Democrats have renewed their Russia-collusion narrative against President Trump, claiming he’s on the side of the Kremlin, not the Pentagon.
John Brennan, who was CIA director under Barack Obama, recently claimed that by “trying to prevent the flow of intelligence to Congress, Trump is abetting a Russian covert operation to keep him in office for Moscow’s interests, not America’s.”
But it turns out the nation’s intelligence apparatus thinks Brennan has gone a little wild.
The Washington Examiner reported Friday intel officials are denying a New York Times report that lawmakers were told that Russia is attempting to help Trump in 2020.
“We cannot comment on classified briefings, but what we can tell you is that Shelby did not say Russia is aiding the reelection of President Trump,” a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told the Examiner.
The report said the controversial classified briefing Feb. 13 was conducted in part by Shelby Pierson, the intelligence community election threats executive under then-acting DNI Joseph Maguire. Officials from the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency, the Examiner reported, were also present. Sources cited by the New York Times last Thursday claimed Pierson warned that “Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Trump reelected.”
However, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien disputed the Times report, saying he had seen no intelligence reports corroborating the claims.
That didn’t matter, however, to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a key player in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s failed impeachment drive.
Schiff claimed: “We count on the intelligence community to inform Congress of any threat of foreign interference in our elections. If reports are true and the president is interfering with that, he is again jeopardizing our efforts to stop foreign meddling.”
Trump called it “another misinformation campaign.”
Brennan has been attacking President Trump since the inauguration, accusing him of treason and being an agent of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
But he had to backtrack when special counsel Robert Mueller concluded Trump did not collude with Russia in his 2016 campaign.
Brennan’s excuse was that he had received “bad information.”
But he’s at it again.
He’s relying on the anonymous-sourced New York Times report claiming the House Intel Committee was warned by an aide to Maguire that Russia was “actively meddling in the 2020 campaign in order to get President Trump re-elected.”
“We are now in a full-blown national security crisis,” Brennan wrote on Twitter. “By trying to prevent the flow of intelligence to Congress, Trump is abetting a Russian covert operation to keep him in office for Moscow’s interests, not America’s.”
The Gateway Pundit blog pointed out Brennan was behind the Russia-collusion and Ukraine impeachment claims “and now he’s going for a third hit on Trump.”
In January, Brennan, now a CNN analyst, falsely claimed Trump wrote a note released by Schiff saying, “Get Zelensky to announce Biden investigation.”
Brennan also falsely testified under oath that the bogus anti-Trump “dossier” funded by the Democratic Party played no role in the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
Brennan further declared he did not know who commissioned the opposition-research document, even though senior national security and counter-intelligence officials at the Justice Department and FBI knew the previous year it was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
In 2014, after Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., accused the CIA of spying on members of the Senate by hacking into computers used by her intelligence committee’s staffers, Brennan told a Senate committee, “Let me assure you the CIA was in no way spying on [the committee] or the Senate.”
However, a CIA inspector general’s report found the CIA was indeed spying on the Senate, and Brennan was forced to privately apologize to intelligence committee members.
Brennan also claimed in a 2011 speech that there had not been “a single collateral death” from U.S. drone strikes because of their “exceptional proficiency [and] precision.'” However, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that one U.S. drone strike alone had killed 42 Pakistanis, “most of them civilians.”
Currently, U.S. Attorney John Durham is believed to be reviewing Brennan’s analysis of Russian election interference, including his handling of a secret source said to be close to the Kremlin.
Durham, who was selected by Attorney General William Barr in 2019 to look into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, is looking into whether Brennan’s CIA was attempting to keep other agencies in the dark as he pushed for a preconceived assessment of Russia’s true intentions in 2016, the New York Times has reported.
