Facing Durham interview, John Brennan lashes out over Trump-Russia ‘collusion’

Former CIA Director John Brennan fumed about the announcement that the Senate Intelligence Committee found no evidence of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

Brennan, who has said he is in the “crosshairs” of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s criminal inquiry into the Russia investigation, condemned a tweet by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio that stressed the bipartisan investigation found “troubling actions by the FBI, particularly their willingness to rely on” British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s anti-Trump dossier.

“You are dead wrong, Senator. The report shows extensive evidence of collusion between the Trump Campaign & the Russians. Read the report,” Brennan tweeted. “Criticizing FBI investigative efforts while ignoring the political corruption of Donald Trump & his cronies is shameful.”

The report, like special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, did not conclude there was a coordinated criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, but Democrats on the intelligence panel broke with Rubio, the acting chairman, to argue that the web of contacts between people in President Trump’s circle and Russians shows “what collusion looks like.”

“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election,” Rubio said in a statement. “What the Committee did find however is very troubling. We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling. And we discovered deeply troubling actions taken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, particularly their acceptance and willingness to rely on the ‘Steele Dossier’ without verifying its methodology or sourcing.”

Brennan’s tweet comes not just on the same day as the release of the intelligence panel’s fifth and final volume of its findings from a long-running investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, but also as the former CIA director is expected to be interviewed by Durham as early as this week, according to CBS News senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge.

Among the issues Durham is reportedly scrutinizing is how allegations of Trump-Russia coordination from Steele’s dossier were used in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment’s appendix. Durham is expected to collect his first guilty plea on Wednesday from former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who is facing a false statements charge for altering a CIA email in 2017 that helped justify the continued FISA surveillance of onetime Trump campaign aide Carter Page by claiming he was “not a source” for the agency.

Brennan has sought to pin questions about the discredited dossier on the FBI, which used it to obtain a FISA to wiretap Page.

“There were things in that dossier that made me wonder whether they were, in fact, accurate and true,” he said in February 2018. He also said that “it was up to the FBI to see whether or not they could verify any of it.”

Durham is looking into how the dossier was used in the 2017 assessment, why former FBI Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, insisted on it being part of the assessment, how allegations from the dossier ended up in an appendix of the assessment, and whether Brennan made misleading assertions about the research’s use. The top federal prosecutor in Connecticut is also reportedly reviewing Brennan’s handling of a secret source said to be close to the Kremlin and working to find out what role that person’s information played in the assessment.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican, has pinned the blame on Brennan. In March of last year, he tweeted, “A high-level source tells me it was Brennan who insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report.”

Watergate sleuth Bob Woodward, who has a book coming out next month, said in April 2019, “I think it was the CIA pushing this.”

Brennan, who has traded barbs with Trump over the past couple of years, found out he had been blocked from accessing his classified notes and records while working on his forthcoming memoir.

Durham is looking into whether Brennan took politicized actions to pressure the rest of the intelligence community to match his conclusions about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motivations. Attorney General William Barr confirmed Durham is scrutinizing the assessment.

“There was definitely Russian, uh, interference,” Barr said in June. “I think Durham is looking at the intelligence community’s ICA — the report that they did in December [2016]. And he’s sort of examining all the information that was … the basis for their conclusions. So to that extent, I still have an open mind, depending on what he finds.”

The 2017 assessment concluded with “high confidence” that Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016,” and Russia worked to “undermine public faith” in American democracy, “denigrate” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “harm her electability and potential presidency,” and “developed a clear preference” for Trump. The National Security Agency diverged on one aspect, expressing only “moderate confidence” that Putin actively tried to help Trump win.

The Senate Intelligence Committee released a report in April defending the intelligence community assessment, saying that Senate investigators found no evidence of political pressure to reach a specific conclusion and determining that the assessments by the CIA, FBI, and NSA present “a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

Those findings clash with a 2018 report from the House Intelligence Committee, led at the time by Rep. Devin Nunes, a California Republican. That assessment, which was not bipartisan, concluded that “the majority of the Intelligence Community Assessment judgments on Russia’s election activities employed proper analytic tradecraft” but found the “judgments on Putin’s strategic intentions did not.”