On Saturday October 5, Donald Trump returned to the Pennsylvania site where on July 13 Thomas Matthew Crooks gained access to a rooftop with a clear sight line to the stage. Crooks got off eight shots, wounding Trump in the ear, killing Corey Comperatore, and wounding James Copenhaver and David Dutch. Crooks was shot dead, but would-be assassins weren’t about to give up.

On September 15, Wesley Ryan Routh set up a sniper’s nest on a Florida golf course where Trump was playing. Trump had Secret Service protection, which had been denied to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who now endorses the Republican former president. Even before the assassination attempts on Trump, Kennedy was looking back at the assassination of his uncle John Fitzgerald Kennedy and wondering about possible CIA involvement in the 1963 hit. Edward Jay Epstein is an authoritative source on the CIA, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the JFK assassination. Epstein died in January, but his body of work is more relevant now than ever.

Epstein was a student at Cornell when his government professor, Andrew Hacker, commissioned him to write a thesis on how the Warren Commission was handling the Kennedy assassination. This project became Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth. As the author learned, the commissioners were mere figureheads who left the investigative work to government lawyers.

The Commission’s report concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone, without foreign influence. Epstein questioned this conclusion, and his inquiries became Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald. The U.S. Marine, an ardent Communist, defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. With Oswald’s first-hand knowledge of the U-2 spy plane, then America’s primary source for information on the Soviet military, Oswald easily qualified as a military defector and openly proclaimed his desire to pass on classified information to the USSR. It is inconceivable that the KGB would ignore such a valuable asset, but that was the line of Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko, that the Soviets would have nothing to do with this American.

One of the major doubters was CIA counterintelligence specialist James Angleton, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Angleton came to believe that Nosenko had been sent to plant disinformation in the CIA, which would make the agency vulnerable to foreign intel operations.  Epstein took up these themes in Deception: The Invisible War Between the CIA and KGB. This work was largely ignored when it appeared in 1989 after fall of the Berlin Wall, but it’s possibly Epstein’s most important book.

In 1974, the CIA fired Angleton, which in Epstein’s view turned the agency upside down. Two years later in 1976, Fordham University political science major John Brennan cast his vote for the Stalinist Gus Hall, candidate of the Communist Party USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the USSR. That disqualified Brennan from any position with U.S. intelligence until 1980, when the CIA hired Brennan. In 2013 he came to run the place.

The Gus Hall voter was the choice of the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. In 2017, the Pulitzer Prize winner revealed that Dreams from My Father was a novel, a work of fiction, not an autobiography or memoir. In intelligence parlance, the Dreams book was a “legend,” a fake biography. In Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies at Home and Abroad, John Brennan has a different take.

CIA insiders describe the composite character as the “real deal” and when it came to Dreams from My Father, Brennan “was struck by the deep thought he had given to national and international issues long before he actively pursued the office of the presidency.” No quotes on the “deep thought” and nothing about the author’s beloved “Frank,” the Communist Frank Marshall Davis, who dedicated his life to the Soviets’ all-white dictatorship .

Brennan views Islamic jihad as “as a holy struggle in pursuit of a moral goal” and contends that jihad has nothing to do with violence. According to Brennan, the CIA has the “best experts in the world” on al Qaeda but the agency failed to stop the massive attack of Sept. 11, 2001. That attack, and terrorist mass murders at Fort Hood (2009), the Boston Marathon (2013), San Bernardino (2015) and Orlando (2016), all escaped the notice of both the CIA and FBI, which are allegedly responsible for counterintelligence. Neither agency played any role in the takedown of the terrorists.

On the foreign scene, Iranians opposed to their country’s Islamic regime find little if any assistance from the CIA. The CIA has also been ineffective in resisting the anti-American Venezuelan regimes of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, who retains power after an obviously bogus election. On the other hand, the CIA enjoyed great success on the domestic scene when deployed against Donald Trump. In 2020, his security clearance and access to CIA facilities still intact, Brennan was signatory to the letter charging that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation,” a sequel to the Russia hoax that Brennan recycles in his book.

According to former CIA analyst John A. Gentry, author of Neutering the CIA:Why U.S. Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences, the “intelligence community” forces that triggered the attack on Trump, “remain intact, available for reactivation in the event of another serious candidacy by Trump or the election of another Republican president.”Renewed IC activism also “seems likely if even a traditional Republican again becomes president.” Despite the disclaimers, the Brennan and Gentry books should be regarded as the CIA speaking for the record.

As Trump mounted a serious run for the presidency, the FBI raided his Florida residence and the Justice Department mounts frivolous charges against him. Democrats compare Trump to Hitler and warn that his election would spell the end of democracy, and so on. On July 8, Joe Biden said it was “time to put Trump in a bull’s-eye.”  On July 13, a 20-year-old with no tactical experience shot Trump, saved only by a sudden turn of the head toward a chart on the stage.

Biden then claimed the “bull’s-eye” remark was a “mistake,” and that he only meant to focus on Trump’s policies. The Secret Service and FBI both announced investigations and Biden ordered a probe that empowers partisan Democrat Janet Napolitano, Department of Homeland Security boss under the composite character president. Call it Biden’s Warren Commission, and it leaves Donald Trump and RFK Jr. with plenty to ponder. 

Secret Service protection for presidential candidates only began after Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Five years earlier, JFK fell to an assassin’s bullet. For generations since born, and some who were around at the time, the default treatment is Oliver Stone’s JFK movie, based on the trial held by New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison. In his last book, Assume Nothing: Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-be Masters of the Universe, Epstein calls Stone’s movie a total denial of reality. The assassination mysteries continue, but some realities are now clear.

The CIA, turned upside down after the firing of James Angleton, has failed to defend America from foreign threats. The CIA has become a partisan political force on the home front. This change was promoted by the president still calling the shots for Biden, as Tablet’s David Samuels pointed out last year in “The Obama Factor.”