, actions recorded by journalists, data collected by university professors, and discussions at open conferences. It is a decades-old problem. In 2002, the practice helped blind U.S. intelligence officials to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s evidence that Iraq did not actually possess weapons of mass destruction. In 2010, it blinded them again to the Arab Spring revolutions brewing across the Middle East. Devaluing OSINT has become a more significant problem as Russia and China use social media as an arena to wage disinformation operations.
Unless F.B.I. agents and American intelligence officers get over this bias, they will continue asking for special powers to snoop on Internet users in ways that should not be allowed. If they are denied their surveillance requests, they will likely throw up their hands and say that they then can’t help fix the problem. [my emphsis]
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