One wouldn’t expect Seymour Hersh, a lefty journalist par excellance, to pop the Trump-Russia propaganda balloon Obama’s CIA director John Brennan released last year. But he has. Hersh has been quoted as saying that the collusion claim is a product of “disinformation” — “a Brennan operation,” as he puts it.

Hersh says that Trump is not the villain but the victim in this story, and that the press has served as a shameful stenographer for Brennan to smear Trump. It has shown no skepticism toward any of his claims or the supposedly nonpartisan reports his cronies and political hacks assembled after the election. Hersh calls Brennan an “asshole” and a “buffoon.”

Indeed, it tells you all you need to know about the rottenness of the ruling class that such an open fraud could rise so high in Washington. Brennan, owing to his treasonous support for the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War (he voted for Gus Hall and supported the Soviet-controlled American Communist Party in the 1970s), should not have been allowed within a hundred-mile radius of Langley. Instead, he was hired and rose to the top of the CIA.

A tool of the Muslim Brotherhood (during a stint in Saudi Arabia he says that he grew to admire Islam and the concept of jihad), Brennan refused to take his oath as CIA director on the Bible. His hatred for Michael Flynn and Trump stems in large part from his Islamophilia and his nostalgia for the socialism and the atheism of the Old Soviet Union.

His Russian fable — which was itself a product of his collusion with foreigners from Estonia to England — fed off his disdain for Russia’s turn to Christianity and America’s turn away from Islam. For Brennan, any stick would do, and he found one in a bag of bogus intelligence supplied to him by Kim Philby types from Britain, socialists in Scandinavia and Germany, and Putin haters from the Baltics.

While running this operation of political espionage, he was auditioning for a job under Hillary and turning CIA headquarters into a branch office of her campaign.

In this hothouse atmosphere of pro-Hillary partisanship, any and all contacts between the Trump campaign and anyone even remotely connected to Russia became occasions for “unmaskings.”

Instead of exposing this blatant political espionage, the media became a conduit for it. Hersh notes that the New York Times was in effect under the editorship of John Brennan last year. He could plant any smear he wanted against Trump on its front page.

It is obvious that Brennan’s circle was responsible for many if not most of the criminal leaks. Why doesn’t the FBI raid Brennan’s home and rifle through his records? The reason that won’t happen is that the ruling class and deep state, which are composed largely of aging radicals, protects traitors while punishing patriots — a conclusion to which the improbable testimony of Seymour Hersh adds still more credence.