Eli Lake, Columnist

Trump Is Not Trying to Silence Brennan

The president’s strategy is the opposite: to make the former CIA director more prominent and use him as a foil.

August 16, 2018 at 4:34 PM EDT

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

The new face of the resistance?
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President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan is, according to conventional wisdom, an effort to silence his critics.

This is what Brennan himself says, though there’s no need to take his word for it; James Clapper, former director of national intelligence and potential target for security clearance retaliation, agrees. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, which had harsh words for Brennan during his tenure at the CIA, says Trump’s action violate Brennan’s First Amendment rights.

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