All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 15, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
25:19
Episode 182 Scott Adams: John Brennan Losing His Security Clearance
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
- Come on in here.
Hey Julie and other people.
Ken, come on in here.
Jess, I'm not going to say that name.
Donna, come on in here.
We got breaking news.
Breaking news!
And it's the funny kind.
It's your favorite kind.
What kind of news is better than the funny kind?
Nothing. Let me turn off my phone here.
So if you're watching the news, you know that Sarah Sanders has announced that the president has decided to revoke The security clearance of John Brennan, who was the CIA chief under Obama.
But more recently, he's been President Trump's most vocal, probably most vocal and powerful critic.
If you combine vocal and powerful together, probably the most vocal, credible sounding person.
Hey, Josh.
And let me tell you all the things that are right about this.
I don't know where to start.
So I'm watching CNN's coverage.
And if you watch my Periscope this morning, you know I talked about How CNN and other news sites, you know, they're not unique, but they have this characteristic, that they try to make you think past the sale.
And they're doing it on this story again, because the story that they're reporting is, is the president doing this for political reasons, or is it to take Omarosa off the headlines?
So those are the two choices that CNN has presented to the audience.
One choice, he's doing it just for political revenge, to shut people up.
And the other choice CNN gives you is maybe it's to take Omarosa out of the headlines.
What's missing? Isn't there sort of a big choice missing?
After you.
In the comments, please tell me what choice is missing.
It's going to take a while for the comments to catch up.
So let me jump to the answer.
The answer is, one of the options that they are not presenting the listeners is that John Brennan can't be trusted.
That option has not been presented.
Well, it's obviously been presented by the President.
But why is it that CNN can't put that on the table?
Because we don't know the reason.
We don't know if it was only to change the headlines.
We don't know if it was only to punish or shut these people up.
But we also don't know if there was a really good reason.
Shouldn't we put that out there?
Three possibilities.
The other thing that CNN is reporting is that Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, was not consulted before this decision.
But they agree that the president can make this decision.
He has full authority.
Now, here's the question.
That I haven't seen on CNN yet.
I'm sure they'll get to it.
And the question is, if the President doesn't trust John Brennan, what the hell else does he have to do?
Who else does he have to talk to?
If the President of the United States, who knows for sure whether or not he colluded with the Russians, you know, you and I, we're guessing, right?
We weren't there. My assumption is he did not.
But if we're being fair, a lot of the country, including John Brennan, believes that he's in Putin's pocket.
But there is one person who knows for sure if he's Putin's puppet.
The president. So if the president doesn't trust John Brennan, I think the word that they used was erratic.
It looks like John Brennan is trying to bring down the government over something that the president knows for sure is either true or false.
You and I don't know, but the president knows.
So given that the president knows the answer to that question and he doesn't trust John Brennan, did he really need to consult anyone?
I don't think so. I don't think he needed to consult anyone.
Because he knew everything he needed to know.
He knows if he's guilty.
Presumably he's not.
And he knows that John Brennan is trying to convince the country that he is.
Which is one of the biggest risks to the country you could ever imagine.
So, it was completely irrelevant.
If Dan Coates weighed in on the value of his clearance.
Now keep in mind, the security clearance taken away can be reassigned.
So if there were some particular security, let's say some emergency came up and we just needed Brennan's input, how long would it take to give him his security clearance back?
I don't know, an hour?
You can always give it back, so it's not like anything's truly lost.
So let me tell you what else I like about this.
The president was put on the defensive with this, Omarosa saying, well, there's this tape out there, but probably not.
You know, all the evidence is that there's not.
But it still was enough for the news to say, can you prove?
Here's the fun part.
Pay attention to this.
So the press is saying, can you prove that no tape will ever show up?
Well, you can't really prove a negative, can you?
But now, I don't think this is the purpose of it, but in a strange twist of events, Brennan and the other people who are at risk of losing their clearance, we'll talk about them in a minute, Are all in a position of kind of having to explain why they should keep their security clearance.
Because it sort of makes them a little bit guilty of something.
So even if they're not, it puts the onus on them to kind of explain how they lost their security clearance.
Yeah. So that part's good politics.
But... The other thing I like about this is that the way it was done is just wrong enough because it's all Republicans and it's all people who have been critical of the president and the reasons given are not, you know, something solid that you can look at and say, oh, there's the thing he did wrong, that's why.
So it strikes us That there's something, I don't know, that's not quite right with this decision.
It's not buttoned up, right?
There's a little bit of uncertainty here.
Bingo. Perfect.
If you want to take something else out of the headlines, don't do it with something that has a good reason behind it.
Do it with something that can be interpreted a little bit differently because that's what gets all the attention.
So the fact that the critics of the president have lots of stuff to work with means he just filled up their agenda for the rest of the evening.
So, the imperfection of the way it's done is part of the feature.
This is one of those cases where the bug is a feature.
Because attention is more important than details in this and many other situations.
But here's my favorite part.
Are you ready for this?
There are a lot of interesting elements to this, but here's my favorite part.
President Trump...
Just branded the deep state.
If you haven't seen the picture that CNN was running, and this is truly funny.
I took a picture of it so you can see it.
All right. So if you can see it, here's a picture that CNN was running.
So there's Brennan here, but here are the faces of the other people who are likely to lose their security clearance, so apparently they've been mentioned.
Doesn't this look a little like a most wanted list?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the first time The alleged deep state has appeared in one place on CNN. He just branded the deep state.
The best brander in the world just made CNN brand the deep state and they can't stop doing it.
They can't stop reporting on this.
It's just too interesting.
So, from now until the end of the week, you're going to watch the president's enemies brand the deep state and tell you exactly who's in it.
Allegedly. And make everybody look into it a little more like, hey, you're going to have people look at that list and say, well, I've heard of a few of these people, but who's Sally Yates?
Most of you know. But a lot of people are going to be like, I better look into it.
Let me Google a couple of these people.
Why are they all on the same list?
What do they have in common?
Now, CNN keeps asking this question of their pundits.
They say, hey, what is it that all these people have in common?
And, of course, they're leading the witness to say, well, these are people who have criticized the president.
Absolutely true.
They might also say that, hey, why isn't General Flynn on there because he lied to the FBI? Well, here's a reason.
General Flynn still has the trust of the President.
That would be one reason. But here's the other reason that the CNN pundits are not offering.
The other thing that that group has in common is that they were trying to overthrow the United States.
Allegedly. So, in our two-movie world, one movie is the President's doing everything wrong and he has lots of critics.
That's how CNN is trying to frame it.
But in the other movie, this group of people allegedly are part of the deep state attempt to take down the president because they didn't like the election results.
Allegedly. Now, we live in a world where you can't really ever be sure what's true.
Somebody saying only tinfoil has, God believes this.
I'm getting to that. You're getting ahead of me.
I personally have no solid evidence that any of those people on that list were actively trying to take down the president.
Oh sure, there's lots of stuff that looks that way.
But keep in mind, there was lots of stuff that looked true on Pizzagate.
It just wasn't true. There was lots of stuff that looked true on the Meg Martin school case, which I probably should talk about here in a moment.
So it's very common for there to be tons of things that suggest something's true and still not be true.
It's very common.
But we have these two competing movies.
One is the president is working with Putin and the election was determined by the Russians.
And the other is that the deep state is working against the legally elected president.
So now the president has solidified the brand of the opposition.
And the more that they complain, The more they become branded.
So they're now self-branding from this point on.
Because you can't really say Brennan lost his security clearance without mentioning the others.
It's too connected to the story.
You just have to mention them as a group.
It's perfect. It's perfect in terms of politics and persuasion.
You can make your own decisions on the ethics and the morality of any of this stuff.
Anything I've talked about, feel free to put your own layer of ethics and morality on it.
We're not ignoring it. I'm just trusting you to do it.
You don't need me for that. Let's talk about a little detour here to the case.
There's some kind of Pennsylvania situation where there are hundreds or a thousand alleged kids who were apparently the victims, allegedly, of Catholic priests.
And I was watching the coverage of that this morning.
And, you know, if I hear a story about a Catholic priest molesting somebody, I'm biased toward thinking that's probably true.
Because there have been enough stories of it happening that you say, if you hear another one, it's very sad and it's probably true.
But this morning I heard allegations of of what allegedly some of these priests did that are so over the top that I call bullshit.
Now I don't call bullshit on every allegation because it seems to me likely that some of them are real.
But when you start hearing that the priest was drinking the bodily fluids of five sisters and washing out the mouth of one of the victims with holy water, I'm sorry.
You've gone too far.
And we have a precedent for this exact thing.
Two precedents. One is Pizzagate.
Plenty of evidence for Pizzagate.
It just wasn't true.
And if you are not familiar with the McMartin preschool case in the 70s, I think, maybe, maybe 80s, you should do it.
Research the McMartin case.
And you'll see that there was a preschool in which the preschool management, 80s, somebody is correcting me.
The management of a preschool, they were accused of horrible satanic rituals and abuse of children.
And there was a lot of evidence.
There was a lot of evidence.
Because they would interview the children and say, hey, is there a secret room underneath the school where people are taking kids?
And some of those kids would say, yep, I've been in that room.
I got abused.
Weird things happened. And none of it was true.
There were no rooms under the school.
No evidence ever corroborated any of it.
And in the end, smart people looked at the tapes of the police, I think the police, interviewing the children, and it became obvious that they were leading the children to make up stories.
And then they were encouraging them and sort of complimenting them when the stories were the type that they wanted to hear.
Kids are very impressionable.
You can make them make up a story really easily.
And when you're done, they'll actually believe it.
That's the weird part. So when you look at this Catholic priest story and you hear that there are a thousand victims, there are two possibilities.
Three, I suppose. But two, likely.
Number one, there are a thousand victims of sexual abuse.
Maybe every part of that is true.
And it wouldn't be wholly impossible because there's such a track record of things like this happening that on its surface, you'd say, could be true.
Now, the odds of all of it being false...
It's not impossible. My feeling, my bias, is that there's something to it.
But somebody's saying, it's true, dude.
Yeah, my bias is the same.
So my bias says, probably with that much smoke, there's something to it.
But the third possibility is that there's something to it, but that whoever is doing the interviews are leading the witnesses.
So don't assume that the stories, the most spectacular stories you hear about that are true.
Somebody just said that Brennan tweeted.
We're gonna have to see that.
Okay. Here we go.
John Brennan, six minutes ago, he said, talking about him losing his security clearance on the President's decision.
Brennan says, this action is part of a broader effort by Mr.
Trump to suppress freedom of speech and punish critics.
It should gravely worry all Americans, including intelligence professionals, about the cost of speaking out.
My principles are worth far more than clearances.
I will not relent.
Now notice how he's trying to make it a free speech story.
He's making you think past the sale.
The sale is can he be trusted?
That's what the sale is.
And he's making you think past it to, well, obviously I can be trusted.
Let's talk about the president denying my freedom of speech and my perfectly good thoughts that I say on TV. And I'm trying to think, does losing his security clearance at this point make any difference to him?
I don't really understand what kind of difference that would make.
The only thing you could do with it that I could think of would be bad stuff.
Let's say, for example, If John Brennan had secret sources in the government who could still tell him stuff if he had security clearance but then could not tell him stuff once he loses it.
I'm not sure if that's real because just having security clearance is different from people being allowed to talk to you.
Those are slightly different decisions.
But I can't think of anything he could use that security clearance for While he doesn't have a government intelligence job, is there?
What did he lose by any of this?
So if he lost nothing, did the president really shut him down?
Oh, actually, there is an argument that he might shut down people who are still working for the government.
So I guess he has an argument that it probably has little to do with what Brennan does, but it might have a chilling effect on other people in the future.
So I think that's a good point.
But in order for that to be a good point, you have to think past the sale.
Because if Brennan is a bad actor, then taking away a security clearance is nothing but a good decision.
And good decisions should not be anything that affects the ability of other people to have free speech.
He has an NDA. Brennan is trusted more than Trump, somebody says.
That is not true.
Well, it might be true if you did a poll.
But I think it would be more clear to say that Trump supporters trust Trump and anti-Trumpers trust Brennan.
But that has nothing to do with either one of them being trustworthy.
Bigger question, why did Trump bother?
Well, you must have missed the insightful first part of my Periscope where I talked about that.
Spied and lied.
Yeah, somebody says he spied and lied.
Rand Paul says he monetized his security clearance.
I don't know what that means.
Because it seems to me that CNN would still hire him with or without security clearance.
If he doesn't need his security clearance to do his CNN job, what difference does it make?
How is he monetizing it?
The only way you can monetize it is by selling secrets, right?
So that's a pretty big complaint.
All right, I think I'm going to...
End it here. I just wanted to get on and talk about the breaking news.
And the main points again for those just coming late are that if the president doesn't trust Brennan, that's the beginning and the end of the story.
He doesn't need to consult with anybody.
It's the president.
His decision. He has to trust him.
Period. Doesn't trust him.
It was his decision. There's nothing else to say.
He cleverly branded the so-called alleged deep state and caused his political critics to continually brand them as we go forward, because now they'll be talking about them as a group.
His decision was just wrong enough that it draws your attention.
You can't look away. It drove Omarosa off the top level.
You know, she's been pushed down a rung or two.
And it puts all of the president's critics who are up for having their security clearance taken away, it puts them on the defensive.
Because they might need to explain at some point why they should keep their security clearance and they might want to...
Let me put it in the press's terms.
John Brennan, can you guarantee to us that we will never find evidence that you did something that would be bad for your security clearance?
No, that's not a good example because that's asking John Brennan himself.
How about this? You say to Clapper, Clapper, can you Clapper guarantee us that there'll never be anything that comes out about John Brennan that would validate him losing his security clearance?
That's the question I want to say.
Don't ask the person because the person you ask can say for sure whether there's a tape or whether they've done something wrong.
That person can answer.
But nobody else...
Can answer for whether something's impossible for another person.
They really can't do that.
So ask Clapper if he can guarantee nothing will ever come out about Brennan.
▲
Export Selection