By David Rohde @ News Desk @ NewYorker.com, July 22

Last July, John Brennan, then the head of the C.I.A., [....] told the audience at the annual Aspen Security Forum that the United States faced the most complex set of threats that he had seen in his thirty-six-year intelligence career, [....] James Clapper, then the director of national intelligence, delivered a similarly grim assessment.

On Friday, Brennan and Clapper returned to the forum, an annual gathering held by the Aspen Institute far from Washington to foster bipartisan consensus regarding national security. Sitting shoulder to shoulder onstage, the two former intelligence chiefs unleashed a blistering and highly unusual public critique of a sitting President by two former intelligence chiefs. Brennan urged members of Congress to resist President Trump if he fires Robert Mueller, the special counsel. “I hope, I really hope, that our members of Congress, elected representatives, are going to stand up and say, ‘enough is enough,’ and stop making apologies and excuses for things that are happening that really flout, I think, our system of laws and government.”

Brennan added that he thought it was “the obligation of some executive-branch officials to refuse to carry out some of these orders that, again, are inconsistent with what this country is all about.” [.....]