In this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson answers additional questions from listeners, including one on the undue influence of our intelligence agencies on U.S. policy.
This content was recorded prior to Hanson’s major surgery on Dec. 30.
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
JACK FOWLER: I guess the second part of the question maybe can be boiled down to an assessment of our intelligence agencies in the last decade. Secretive intelligence agencies, per Scott’s question, having undue influence, and is Donald Trump grabbing the bull by the horns here?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yeah, the way to answer that is by commission and omission. If we start the omission, let’s ask ourselves, what did the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency [do]? Did they predict 9-11? No. They had no idea it was coming.
Did they know about the Yom Kippur War? No. Did they know Pakistan was going to let off a bomb? No. They had no idea.
Did they have any timetable that was accurate about the Iranian nuclear development? Not really. Did they realize the Shah [of Iran] was going to collapse when he did suddenly? No.
Did they know that the Afghan Kabul thing when [Joe] Biden said in July he wanted to pull out gradually and [former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen.] Mark Milley said it would be very orderly and the Afghan army was tip-top, did the CIA say, “No, no, it’s going to collapse”? No.
So, they haven’t had a good record.
Then the act of commission, are they interfering? Yes.
John Brennan, head of the CIA and James Clapper, director of national intelligence, along with [James] Comey sat in the office of Barack Obama when he said to them, I know Donald Trump is colluding [with Russia]. And they said to him, our intelligence says that he’s not. And then Obama said, well, go find it. Go find stuff that he is. And so, they did.
And then Clapper lied under oath when he said that the National Security Agency doesn’t spy on Americans. They do. He apologized for that and said, I said the least untruthful thing.
Everybody’s mad about the drug interdictions. Obama killed 500 people from Predator assassinations, and Brennan claimed that not one civilian was killed. That was a lie. He said the CIA didn’t spy on the Senate staffers. They did, and Democrats wanted him to resign.
And then you remember the 51 intelligence authorities, these were retired CIA, DIA. Said they were retired. No, some of them were still contractors. They told us that Hunter’s laptop was a product of Russian information, meaning disinformation. And they knew that was false because [then FBI Director] Christopher Wray, his FBI had that laptop, and they had it for almost a year, and they knew that it was Hunter’s, and the CIA knew that.
So, they were lying and that affected an election basically.
The 51 intelligence authorities who said it was Russian meant that when Joe Biden got onto that debate [stage] three or four days later, the last debate of 2020, and Trump started railing about Hunter and Mr. Big Guy and 10% and Joe Biden, you were in that laptop. Oh, 51 intelligence agents, you’re lying, Donald Trump. This was all Russia, and this was collusion. That’s you, you, you. That was all a lie.
So, they affected that election, and they tried to affect the 2016 election.
We have too many of them. There’s so many intelligence agencies. I think there’s 50 of them. Everybody thinks there are these guys that are hardcore, right wing. They’re not. They’re mostly liberal arts people. And they think they’re very smart. And they haven’t got a good record of prediction or intervention.
They didn’t really forecast the Iraqi insurgency. They didn’t forecast the collapse of the Afghan army and the quick [takeover]. They didn’t predict what happened in ‘75 when the Vietnamese army collapsed suddenly. They’re doing other things.
They shouldn’t have anything to do—by their charters—with domestic politics.
So, any of those 51 intelligence authorities, they should have told Mike Morrell, the former interim CIA director, “I can’t comment on that. Mike, I’m a foreign intelligence officer. I don’t snoop. I don’t get involved in domestic politics, especially on the eve of [an election].”
So, I’m talking to you, Leon Panetta, head of the CIA, and you, James Clapper, and you, John Brennan. You had no business rounding up your cronies and then lying to the American people to alter an election and then didn’t have the character enough to apologize for what you did.
So yeah, I’m really worried about the intelligence agencies.
FOWLER: They will die before they apologize.
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