The Patriot Post® · John Brennan's Security Clearance Revoked

President Trump revoked former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance. It’s about time! Brennan has been actively engaged in the #Resistance movement to bring down the president of the United States and appears to be implicated in the deep-state efforts to spy on the Trump campaign.

Below are excerpts of a statement issued by President Trump explaining the decision:

“Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations … about this Administration. Mr. Brennan’s lying and recent conduct … is wholly inconsistent with access to the Nation’s most closely held secrets and facilitates the very aim of our adversaries, which is to sow division and chaos.

"More broadly, the issue of Mr. Brennan’s security clearance raises larger questions about the practice of former officials maintaining access to our Nation’s most sensitive secrets long after their time in Government has ended. Such access is particularly inappropriate when former officials have transitioned into highly partisan positions and seek to use real or perceived access to sensitive information to validate their political attacks…

"For this reason, I have also begun to review the more general question of the access to classified information by former Government officials.”

Lurch to the Left

The Democrat Party’s lurch to the radical left continues, making it look more and more like the bar scene from Star Wars than a party ready to govern.

In Minnesota, Democrats nominated Rep. Keith Ellison to be attorney general. Ellison has a very checkered past. While he is the deputy chairman of the Democrat National Committee, he is a Muslim who has worked with radical Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

He made news recently for wearing a T-shirt that read in Spanish, “Yo no creo en fronteras.” Translated it means, “I don’t believe in borders.” During a recent interview, he suggested that borders cause “injustice.”

More recently, Ellison was accused of physically abusing a woman with whom he had a relationship in 2016. Tuesday, a police report emerged indicating that he may have assaulted another woman in 2005.

So this is the guy that Minnesota Democrats selected as their choice to be the highest law enforcement authority in their state.

By the way, CNN devoted 24 times more coverage to the domestic abuse allegations against a member of Donald Trump’s staff than it has to the charges against Ellison. How’s that for media bias?

The Democrat nominee to replace Ellison in Congress is Ilhan Omar, who came to this country as a refugee from Somalia. Sadly, she clearly shares Ellison’s anti-Israel attitudes. Omar once called Israel an “apartheid regime” and accused the Jewish state of “doing evil things.”

I mention Omar’s remarks because she seems to be part of a disturbing trend among Muslim Democrats. For example, Rashida Tlaib, another avowed socialist, recently won the Democrat primary for John Conyer’s seat in Michigan.

Tlaib has also called Israel an “apartheid state.” She suggested the U.S. should not be allied with Israel and vowed to oppose aid to Israel. She expressed sympathy for a Palestinian terrorist. And she’s supported by radical anti-Semite Linda Sarsour, who called Tlaib “my mentor, my role model.”

In Wisconsin, eight Democrats ran to challenge Gov. Scott Walker. Working with President Trump, Walker successfully managed to get Foxconn to build a new plant in Wisconsin, which will create 13,000 new jobs. Incredibly, every Democrat, including the primary winner Tony Evers, reflexively opposed the new factory.

Finally in Vermont, Democrats made history by nominating Christine Hallquist, the first major party transgender candidate for governor. While most Americans are rightly concerned about radical Islamic terrorism, Hallquist joins Rosie O'Donnell in worrying about “radicalized Christians.”

The Culture Wars

Students returning to school this month in Alabama, Florida, and Tennessee will be greeted by displays of our national motto, “In God We Trust.” The push to get God back in our schools is part of an initiative supported by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation.

If you like the idea, find other friends who agree with you and talk to your state legislators. But I’m sure lawsuits are coming, which leads me to another observation.

It is the Supreme Court that has caused the culture wars in the United States. Liberals, unable to prevail at the ballot box, rushed to the courts in order to take away the rights of people in diverse states to reflect the values of their states and communities.

Prior to Roe v. Wade, individual states had their own laws on abortion. Some were lax, some were tough. The Supreme Court struck them all down. Prior to 1963, states had different laws on school prayer. The court ruled them all unconstitutional.

Prior to 2015, 30 states had constitutional amendments defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. But five lawyers in black robes thought they knew better than the American people.

Why should judges decide whether Alabama and Florida can post “In God We Trust” in our schools? It’s also on our currency. But as long as left-wing activists and judges insist on imposing their values on the country, the culture wars will rage on.

Speaking of which, the state of Colorado is harassing Jack Phillips again. Like most states, Colorado has a lot to be concerned about — crime, education, transportation issues, the impact of its experiment with legalized marijuana.

But evidently there are some bureaucrats whose number one concern is crushing the rights of a Christian baker. Welcome to left-wing “tolerance,” my friends.

About That Deal…

As you know, I was a fierce opponent of Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran. I am gratified that President Trump has kept his campaign promise to withdraw from that deal.

It was shocking that the Obama administration could make such a bad deal to begin with. At the time, many critics were wondering what they were thinking when they sent billions of dollars to the Iranian regime and why they were so furious that the prime minister of Israel was invited to speak to Congress about the deal.

Well, we don’t have to guess anymore because Wendy Sherman, the lead negotiator of the Iranian nuclear deal, has just written a column in Foreign Affairs explaining what she and her Iranian counterparts were thinking.

For example, on Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, Sherman writes:

“The speech was the equivalent of throwing a grenade into the negotiations. The Iranian negotiators had grown accustomed to Netanyahu’s hyperbolic rhetoric but were incensed by the fact that the U.S. Congress seemed to be endorsing it.”

It is amazing that Sherman seems to sympathize with the Iranian regime when it regularly calls for a second Holocaust and chants “Death to Israel! Death to America!” It calls us “the Great Satan.”

And Netanyahu’s rhetoric is “hyperbolic”?

Regarding her biggest concern about the deal, Sherman explains:

“I always expected that the greatest challenge to the deal’s success would be violations by Iran, not the political machinations of the president of the United States… I don’t know if the Iran deal can survive the reinstatement of sanctions.”

First of all, there were plenty of “political machinations” by President Obama. In fact, his decision to deliberately evade the constitutional process for passing treaties is why President Trump was able to abandon it.

But more importantly, Sherman concedes that she was negotiating a deal to transfer billions of dollars to an enemy with American blood on its hands in spite of the fact that she expected Iran to cheat on the deal!