February 14, 2024: Did John Brennan Ask the “Five Eyes” to Spy on Trump?

Netanyahu vetoes hostage negotiations; The SEIU and the NGO Borg; The Rafah operation and “war crimes”

---

---

The Big Story

One of the enduring mysteries of the Russiagate hoax is the question of how the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, nicknamed “Crossfire Hurricane,” really began. 

There have been several official stories, none of which ever checked out. The first was that it began after Carter Page, an obscure Trump aide, caught the FBI’s attention with a trip to Moscow in July 2016. That story was abandoned when it became clear that the Moscow meeting had been a central element of the Steele dossier, a piece of unverified (and, as it turned out, false) opposition research from the Clinton campaign. As the FBI tried to distance itself from the Steele dossier, the story became that the bureau had been tipped off by Australian intelligence after an even more obscure Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, told an Australian diplomat in May 2016 that an allegedly “Kremlin-linked” academic, Josef Mifsud, had informed him that Russia possessed emails damaging to Hillary Clinton. But that didn’t make much sense either: the FBI never bothered to interview the supposedly central Papadopoulos until January 2017, and it was subsequently revealed that the FBI had interviewed Page in March 2016, before the allegedly incriminating Papadopoulos meeting ever happened. To make matters more confusing, The Guardian reported in April 2017 that British intelligence officers began passing reports on “suspicious activity” among Trump’s aides to their U.S. counterparts as early as “late 2015”—before Page or Papadopolous joined the Trump campaign. 

Now, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag have published some explosive claims in the Substack “Public” that could finally make some sense of the whole mess. Citing “sources close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) investigation,” they report that the U.S. Intelligence Community, led by Obama CIA Director John Brennan, had asked the other “Five Eyes” intelligence services (those of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) to spy on Trump’s associates and share the information they gathered with the U.S. IC—a direct violation of laws prohibiting warrantless spying on Americans as well as a rather flagrant attempt by the IC to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. According to one source, Brennan personally identified 26 Trump associates as “people to ‘bump,’ or make contact with or manipulate.” 

According to the report in “Public,” the first target was neither Page nor Papadopolous but Gen. Michael Flynn, who was approached by Stefan Halper, a Cambridge academic and CIA informant, in March 2016. Halper, who also later identified Page to U.S. intelligence, was paid more than $400,000 in September 2016 for two studies on the Chinese economy by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, which a source described to “Public” as an office “to pay off spies.” The “Public” report also identifies Papadopoulos as a victim of Five Eyes “bumping”:

A Maltese professor named Josef Mifsud approached or “bumped” another Trump aide named Geroge Papadopoulos. … House Democrats on the Intelligence Committee called Mifsud “Kremlin-linked” and a Russian “cutout.” But a source told Public and Racket that Mifsud was “a professor who really worked for MI6.”

Brennan did not respond to the request for comment from “Public.” 

To help make sense of this report, we reached out to Tablet writer and retired CIA officer Peter Theroux. Here’s what he told us via email, lightly edited for concision:

I don’t know enough about how the Office of Net Assessments works to comment about that, though the amount of $400,000 seems absurd, since the IC tends to pay in the tens of thousands of dollars for routine academic papers. When I was at CIA, a highly prestigious Beltway bandit think tank tried to peddle to my office a research project on tribal networks in Iran, for $500,000. They boasted they had sources in Dubai. Dubai! Can you imagine how slick these daredevil savants were to penetrate DUBAI?! We told them to take a hike, needless to say. Maybe the Pentagon with its bazillion-dollar toilet seats has looser accounting principles. … I wouldn’t know.

What I DO know is that spying on Americans is such a third rail that when I was serving in Iraq, we had to jump through hoops to collect against foreign terrorists who were using Yahoo Messenger with U.S. area code accounts, so great are the guardrails in place to protect U.S. persons from our legitimate espionage work. So I can see why a hyper-partisan snake like Brennan would try to work around the system.

This moral ecosystem links Brennan and other Intelligence Community slimeballs to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the preposterous attempt to pretend Hunter Biden’s laptop wasn’t Hunter Biden’s laptop. Add to that that Brennan won’t comment. Mister Blarney Stone himself, whose big uncontrollable Irish yap is his great pride and joy, can’t utter a syllable denying this story? I would stack all my chips on the allegations of dirty deeds to target Trump being true.

“Public” has promised to publish more material from a “top-secret Russia collusion binder” soon—we’ll let you know if that offers any clarification. 

Read the story here:

CIA Had Foreign Allies Spy On Trump Team, Triggering Russia Collusion Hoax, Sources Say

IN THE BACK PAGES: Columbia professor Shai Davidai and his wife, Yerdenne Greenspan, on the campaign to cancel them for speaking out against Hamas

---

The Rest

→On Wednesday, Israeli media reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ruled out sending Israeli negotiators back to Cairo for further hostage talks, after the U.S.-, Egyptian-, and Qatari-mediated negotiations with Hamas ended without a breakthrough on Tuesday. According to a report in The Times of Israel, Netanyahu’s office said that no progress could be made until Hamas abandoned its “delusional” negotiating positions. Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, the two opposition leaders in the war cabinet, were reportedly “angered” by Netanyahu’s decision.

→Michael Watson, research director of the Capital Research Center and managing editor of InfluenceWatch, shared with The Scroll some of his research on the Service Employees International Union (SEUI), the 1.8-million-strong union of largely government and para-governmental workers that has become a powerful player in the progressive fundraising, lobbying, and activism machine. Here are some of the highlights from Watson’s research, which show how “organized labor,” as it has become more dependent on college-educated public-sector employees and thus the Democratic Party and its donor base, has evolved from a lobby for economically liberal and socially moderate workers into yet another element of the NGO Borg:

• The SEIU is a founding member of the Democracy Alliance, a nonprofit network of Democratic megadonors that “coordinates [the flow of] hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions” to “activists and operatives in the charitable sector.” 

• Workers United-SEIU, an SEIU division, has a “substantial ownership” stake in Amalgamated Bank of New York, and Workers United-SEIU President Lynne Fox chairs the Amalgamated board. Amalgamated is an “institutional pillar” of the Democratic Party whose clients include the Democratic National Committee, the Democrat-aligned Senate Majority PAC, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, and progressive nonprofits such as Color of Change and the League of Conservation Voters. Amalgamated has partnered with the Southern Poverty Law Center to pressure other financial institutions to prevent clients from using donor-advised funds to donate to groups deemed “hateful” by the SPLC, including mainstream center-right groups such as the Center for Immigration Studies.

• The SEIU also directly spends tens of millions of its own money on political causes, including $46 million in the 2022 elections. Among the recipients of SEIU money:

  • Progressive voter registration hubs (America Votes), candidate training groups (Emerge America and re:power), and groups for developing left-wing ballot measures (Ballot Initiative Strategy Center and The Fairness Project)

  • Courier Newsroom, the George Soros-backed Democratic digital propaganda outlet that operates “local news” sites in several battleground states

  • New Venture Fund and Sixteen Thirty Fund, the charitable and lobbying arms of the Arabella Advisors network

  • The Women’s March

  • Various groups linked with Black Lives Matter’s Alicia Garza, including women’s group Supermajority and the Center for Empowered Politics, which is both the lobbying arm of the Chinese Progressive Association and the fiscal sponsor of Garza’s Black Futures Lab

→Two stories that are actually the same story. 

1. In a Wednesday X thread, former Netanyahu adviser Caroline Glick identified two recent examples of Biden-friendly leaders of the Israeli opposition—former prime minister Ehud Barak and anti-judicial reform protest leader Ami Dror—speculating about various legal and parliamentary paths to force new elections by June. The purpose, as Barak explains, is to remove Netanyahu from office so that a new government can accept the Biden administration’s allegedly generous offer of Saudi normalization paired with a political process leading to a two-state solution. 

2. Breitbart News reports on a new poll from Israel’s Channel 14 news, which showed Netanyahu receiving the support of 47% of the sample, vs. 34% for Gantz—his largest lead since Oct. 7. 

Bottom line: Washington’s fretting about Israeli democracy aside, on the question of the two-state solution, it’s Netanyahu, not Barak or Biden, who reflects the views of the Israeli people. 

→In yesterday’s Big Story, we described the Biden influence-peddling operation as a form of “corruption by proxy,” in which wealthy individuals buy access to a politician by paying off their family members. This type of corruption is relatively common because the old style—suitcases full of cash, transfers to Swiss bank accounts, etc.—is simply too obvious. But credit to Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) for keeping the old ways alive: New court filings from federal prosecutors in their ongoing corruption case describe bags full of cash, boots stuffed with $50 bills, and a $12,000 diamond ring for Menendez’s wife, as part of a scheme by the Egyptian government to bribe Menendez in exchange for foreign aid and nonpublic information about the U.S. government. The initial federal indictment from September 2023 charged Menendez with receiving gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz convertible, and mortgage payments to interfere in investigations into two New Jersey businessmen linked to the Egyptian government’s cutout, an Egyptian American businessman named Wael Hana. A January 2024 update to that indictment alleged that one of those New Jersey businessmen also provided Menendez with “cash, furniture, and gold bars” in exchange for Menendez, then the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, taking action to benefit the government of Qatar, from which the businessman was seeking tens of millions of dollars in investments.

→The United States, United Nations, and International Criminal Court have been warning Israel over its impending ground operation in Rafah for several days, with the chief prosecutor of the ICC saying Monday that Israel could face “war crimes” charges. Also, South Africa filed an urgent request asking the International Court of Justice to immediately “order provisional measures” to prevent the impending “genocide”—citing the sole precedent of a Clinton-era case involving the consular rights of two German nationals convicted of murder in Arizona. As we’ve been saying since October, the case that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza is bogus according to any credible reading of international law, as Salo Aizenberg explains in our Thread of the Day:

→Quote of the Day: 

Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has inevitably drawn comparisons to other battles or wars, both modern and from the past. These comparisons are mostly used to make the case that Israel's operations in Gaza are the most destructive in history, or the deadliest in history.

Yet while the use of historical analogy may be tempting for armchair pundits, in the case of Israel's current war, the comparisons are often poorly cited, the data used inaccurate, and crucial context left out. Given the scale and context of an enemy purposely entrenched in densely populated urban areas, as well as the presence of tunnels, hostages, rockets, attackers that follow the laws of war while defenders purposely do not, and proximity between the frontlines and the home front, there is basically no historical comparison for this war.

That’s from the latest article in Newsweek by West Point’s John Spencer, who has been a reliable source of level-headed and genuinely expert analysis since the start of the war. 

Read the rest here: https://www.newsweek.com/memo-experts-stop-comparing-israels-war-gaza-anything-it-has-no-precedent-opinion-1868891 

→Happy Valentine’s Day from The Scroll. If you’re in need of a mood-setter, here’s a live recording of Chet Baker singing “My Funny Valentine” in Turin, in 1959:

---

TODAY IN TABLET: 

Words as Shelter, by Jake Marmer

Mireille Gansel’s new collection of poetry teaches us how to make ourselves at home in a broken world

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---

What Happens When You Teach at Columbia and Reject Hamas

A professor and his wife saw their lives upended by their decision to denounce terrorism in Israel and antisemitism in America

By Shai Davidai and Yardenne Greenspan

Speaking up against Hamas’ crimes against humanity and against the student organizations that support it ruined our lives. Almost two weeks after Oct. 7, as Shai felt compelled to speak up against the antisemitic, pro-Hamas storm raging on U.S. campuses, we realized that nothing would ever be the same.

It happened suddenly and all at once. The day after giving an impassioned speech during an anti-terror vigil on Columbia’s campus, every one of Shai’s inboxes was overflowing with messages. People had seen him at his rawest and most vulnerable—heartbroken, abandoned, and betrayed—and they felt the same. Reading through thousands of missives of encouragement and commiseration from Jewish parents and students, Holocaust and Oct. 7 survivors, and concerned non-Jews from all over the world, we felt our souls cracking open to let in our people’s anxiety and grief. For the first time since the dreadful massacre, we didn’t feel completely alone.

But other messages started coming in, too. One friend blocked Yardenne on social media. Another said that speaking up against organizations who openly support Hamas was not a good look. A third, stating her discomfort with how much of our attention was devoted to the kidnapped Israeli civilians, cut ties. A close friend of Shai’s from graduate school simply stopped returning his calls.

At first, we assumed this was all a big misunderstanding. We thought that if we could only get our friends to see what our childhood under constant suicide bombings was like, they would realize the depravity of student protesters calling for another intifada. We thought that we could get our friends to realize that there is no meaningful difference between the families slaughtered on Israel’s southern border and our own families, who live just 55 miles away. We thought that if we could only give voice to our people’s pain and suffering, our friends would not so flippantly reject our lived experiences. We thought that our friends would let us grieve. We were naive and we were wrong.

As leftist, liberal Zionists, we have always made a clear distinction between the people of Palestine and the inhumane terror organizations that falsely purport to speak in their name. Our support for a two-state solution has never wavered, and to this day we remain staunchly opposed to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, refrain from buying products manufactured beyond the 1967 armistice line, and protest any governmental policy that we see as oppressive or unjust. Surely, we thought, our seemingly liberal friends would see that we, too, deserve to be heard.

This is what we got wrong. We failed to realize that for many in our “progressive” circle, being a liberal Israeli just wasn’t good enough. If we had kept quiet, they might have been willing to accept us as equals. If we apologized for Israel’s existence, they might have even given us some extra points. But exposing Hamas’ atrocities and the support it was gaining among young Americans? Naming the kidnapped children and begging the world to help bring them home? Giving voice to the Israeli victims of mass rape by Hamas terrorists? For our friends, our refusal to apologize for Israel’s existence simply deemed us intolerable. Their minds were already made up. They wouldn’t even let us plead our case.

It took us a while to understand it, but once we did everything started making sense: Our friends did not have a problem with our politics, they had a problem with our identity. Our friends were willing to overlook the fact that we were Jewish Israelis, but only so long as we shut up about it. For many in our “enlightened” circle, our ethnic and national identity was an unfortunate accident, something to apologize for rather than take pride in. We failed to realize that for many, our people’s continued existence was not a high priority.

While some friends offered support and empathy, the love from others turned out to be conditional at best. Colleagues ghosted us. Some have actively turned against us. Far from bloodthirsty or belligerent, the fact that we refused to quiver in the face of those who call for our demise was not something they could live with. They wanted us to be silent and weak and apologetic—the perfect Jewish victim. Standing up for ourselves made us unacceptable.

We did not see this coming. But now that we’ve seen it, we will never unsee it. We will never forget the gaslighting. We will never forget the denial of our trauma. We will never forget the victim-blaming and the way they had us believing that advocating for our own lives was an injustice to others. Some things are just not so easy to brush off.

As Shai continued to call out Columbia University’s moral cowardice, we began to receive another kind of hatred—the public, faceless kind so easy to mete out from behind a keyboard. Every morning, as we sift through the hundreds of hateful emails and online comments that Shai receives each day, we are reminded that life will never be the same again. From memes of rats with big, curving noses to threats of physical violence, from the publicizing of our personal information to the dissemination of egregious lies about Shai and his parents, from unsubstantiated criticism of Shai’s professional conduct to conspiratorial antisemitic rants, we believe we’ve seen it all. Shai is regularly called a Nazi, a Zionist pig, a genocidal baby murderer, a kike. Thousands have called for his death. While a few people get in touch privately to offer their support, almost none of our friends have dared to publicly stand by his side. Many of Shai’s colleagues are regularly cc’d on these hateful missives. None have spoken up.

Our pain is miniscule compared to that of the thousands of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost their loved ones on and since Oct. 7. Our pain is miniscule compared to that of the 134 kidnapped civilians and their heartbroken families. Our pain is miniscule compared to that of the hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians in Gaza and the hundreds of thousands of displaced Israelis from its northern and southern regions. And yet, our pain is real, and the inability of some of our closest friends to accept the legitimacy of our pain only adds more heartache.

But while speaking up may have ruined our lives, it also made them so much better.

Since Shai spoke out against the support for terror on U.S. campuses, a number of friends and acquaintances have made a point of being there for us. We may not see eye to eye about everything, but we agree on the fundamentals. We agree that both Israelis and Palestinians have a right to exist. We agree that Hamas is the problem, not the solution. We agree that the status quo will have to change. And we agree that rape is never, ever, ever OK. These are the people who will never turn against us. These are the people who will always show up.

We have also made new friends—activists, protesters, and true warriors of justice. Vocal and brave Jewish and non-Jewish allies who, like us, have put their lives, jobs, and reputations on the line. Like us, many of them have lost people whom they’d believed were their friends. Like us, many of them are frightened and heartbroken and worried. But we have found each other, and we have each other’s backs. Our new community accepts us for who we are, not for who it wants us to be. Together, we are working toward making a real difference.

We want the war to end, the hostages to return home, and for peace to become a tangible goal, not an empty election slogan. We want to strengthen the State of Israel as a liberal, democratic haven for Jewish people everywhere. We want the Jewish people to be recognized as a minority worthy of protection and celebration. We want the world to show up for us in the same way that we have repeatedly showed up, and will continue to show up, for so many others.

We may have lost some friends, but we gained something much more valuable: a tribe. Sabras and diasporic, religious and secular, left and right, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, gay and straight, we are all coming together as Jews. We all share a deep understanding that has become impossible to ignore since Oct. 7: We are part of one big family, and we are all in this together. Whatever happens and despite our differences, as long as we refuse to be silenced and remain united, we will get through this. We always do.