As the fragments come together in a fantastic mosaic indicating that the seniors of the "Intelligence Community" -- led or organized by CIA Director John Brennan -- set out to "create" the appearance of co-called Russian collusion around what amount to political by-standers in order to catalyze their conspiracy against Candidate, then President Trump, I am  put in mind of the investigatory motions I imagine having set the groundwork for ... Stalin's purges. 

This occurred to me (again) while reading George Neumayer's latest in The American Spectator. Neumayer zeroes in on the work of David Corn and Michael Issikoff, where they "inadvertently provides a picture of Brennan running an anti-Trump spying operation right out of Langley."

Langley? Are we sure this wasn't Lubyanka? 

This interagency "working group" at CIA headquarters, Corn and Issikoff explain, "would review the intelligence and figure out the full scope and nature of the Russian operation."

Stop and think about this "working group" for a minute. Brennan put it together to investigate a "Russian operation" that appears to be of his own creation! How is this not akin to the preparation of the Bolshevik purges of Stalin's political rivals on the basis of state-concocted treason (read: "collusion") with foreign enemies? No doubt dodgy "dossiers" were a part of that toxic mix, too. 

While mulling this all over, here's a quick look back at Brennan's Red Thread 6:

Maybe I missed something -- it is a Big Story -- but I am now wondering if Brennan has ever been quizzed about that hot little envelop he passed to Obama in August 2016. The Post story breaking this piece of the story appeared on June 23, 2017;  Brennan's last day of congressional testimony, I believe, was May 23, 2017.

Now that we know the Steele "dossier" was an "essential part" of the FBI/DOJ application to the secret FISA court for its surveillance warrant -- and knowingly presented by FBI/DOJ to the court without revealing that the "dossier" was bought and paid for by the DNC and Hillary campaign -- it seems possible that the Steele "dossier" was also "an essential part" of what the CIA had, too. If that's the case, it follows that the Steele "dossier" was an essential part, if not the mainstay, of the entire IC- Russian-interference "assessment" enterprise, which also includes statements and comments of "IC" principals. Recall when James Comey, for example, stated, as fact, that Putin "hated" Hillary Clinton. Was this the "dossier" talking again? 

These are questions not to lose sight of as battle is joined -- and especially while trying to keep our red threads straight. Unusually, in this same context, John Brennan showed off his own "red thread" at the height of the presidential campaign. On September 16, 2016, for some reason, the sitting CIA director announced he had voted for Communist Party USA leader Gus Hall in the 1976 presidential election.

That was one month after Brennan couriered over that "eyes only" envelop -- perhaps containing the Steele "dossier," created by "confirmed socialist" Christopher Steele -- to President Obama, who, to highlight his own ever-unspooling red thread, was mentored by a Communist operative on an FBI arrest list in case of war with the USSR. 

Heavens, suddenly I am reminded of Lend Lease -- "From Hammer to Hopkins to White and back again to Hopkins..." Never mind. A little American Betrayal inside baseball.

Brennan's late-career confession came during a panel discussion of "diversity in the intelligence community" as he recalled his own CIA employment polygraph in 1980. On being asked by the polygrapher about whether he had ever worked with or for a group dedicated to overthrowing the US, he spoke up about his 1976 vote for the CPUSA. Forty years later, this was sensational news.

Or was it? The story garnered a headline or two but not more -- that is, outside of setting the hair on fire, privately, of long-retired, anti-Communist intelligence professionals, the last of the Mohecans. 

"I froze, because I was getting so close to coming into CIA and said, 'OK, here's the choice, John. You can deny that, and the machine is probably going to go, you know, wacko, or I can acknowledge it and see what happens,'" Brennan said.

He said he chose to be forthcoming.

"I said I was neither Democratic or Republican, but it was my way, as I was going to college, of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change.

Unhappiness with "the system"  -- what dreary cant. More revealing today is the old rhetoric of Communist Party USA leader Gus Hall, circa 1975, from his "Report to the 21st Convention of the Communist Party USA." If this is what appealed to the future CIA director, it is a shocking window on the state of Brennan's political mind while he studied political science at Fordham University in the mid-1970s. More than the nuts and bolts of the Communist program, what is especially striking in Hall's speechifying is the visceral hatred of the USA that animates it. America is -- "the arsenal for the military fascist dictatorships and the reactionary colonial rulers the world over" --"the lair of the assassins, the home base of the hit men of imperialism" -- "the main source, the cesspool of corruption of the lifeline of the capitalist world" -- "they operate like the gangsters that they are are, who have lost all possibility of winning public support for their operations or ideas." 

Projection, much?

Not unexpectedly, Communist honcho Hall casts anti-Communism in America as a "weapon" of "fascism": "Anticommunism is a weapon in the preparation of the soil and the atmosphere for fascism." 

The young, idealistic, future Obama-fixer and CIA director, however, was enthused.  

We don't know the extent to which Brennan followed or participated in Communist Party activities in these Brezhnev years. Nor do we know if he was ever himself a Communist Party member. He says  he told the CIA polygrapher that he was at that moment not a member of the Communist Party, and, according to Brennan's story, the polygrapher did not follow up to inquire about past membership -- a key question since Communist Party members routinely dropped their membership when it became a matter of expedience, such as when trying to enter the US government, including the CIA. 

Brennan:

I said I'm not a member of the Communist Party, so the polygrapher looked at me and said, 'OK,' and when I was finished with the polygraph and I left and said, 'Well, I'm screwed.'"

But he soon got his admission notice to the CIA and was relieved, he said ...

If the moral of Brennan's uplifting little story is that there is no bar to joining the CIA, not even Communist Party sympathies, that's "diversity" for you.

In the end, though, it is Brennan's current attitude toward the episode that is most significant. "We've all had indiscretions in our past," he explained, which is often true; still, he evinces not a tinge of shame or just embarassment over having voted during the Cold War for a servile Communist hack devoted to advancing the Kremlin's overthrow of America, even while leading an organization created to defend against the Kremlin overthrow of America.