by WorldTribune Staff, July 25, 2017
Government officials should refuse to follow President Donald Trump’s orders if he fires special counsel Robert Mueller, Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan said.
In effectively calling for the overthrow of the Commander in Chief, Brennan said firing Mueller would be “inconsistent” with the duties of the executive branch.
“I think it’s the obligation of some executive branch officials to refuse to carry that out,” Brennan told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer at the Aspen Security Forum.
Related: ‘Brennan of Arabia’: Emerging truth on the Russia-Trump narrative stranger than fiction, April 20, 2017
“I would just hope that this is not going to be a partisan issue. That Republicans, Democrats are going to see that the future of this government is at stake and something needs to be done for the good of the future.”
Appearing alongside his former colleague at the security forums, which ran from July 19-22, was ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who also served in the Obama administration.
When asked about the June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort with a Russian lawyer and others, Clapper responded: “I’m an old school, Cold War warrior and all that – there’s truth in advertising, great suspicions about the Russians and what they do. A lot of this to me had kind of the standard textbook tradecraft long deployed by Russians. It would have been a really good idea maybe to have vetted whoever they were meeting with.”
Clapper said Trump had asked him to “to put out a statement rebutting the contents” of the discredited Christopher Steele dossier, which Clapper said he “couldn’t and wouldn’t do.”
Referring to the bogus document as “kind of transactional,” Clapper said it was not clear if he wouldn’t and couldn’t do it because the contents were legitimate, in his view, or because the dossier is what started the whole “Russian collusion” narrative in the first place.
Curiously, Clapper saw it as a favor to Trump not to issue a statement.
Asked by Blitzer why he didn’t put out a statement, Clapper replied: “The whole point of the dossier by the way was we felt an obligation to warn him to alert him to the fact it was out there. That was the whole point.”
Meanwhile, Brennan contended that “If Mueller is fired, I hope our elected reps will stand up and say enough is enough.”
Subscribe to Geostrategy-Direct __ Support Free Press Foundation__Drop Us A Line