Former CIA Director John Brennan reacted with predictable anger after the Trump White House revoked his security clearances earlier this week. Brennan denounced the action in a tweet, writing that President Trump’s move was part of “a broader effort by Mr. Trump to suppress freedom of speech & punish critics.” He later added, writing in the New York Times : "Mr. Trump clearly has become more desperate to protect himself and those close to him, which is why he made the politically motivated decision to revoke my security clearance in an attempt to scare into silence others who might dare to challenge him."

Brennan is almost certainly right. The decision to revoke his clearances was petty and vindictive. The motivation for it was, indeed, political, as Trump effectively conceded in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. And it may well be the case that Trump hopes the move will obscure the truth about the controversy currently unsettling the White House.

Trump’s motives may not be a mystery. But his tactics are ones Brennan might recognize more quickly than others. He’s used them.

Six months after the attacks on US personnel in Benghazi, Libya, several of the survivors flew to Washington, D.C., to attend a memorial service for those who died there. They expected to see old colleagues, to reminisce about their shared experiences, to mourn the passing of their friends. They did not expect to be handed new, legally unnecessary nondisclosure agreements.

Here’s how we reported it at the time:

On May 20, 2013, four of the CIA officers who had fought to repel the attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi arrived at the grounds of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. [John “Tig”] Tiegen, [Kris “Tanto”] Paronto, [Mark] Geist, and “Jack” had returned to Washington to honor two of the men who had fought and died in those attacks, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.



Shortly before the service began, an agency representative approached the four and asked them for a moment of their time. They were led away from the public gathering space near the CIA museum through one office, then through another, until they finally arrived at a back room far removed from the quiet murmurings that preceded the ceremony.



When the door shut behind them, a CIA official handed each man a small packet of papers and with very little explanation asked them, one by one, to review and sign the documents. As the men began to read the papers they’d been handed it did not take long for them to understand what was happening. The documents were nondisclosure agreements, and several of the CIA officers quickly concluded that they were meant to send a message.



Geist, who was moving to a new job at the agency, says he had always assumed he’d have to sign another NDA and didn’t think much of the request. His colleagues had another view.



“That was a bunch of bulls—,” says Paronto. “We were pissed. We didn’t have anyone outside the agency there with us—no lawyers, no one. That’s just not right.”



The men quickly signed the papers, in part because they were already covered by existing NDAs and in part, they say, so that they wouldn’t be late for the ceremony. After the memorial service, the men stopped for drinks and remembered their fallen comrades in a less formal way. Paronto says it didn’t take long for the NDAs to come up.



“I remember Jack sitting there—he looks at us and says: ‘That was pretty f—d up, wasn’t it?’ ”



It was.

“It was very odd, since I hadn’t signed one in six years and then had to sign two in a few months. And when I say ‘odd’ I mean of course we were under ‘pressure’ to sign,” Paronto recalled.

Mark Zaid, the veteran national security lawyer who represented several of the survivors, told us: “The request, indeed demand, by CIA to have its security team members execute new NDAs was entirely out of the norm. The documents were legally unnecessary as the team was already bound by prior NDAs and any reasonable interpretation was that it was intended as an explicit reminder not to speak, if not implicit threat . . . I told committee members and staff that based on 20 years of experience with the CIA there was no reason they had to sign the agreements.”

The NDAs were meant to silence those with information that would expose the Obama administration’s misleading Benghazi narrative.

Remarkably, in a letter to congressional oversight committees four months later, Brennan denied even presenting the Benghazi survivors with NDAs to sign. “Has any officer, either staff of contractor, been required to sign any non-disclosure agreement because of their presence at Benghazi or their participation in any activity related to the Benghazi attacks?”

Brennan’s unqualified response? “No.”

Brennan and his defenders changed their story each time their previous claims proved difficult to defend:



First, the claim was that there had been no effort whatsoever to keep anyone from talking, that no one was asked to sign an additional non-disclosure agreement, and that anyone suggesting otherwise was lying. When presented with evidence that some CIA officers involved in Benghazi were asked to sign additional NDAs, the story changed. Okay, maybe some officers were asked to sign additional NDAs, but those NDAs were standard operating procedure. When presented with claims that some of the NDAs were legally unnecessary, the story changed again. Okay, it’s possible some of the NDAs were redundant, but they had nothing to do with Benghazi. But when presented with evidence that some Benghazi officers were asked to sign NDAs at the memorial service honoring CIA officers killed in Benghazi, the story changed once more. Okay, but the NDAs didn’t actually mention Benghazi, and they were necessary in order to process payments for the officers to attend the memorial service.



This kind of mendacity in the service of politics was the rule for Brennan, not the exception. Brennan was one of the chief architects of President Obama’s “strategy” for fighting terrorism. That strategy hinged on the idea that the jihadists’ territorial ambitions didn’t really matter. Remember Obama’s remark that the predecessor to ISIS and other al Qaeda-affiliated groups were the “jayvee” of terrorism? Brennan laid the groundwork for that view. During a speech on June 29, 2011 , Brennan claimed that al Qaeda’s "grandiose vision" of an "Islamic caliphate" is an "absurd" and "feckless delusion that is never going to happen." Three years later to the day, on June 29, 2014, ISIS declared itself to be a caliphate, ruling over a large part of Iraq and Syria. ISIS didn’t invent the idea of a jihadist caliphate out of thin air. Bin Laden and his men had preached it for years, including when the ISIS’ forerunner was part of al Qaeda’s global network.

Six months before the 2012 election, the Obama administration launched a comprehensive effort to demonstrate that the president had kept America safe. John Brennan, then chief White House counterterrorism adviser, gave a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda, Brennan claimed, was on the run. The future CIA director predicted that the global terrorist organization would see its “demise” by the end of this decade. This wasn’t analysis, it was politics. Brennan made the claim despite a wealth of evidence —classified and open source—that al Qaeda was amassing more territory and recruiting more fighters.

Among the most compelling evidence of al Qaeda’s resiliency was the intelligence gathered at bin Laden’s compound. Brennan worked as hard as anyone to keep that information from public view, as it often contradicted the Obama campaign’s rhetoric and complicated Obama’s policy priorities. The Obama team claimed bin Laden was isolated and impotent. He wasn’t. Bin Laden was managing an international web of jihadist groups at the time of his death.

Obama officials, eager to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, claimed distance between the Taliban and al Qaeda. The documents demonstrated the opposite, as the two fought side-by-side on the battlefield. Obama White House officials, already laying the groundwork for the Iran nuclear deal, downplayed the threat posed by the Iranian regime. The documents showed the Iranian regime as a key facilitator of al Qaeda, despite ideological differences and antagonism between the two sides.

And Brennan not only fought the public release of these documents, as CIA director he blocked other elements of the U.S. intelligence community from access to them.

John Brennan didn’t suddenly become political with the election of Donald Trump, as his defenders in the intelligence community and the media would have us believe. He was an adviser on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. He was political as a top White House counterterrorism adviser. And he was political as CIA director. He used intimidation tactics similar to the ones he now finds so objectionable and lied about it afterwards. He sold the country a misleading narrative about the demise of al Qaeda and worked to bury evidence that contradicted Obama administration claims.

None of this is offered as a justification of Trump’s revocation of Brennan’s security clearances. I share many of Brennan’s concerns about Trump’s temperament, his character, and his behavior in office. There are serious questions about Trump and Russia. I’m glad Bob Mueller is investigating them.

But portraying Brennan as a dispassionate, apolitical intelligence professional is misleading. It gives his pronouncements the appearance of detachment and objectivity; they have neither. Some reporters doing this are guilty of the black-hat/white-hat reporting that has infected political journalism in the Trump era. Trump so offends their sensibilities that they depict his critics as heroes almost by default. Other reporters are no doubt portraying Brennan this way out of genuine ignorance. After all, there wasn’t much reporting on his efforts to politicize intelligence during the Obama administration and what reporting there was routinely was ignored.

Whatever the reason, such inaccurate portrayals are a disservice to everyone. And they help explain why Trump’s odious efforts to demonize the media have more resonance than they ought to.