It was my first time voting in a presidential election, and, while only twenty-one years old, I was already disenchanted with the state of partisan politics in America. Entering the voting booth I had no idea for whom I was going to cast my vote, but I was thrilled at the opportunity to exercise my newfound citizenship privilege. I scanned the seven names listed and stopped at the Communist Party candidate, Gus Hall. I was vaguely familiar with the name but knew nothing about him. I pulled the lever on my protest vote and became one of the 58,709 Americans who voted for Gus Hall that year.
That’s former CIA boss John Brennan in Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies at Home and Abroad. The names he scanned included Libertarian Roger MacBride, former Democrat and independent Eugene McCarthy, Ben Bubar of the Prohibition Party, Socialist Party USA candidate Frank Zeidler, and Lester Maddox of the American Independent Party. Any one would have qualified as a “protest vote” but Brennan picked Gus Hall of the Communist Party USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the USSR. The contention that Brennan, a political science major at Fordham, “knew nothing” about Hall is a stretch.
A Communist since the 1930s, Hall was the CPUSA candidate in 1972, and with the USSR on the march around the world, the Stalinist was much in the news. Even if not a CPUSA member, the vote for Hall should have disqualified Brennan from any post with the CIA. As Ronald Radosh (The Rosenberg File) notes, Clinton national security advisor Anthony Lake failed to become CIA director partly because he thought Soviet spy Alger Hiss might be innocent. By contrast, the CIA hired John Brennan in 1980 and in 2013 the Gus Hall voter came to run the place. What could possibly go wrong?
Brennan believed that jihad was a “holy struggle in pursuit of a moral goal,” not violence against non-Muslims. So no surprise that the CIA failed to prevent 9/11. The Gus Hall voter told his boss George Tenet “there is something I really admire about Obama and am interested in helping if I can,” and in addition to financial contributions, “I wanted to explore other ways to help him get elected.” So no surprise that Brennan shifted the CIA from foreign adversaries to Obama’s domestic opposition, as indicated in the subtitle of his mendacious auto-hagiography published in 2020.
That year Brennan was signatory to the letter branding the Hunter Biden laptop “Russian disinformation,” which he knew was untrue. Look for more tricks like that as the election approaches. Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has endorsed Trump, believes the CIA was involved in the assassination of his uncle, John F. Kennedy. Members of the congressional probe might ask Brennan if he knew anything about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and when he knew it.
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