Rand Paul Names 3 Intelligence 'Bad Apples' That Need to be Removed 'from the Swamp'
Rand Paul is rarely shy about speaking his mind.
Kentucky’s junior senator, a Republican who’s as libertarian in his leanings as his father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, is known to rock the boat almost as often for President Donald Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill as he does for Democrats.
But in a speech Tuesday night in Washington, where he called out some of the “bad apples” in the “swamp of Washington,” Paul was solidly on the president’s side.
“We’ve got some bad apples that need to be dismissed from the swamp of Washington, sent on their way,” Paul said at the conservative group Turning Point USA’s High School Leadership Summit, according to The Hill.
“I’m thinking maybe, how about John Brennan, No. 1.”
It was a target every Trump supporter could applaud.
Brennan, CIA director in the Obama administration, has been one of the most outspoken – and outrageous – members of the “intelligence community” attacking Trump since even before Trump took the oath of office.
Most recently, after the Trump summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Brennan went so far as to brand Trump’s behavior “treasonous.”
Whatever Brennan’s qualifications from his intelligence career – and it’s no small achievement to be named to lead the CIA – calling a sitting president “treasonous” on the basis of a news conference is worse than absurd — it’s unhinged.
(But considering Brennan has a “senior national security intelligence analyst” gig at MSNBC, the liberal news outlet so insanely opposed to the Trump administration that it’s practically a stand-in for the “fake news” media in general, maybe Brennan is just giving his new masters what they’re paying him for.)
Paul made headlines earlier this week when he called for Brennan to lose his national security clearance. (It shocked the mainstream media, of course. Saner people were just shocked to learn loose cannons like Brennan still had a national security clearance.)
Paul repeated the call on Tuesday: “Does anybody in their right mind think that John Brennan, who said that the president is treasonous, should have a security clearance?” he asked.
But Brennan wasn’t Paul’s only target. He also went after former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former FBI Director James Comey.
“James Clapper came to the U.S. Senate in 2013, looked us in the eye, and lied under oath,” Paul said, according to The Hill. (The lie was when Clapper denied that the National Security Agency was collecting data from American citizens.) “This is a felony. James Clapper should be in jail for lying to the government.”
Comey’s problems are well known, of course. He’s going to go down in history as the FBI director who exonerated a clearly guilty Democrat presidential candidate named Hillary Clinton for her mishandling of national security information while she was secretary of state.
But Paul slammed Comey for the FBI’s investigation of the Donald Trump campaign based on spurious documents from the Clinton campaign.
“This has been spin and innuendo and politically driven witch hunt,” Paul said.
Now, Paul’s charges on these three top intelligence officials in the government is serious business. And it’s a lot to lay onto an audience of high school students – even conservative students who are part of an informed group like Turning Point USA.
But Paul had an audience. And he had something to say that needed saying.
And anyone who follows politics knows that Rand Paul is rarely shy about speaking his mind.
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