Out of hatred for McGovernite liberals, a Republican president in the 1970s broke the law. Now those aging radicals break the law out of hatred for a Republican president.

Nested within intelligence agencies, they have fed a series of criminal leaks to a press corps that functions like an anti-Trump dirty tricks operation.

Donald Trump has publicly speculated that former CIA director John Brennan is one of the criminal leakers. In January, he tweeted out, “Was this the leaker of Fake News?” Trump has now charged the Justice Department with investigating “low-life leakers” in the government.

Former CIA analyst Tony Shaffer also suspects Brennan as one of the leakers. He said on Fox Business Network that the leaks which forced Michael Flynn out can be laid “squarely at the feet of” Brennan, among other embittered Obama aides.

What we know is that intelligence agencies taped Flynn’s call with the Russian ambassador, and we know that the contents of the call were leaked to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, who is a de facto stenographer for political liberals at the CIA. We also know that Brennan has made no secret of his opposition to Trump and Flynn. By opposing Brennan’s overtures to the Muslim Brotherhood and his refusal to grapple with the spread of Islamic terrorism, Flynn became enemy number one in the eyes of Obama holdovers at the CIA.

All of this gives the Justice Department ample reason to focus on Brennan. He had the means and motive to commit a crime.

“When I hear [former CIA head] John Brennan with the venom that seems to be in his voice after Donald Trump was elected president, it’s not hard to imagine that in the intelligence community, Donald Trump has his enemies and those enemies are not as restrained as they ought to be,” said Congressman Steve King on MSNBC.

Indeed, John Brennan brought with him to the CIA a coterie of political radicals and left-wing academics and gave them plum positions from which to leak to the press. So dedicated was Brennan to open political activism that he would walk the halls of the CIA in an LGBTQ “rainbow lanyard,” reports Bill Gertz of the Washington Times.

According to Gertz, Brennan turned his left-wing hires into “operatives” by fiddling with standards at the Directorate of Operations. These political hacks disguised as apolitical operatives had no more business receiving high-security clearances than Brennan himself did.

Recall the astounding admission Brennan once made at a “diversity” conference in 2016: that he thought he had “screwed” up his chances to enter the CIA after undergoing a polygraph test which smoked out his support for the American Communist Party during the Cold War. This sounds like a parody, but it isn’t. As he recounted:

This was back in 1980, and I thought back to a previous election where I voted, and I voted for the Communist Party candidate… 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.”… 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. 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.”

Unfortunately, he wasn’t. He entered the CIA, rose to its highest rank, and then salted the agency with fellow radicals, whose hatred for the “system” now takes the form of sabotaging the Trump administration.

Brennan and his leakers see no irony in becoming what they once opposed. In the 1970s, they cheered as the Church committee castigated the CIA for breaking laws. Now they use the CIA for their own dark arts and receive applause from ACLU-style liberals. They have gone from voting for communists to taping Russians, from fearing the unaccountable power of the system to wielding it shamelessly.

They marched through the institutions, stayed long enough to find the exits, and now booby-trap them as they file out. The trail of McGovernite liberalism ends as it began, in lawlessness, with a departing CIA director who behaved no differently than Daniel Ellsberg.