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In many ways, it’s been a good couple of years for intelligence agencies. Aided by a combination of the Russiagate scandal and Donald Trump’s disrespectful attitude toward them, the nation’s spies are enjoying a renaissance in their public standing, particularly among Democrats, a major shift from the years and decades prior. Trump’s decision yesterday to withdraw former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance is a perfect illustration of this dynamic. Brennan was one of six former intelligence officials whose security clearances Trump threatened to revoke due to their criticisms of the president. He’s now the first that Trump has followed through on, prompting paeans to Brennan’s years of public service by establishment journalists and politicians, while Brennan has assumed the role of courageous dissident speaking truth to power (“My principles are worth far more than clearances. I will not relent.”) Incidents like these have bolstered a canny PR campaign carried out by Brennan and two other high-profile former officials in particular: former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) head Michael Hayden, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. For two years, the trio has been ubiquitous in media coverage of Trump, doing TV appearances, interviews, and plugs for their books, criticizing Trump and insinuating that he’s a Putin asset. Big-name #Resistance liberals like Rob Reiner (“When you libel James Clapper and John Brennan you libel America,” he wrote) have cheered on these figures — sometimes literally, as when they’ve appeared on liberal talk shows to insult Trump in front of whooping crowds. As liberals have fallen in love all over again with the intelligence agencies they previously distrusted, the Left has cringed. Why? There are, of course, the ignominious histories of such agencies, which since their inception have fought against movements devoted to expanding the rights, protections, and freedoms of ordinary people in the US and abroad. But there’s also the personal histories of the former intelligence officials themselves. Brennan, Clapper, and Hayden have, in the space of a couple of years’ worth of Trump criticism, seemingly erased the massive scandals that once clung to their names — scandals that should make anyone who fears Trump’s serial dishonesty, undermining of norms, and latent authoritarianism think twice about turning these men into folk heroes.

“Normalized Lying to an Unprecedented Degree” Arguably no former intelligence figure in the Trump era has achieved the level of media saturation attained by former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden. Hayden is television news’s go-to source for explaining the limits of US surveillance. He writes op-eds for major newspapers, frequently weighs in on the Trump-Russia issue and the president’s conflict with intelligence agencies, and is flattered by obsequious talk show hosts in front of hooting crowds. Like the others on this list, he’s been conspicuously critical of Trump, drawing praise for his pro-immigration stances; he has compared Trump’s immigration policy to Auschwitz. Like the others, Hayden throughout his career has displayed an unhesitating propensity to lie to the public and to Congress, out of two principal motives: to protect the reputation of intelligence agencies and to defend the use of torture. Hayden is such a serial liar that the 2014 torture report features a thirty-eight-page-long section devoted to documenting and debunking the many false statements that he personally has made about the torture program to Congress over the years. These include claims that a terrorist suspect had to be tortured because he was uncooperative and resisting, that those carrying out interrogations were “carefully chosen and carefully screened,” that no CIA personnel objected to torture, that “bruising” was “the most serious injury” sustained by detainees, and much, much more. All of these are flatly contradicted by the documentary evidence gathered for the report. Lying to Congress is a crime, one Hayden was allowed to commit because it’s legally all but impossible to prove. As with Brennan, however, one can only credit the idea that he really believed what he was saying if you assume that he was extraordinarily incompetent at his job. There’s also the fact that less than two years after the release of the report, Hayden simply repeated many of these same false claims in his memoir. “To say that we relentlessly, over an expanded period of time, lied to everyone about a program that wasn’t doing any good, that beggars the imagination,” Hayden once said, in a quote that reads very differently once you know that the CIA did indeed do this very thing. Hayden didn’t just personally lie, however. According to the report, he ordered others to lie to Congress, directing a CIA officer to find a way to erroneously report a smaller number of CIA detainees than there actually were (“pick whatever date i [sic] needed to make that happen but the number is 98,” the officer said Hayden told him). As late as 2007, according to the report, Hayden wrote Bush a letter asking him to sign an executive order interpreting the Geneva Conventions in such a way as to allow the CIA to use its “enhanced interrogation techniques” on suspect Muhammad Rahim. Bush dutifully did so. So it’s no wonder that Hayden opposed any investigation of the program after Bush left office, cosigning a 2009 letter with six others urging then–Attorney General Eric Holder to end a Justice Department probe into the matter. It’s also no wonder that Hayden has endlessly defended the use of torture, calling its (again, nonexistent) success an “inconvenient truth,” positing that “taking techniques off the table” has made the US less safe, and claiming that “in the real world . . . the agency has nothing to gain from hiding things from Congress.” Bill Maher’s audience, too busy clapping and cheering for Hayden as he appeared to rebuke Trump’s promise to reinstate torture, probably didn’t notice Hayden’s subtle caveat that he only really opposes the use of torture as a punishment (something the CIA did anyway). Most recently, Hayden, Clapper, and Brennan all fiercely supported former black site operator Gina Haspel’s appointment to head the CIA. Before all this, Hayden was best known for heading the NSA at the time of its failure to detect the September 11 plot, despite having intercepted alarming messages from two of the hijackers one day earlier. In the wake of this failure, Hayden pushed to expand NSA spying into the domestic sphere, helping design (as he explained in 2006) both Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program and the agency’s collection of Americans’ metadata and emails. The eventual revelation of these programs in 2005 and 2006 was hugely embarrassing to Hayden, who had spent years insisting the NSA only targeted foreigners. Meanwhile, outraged members of Congress complained that they’d been kept in the dark, stopping just short of calling Hayden a liar. “I now have a difficult time with your credibility,” Senator Ron Wyden told him in 2006, pointing to Hayden’s false statements to Congress over the years about the extent of NSA spying and complaining that he and Bush hadn’t “kept the committee fully and currently informed of all appropriate intelligence activities.” In 2006, former US official Mort Halperin argued that, as with his later statements on CIA torture, Hayden had broken the law by lying to Congress about the scale of NSA spying. And yet, eleven years later, Hayden would be invited to speak at an event titled “The Future of Truth,” where he would complain about Trump’s “straight-out attempt to delegitimize the bearers of the facts.” Just a few months ago, he lamented that Trump had “normalized lying to an unprecedented degree.” He continues to be treated uncritically as an authority on how spy agencies operate, even though he’s demonstrated a well-documented willingness to lie about this very topic, even breaking the law to do so. Those fearing for the survival of the rule of law and democratic norms in America may be interested to learn that Hayden, who spent years defending the legality of the NSA’s surveillance, emphatically denied that the Fourth Amendment featured “probable cause” as a legal standard, even though the words are written in the actual amendment. “Believe me, if there’s any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it’s the Fourth,” he said, according to the Charleston Gazette. This issue came up again when it was revealed that the CIA had destroyed incriminating interrogation tapes, which Hayden justified on the grounds of protecting agents’ identities. Contrary to Hayden’s public statements, Representative Peter Hoekstra, a Republican, said that he had “never [been] briefed or advised that these tapes existed, or that they were going to be destroyed.” A few days later, Hayden admitted the CIA hadn’t informed Congress. One could put so much more on this list — Hayden’s defense of, and fear-mongering over, NSA spying at the very same moment he was personally profiting from it, his casually joking about assassinating a US citizen, the irony of his receiving plaudits for excoriating Trump’s plans to kill terrorist families while the drone program he champions does that very thing on a regular basis — but his record of mendacity is enough.