Trump Hints Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan Committed Crime

Trump Hints Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan Committed Crime
Then-Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on March 13, 2015. (Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)
Petr Svab
5/22/2018
Updated:
10/5/2018

President Donald Trump posted on Twitter a quote that implied former CIA Director John Brennan lied and is fearing criminal charges.

The lengthy quote Trump posted on Monday, May 21, came from Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and instructor who guarded presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

“John Brennan is panicking, Steve,” Bongino told Fox and Friends’ Steve Doocy on Monday. “John Brennan has disgraced himself, he’s disgraced the country, he’s disgraced the intelligence community. He is the one man largely responsible for the destruction of Americans’ faith in the intelligence community and in some people at the top of the FBI.

“Brennan started this entire debacle with Trump. We now know that Brennan had pretty detailed knowledge of the [Steele] Dossier. I'll walk you through this real slow: he knows about the Dossier, he denies knowledge of the Dossier, he briefs the Gang of 8 up on the Hill about the Dossier, which they then use to demand the FBI start an investigation into Trump. It is that simple. This guy is the genesis of this whole debacle.”

Trump further quoted Bongino saying that Brennan is among a small working group of officials from the Obama administration who are “worried about staying out of jail.”

The Steele Dossier, characterized as “salacious and unverified” by former FBI Director James Comey, was a piece of opposition research put together by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele and paid for by Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. It was heavily relied upon to obtain a warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page several weeks before the presidential election, according to a memo by the Republican majority on the House Intelligence Committee.

Top FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) officials authorized the warrant and intentionally withheld from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court that much of the evidence presented in the application was based on the dossier, the memo says.

Brennan, however, said he didn’t see the dossier until a month after the election.

“It was in late summer of 2016 when there were some individuals from the various U.S. news outlets who asked me about my familiarity with it. And I had heard just snippets about it. I did not know what was in there. I did not see it unit later in that year. I think it was in December,” he told NBC News on Feb. 4.

When he was questioned by the House Intelligence Committee on May 23, 2017, Rep. Trey Gowdy asked him, “do you know who commissioned the Steele Dossier?”

“I don’t,” Brennan replied.

But the memo states “the political origins of the Steele dossier were [at the time of the FISA warrant] known to senior DOJ and FBI officials.”

Brennan allegedly promoted the dossier to Democratic leaders in Congress during the campaign, according to a Feb. 11 article by investigative journalist and author Paul Sperry citing “several Capitol Hill sources.”

Bongino’s mentioning the Gang of Eight, refers to the eight members of Congress briefed on classified intelligence (House and Senate leaders from both parties as well as top House and Senate Intelligence Committee members from both parties).

On Aug. 25, 2016, Brennan briefed then-Senate Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid. It was unclear whether FBI officials attended the briefing, a congressional source told Fox News.
Two days later, Reid sent a letter to Comey requesting an investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election, specifically mentioning a claim made in the dossier—meetings Carter Page allegedly had with a Russian official and a top executive of a major Russian oil company in July 2016. Neither meeting has been corroborated. Page denied under oath meeting the individuals.
Brennan also testified that the dossier played no role in the CIA-FBI-NSA intelligence assessment, published in a sanitized form on Jan. 6, 2017, that estimated with high confidence that the Kremlin tried to influence the election.

“[The dossier] wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that was done. It was not,” Brennan said.

But Sperry reported on May 15 that a two-page summary of the dossier (described as “the Christopher Steele information”) was appended to the ICA draft and its consideration was “part of the overall ICA review/approval process,” according to a March 5 classified letter by recently retired NSA Director Michael Rogers addressed to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes.

However, there are more crimes connected to the FISA warrant. Specifically, the leaks of the names of Americans, including Carter Page, who were spied on.

During his testimony, Brennan acknowledged that the privacy of Americans is to be protected—even if they’re spied on by the government—through masking of their names. There has to be a justification for unmasking them, he acknowledged.

“So how do we get from that to names being on the front pages of certain major U.S. newspapers?” Gowdy asked.

“It’s an excellent question,” Brennan replied.

“What would be an equally excellent answer?” Gowdy said.

“That somebody violated their oath to protect classified information and violated that oath and shared that information in an unauthorized fashion with members of the media,” said Brennan.

According to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova, Inspector General Michael Horowitz has already made criminal referrals to federal prosecutor John Huber, who was appointed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate, among other things, the spying on Page.
“Criminal referrals have already been made, and I suggest that Mr. Brennan—who loves to make comments about the process—get himself a good lawyer,” diGenova told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on May 17.
Epoch Times reporter Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report

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