VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: How can Americans now trust the intelligence agencies shown to be corrupt in the very recent past?

via nationalreview:

In sum, many within the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, the NSC, and the State Department may have been involved in the greatest scandal in American electoral history, by directing agents, informants, and employees to help one campaign to harm another — and then, even after the election, to work to undermine a sitting president. In addition, these rogue agencies spent two years fighting congressional requests to release incriminating information. And then, when they were forced against their will to cough up some documents, they redacted them so heavily that they’re almost undecipherable.

Former FBI director Comey spent months on a book tour, punctuated by daily back-and-forth feuding with the president of the United States. Former CIA director John Brennan is a current paid CNN analyst who devotes much of his commentary to calling the president treasonous and unfit. Former director of national intelligence James Clapper is a paid MSNBC consultant who has alleged that the president is a Russian intelligence asset.

So let us recontextualize the intelligence agencies’ current dilemmas.

Our current agency directors and cabinet are rightly calling universal attention to the ongoing threat of Russian espionage efforts.

They do so in concert because they are apparently worried, though they cannot say such openly, that President Trump himself and the American public are not yet sufficiently woke to these existential threats from Russia.

Such concern for the national security is fine and necessary.

But somewhere, somehow, someone must also must explain and rectify the past.

A top-to-mid-level-management housecleaning would do wonders, too.

h/t SG