John Brennan on Being Investigated: ‘Nobody from the FBI or Department of Justice or CIA Has Reached Out to Me at All’

Wallace: “Joining us now is our guest, John Brennan, here for his first public comments on this news. Director Brennan, thank you for being here.”

BRENNAN: “Good to see you, Nicolle.”

Wallace: “Tell me if I have left anything out of the fact pattern if you go back to your role in government and the way the assessment was put together about Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.

BRENNAN: “Yeah, well, as Yogi Berra has famously said, it’s deja vu all over again. It is hard to believe that here we are, 8 and a half years after, we’re still going over this ground that has been, I think, fairly well and exhaustively plowed. First of all, I should say I know nothing about this reported investigation or referral to the DoJ other than what I’ve read in these press reports, these leaks, which are not really supposed to happen if there is an investigation going on. Secondly, nobody from the FBI or Department of Justice or CIA has reached out to me at all. So, I am just waiting to, you know, hear more about what this might be. And so, again, I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today. I’m very proud of the work that the women and men of the CIA and of other elements in the intelligence community did 8 and a half years ago when they put together this intelligence community assessment. We went to great lengths to protect the integrity of the process, the integrity and the sensitivity of the intelligence involved, as well as to protect the identities of individuals that may have been implicated in some of this intelligence, including from the Trump Administration. And so, we went to whatever lengths we needed to do, to go to in order to make sure that we’re able to follow through with the President Obama’s request that a comprehensive and exhaustive review be done of Russian interference in 2016 election because he and others realized that the Russians were going to continue to do this in subsequent elections and he wanted to make sure that we were going to have that, the collection of information and intelligence that we then could hand over to our successors. And as you pointed out, there have been numerous reviews of this intelligence community assessment and the process we went through. The bipartisan Senate intelligence report, the Durham investigation, other types of things which validated it. And indeed, as you pointed out, the CIA know this tradecraft review and I will point out there was a serious violation in terms of what they did. They never interviewed me or Jim Clapper, you know, two of the people involved in this, before putting this thing out, but it says in there that the rigor of the analysis in that intelligence community assessment exceeded that of most other intelligence community assessments. So, again, I think this is, unfortunately, a very sad and tragic example of the continued politicization of the intelligence community, of the national security process. And, quite frankly, I’m really shocked that, you know, individuals who are willing to sacrifice their reputations, their credibility, their decency, to continue to do Donald Trump’s bidding on something that clearly is just politically based.”