The man Donald Trump has nominated to be No. 3 at the Pentagon already has a proven history of pushing racist anti-Obama conspiracy theories, but the latest nonsense uncovered by CNN's KFile really takes the cake.
Retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata pushed a loony tunes tale that former CIA Director John Brennan tried to orchestrate a coup to overthrow Trump—and even tweeted out a coded order in 2018 to assassinate him.
It's almost as if the White House did zero vetting on the guy Trump tapped to run the Department of Defense's policy shop. In multiple radio and television interviews, Tata slandered Brennan—an outspoken critic of Trump—as a "former communist," and accused him of manipulating intelligence.
"I think that John Brennan is a clear and present danger and a threat to this nation," Tata told Fox News in August 2018 after Trump had revoked Brennan's security clearance. "He supports the overthrow of this particular president and he needed to have his access to information revoked."
Speaking to the right-wing outlet One America News in 2018, Tata accused Brennan of being "allied" with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian efforts to sow division and discord in the U.S. "You look at his tweets, you look at what he says, and he is doing Putin's bidding every day on Twitter. He is dividing this nation and he's trying to ossify the left against the right," Tata charged. Huh, kinda sounds familiar—a high-level Putin puppet cleaving the nation.
But a tweet Tata sent in May 2018 is really the capper. Replying to a tweet in which Brennan quoted Cicero, Tata wrote: "As incompetent as @JohnBrennan was as a #CIA analyst (failure at Khobar Towers), we must assume he knows spy tradecraft. This is a signal to someone, somewhere. Cicero was assassinated for political reasons. This is a clear threat against @POTUS."
Previously, KFile turned up tweets in which Tata hurled the right's favorite epithets at former President Obama, calling him a "Muslim" and a "terrorist leader" who tried to "subvert U.S. national interests to Islam." Tata also accused both Obama and Hillary Clinton of sedition and treason on Twitter. Tata has been in a mad dash, trying to erase all the tweets that reveal that he is completely and utterly unfit for the post for which he's been nominated, but frankly, he's simply spewed too much stupid to cover it up.
When CNN asked DOD officials to comment on Tata's latest inanity, "[t]he Pentagon referred CNN to the White House for comment. The White House stood by Tata and referred CNN to a previous statement defending the nominee from last week."
In other words, Tata is just too indefensible for words.
But Tata, trying to salvage his nomination, told CNN: "I deeply regret comments I made on social media several years ago," adding, "my tweets were completely out of character."
Right, just a couple of errant tweets—not a distorted worldview that would render one incapable of making coherent policy for the most powerful military in the world. Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee have already indicated they will oppose Tata’s nomination.
