The real story about John Brennan’s security clearance is not that he lost it under a Republican president but that he once got one. One of the peculiar footnotes of Brennan’s history is that he obtained a position in Bill Casey’s CIA after having supported the Soviet-backed American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War. Had Casey conducted the polygraph test in which Brennan admitted to voting for Soviet proxy Gus Hall in 1976, Casey would have tossed him out of the office. Casey hated communists. Whoever hired Brennan must have been a Deep State holdover from the Carter years.

All of Brennan’s propaganda about “Trump-Russian collusion” is just sour grapes over the loss of his preferred candidate, Hillary, for whom he was desperately auditioning by launching an unfounded investigation into her opponent, and a remnant of his pro-Soviet nostalgia. Brennan’s much-vaunted “conscience” was pricked not by Soviet leaders who slaughtered their own people and enslaved hapless nations but by a Russian leader who — brace yourselves — isn’t keen on postmodern Western propaganda in favor of gay rights. Brennan prided himself on his “commitment” to alternative lifestyles and would pad down the halls of the CIA in a “rainbow lanyard,” as Bill Gertz once reported. Putin’s refusal to hold “gay pride” parades in Moscow infuriated Brennan. He also didn’t care for Putin’s unsentimental approach to Islamic terrorism. Brennan defined jihad as “self-improvement” and lobbied Obama to embrace the fanatics of the Muslim Brotherhood. Brennan got his wish when the Obama-backed Morsi rose to power in Egypt and wrecked it.

Michael Flynn thought that Brennan was a PC jackass of the first order, in thrall to the Muslims with whom he had traveled to Mecca during his stint as station chief in Saudi Arabia. Brennan got his revenge on Flynn by unleashing on him Stefan Halper, the vaguely pro-Republican oaf and Cambridge con man the Obama administration hired to spy on Trumpworld. Halper reported to his friends in British intelligence that Flynn in 2014 had been seen at a Cambridge University forum fraternizing with a Russian historian. That morsel of half-baked gossip was then fed to Brennan. In 2015, the British and presumably Halper kept bird-dogging Flynn. Part of Brennan’s “Trump-Russian collusion” fetish feeds off his hatred for Flynn, who had criticized the Obama administration for pursuing a pointlessly anachronistic course against Putin. Islamic terrorism, not Russian nationalism, threatened the vital national interests of America, argued Flynn. Brennan stewed over this disagreement and exacted his revenge on Flynn through Justice Department official Sally Yates, a Democratic hack who had joined the anti-Trump ring in the Obama administration along with her subordinate Bruce Ohr and fellow saboteur Peter Strzok.

The only criticism that Trump deserves for yanking Brennan’s security clearance is its delay. He should have done it on day one. Brennan was a security risk from the start — an anti-American radical of staggering proportions who should never have been permitted within a hundred-mile radius of Langley. Putin, Trump once said, is “laughing his ass off” at the mayhem dolts like Brennan have caused. Putin is also no doubt laughing at the spectacle of a former communist rising to the top of the CIA, then conducting in his retirement an attempted coup against a patriotic president on the claimed grounds that he is insufficiently hostile to Mother Russia.

Like the execrable Peter Strzok, with whom he conspired to “stop” candidate Trump, Brennan sputters about Trump as a “Russian asset.” But if anyone qualifies as a useful idiot for the Russians, it is Brennan. At the most critical moments in the Cold War, he was rooting for the Reds. He has gone from demanding “détente” to forbidding it, from raging about “McCarthyism” to impersonating it. Brennan never grew up. In his youth, he clamored for the overthrow of an American president; nothing has changed in his dotage. He is still vowing to sabotage an American president, and indulges the adolescent delusion that he somehow speaks for the proletariat, insisting that it will “defeat” Trump.

Samantha Powers, another lefty drip in Obama’s anti-Trump ring, warned Trump that he shouldn’t risk the wrath of Brennan. Who knows, implied Powers, what he might do? In taking away Brennan’s security clearance, Trump just took Powers at her word.