Obama administration CIA Director John Brennan insisted in an interview Sunday with Fox News’s Chris Wallace that Obama’s intelligence agencies conducted “no spying on Donald Trump’s campaign,” a claim contradicted by inspector general reports, a two-year special counsel probe, congressional inquiries, and continued investigation.
In 2019, an inspector general report found that Brennan lied under oath to Congress about details of the Obama administration’s spying on its political opponent Trump. A ruling from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court in June demonstrated that the Obama administration in which Brennan served lied about its legal basis for spying on former Trump campaign official Carter Page, including apparently fabricated evidence. Fabricated claims form much of the Steele dossier, according to the FBI. Federal agency reports previously found that Brennan repeatedly lied, including while under oath to Congress, about the CIA spying on the Senate, drone strikes, and more.
During the Sunday interview, Brennan also repeated lies he previously made to Congress that the Christopher Steele “dossier” did not affect the FBI and CIA’s review of disproven “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia. A report from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed the former CIA director lied to Congress about this previously.
“The Steele dossier was not used in any way to undergird the judgments that came out of the intelligence community assessment about the Russian actions in the 2016 election,” Brennan claimed to Wallace. “There was so much other evidence and intelligence to support those judgments,” he added. “I am very comfortable with how the intelligence community came out on the 2016 election.”
Despite repeating disproven lies that there was no Obama administration spying on its political opponents, Brennan said he has “no problems” with Attorney General William Barr naming John Durham a special counsel on the ongoing investigation into the intelligence communities’ investigations.
“I do believe John Durham is going to carry out his responsibilities ably and without any political influence,” Brennan said.
In the rest of the interview, Brennan compared Israel to China and Russia, calling the most recent attack killing Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was involved in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a brigadier general and was the head of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, an attack on a “scientist.”
“If China were to assassinate a Taiwanese nuclear scientist or if Russia were to assassinate a Ukrainian nuclear scientist, it would be roundly condemned and rightly so,” said the man who covered up Obama administration drone strikes. “Just because it may have been Israel behind the assassination does not make it right.”
While Wallace noted that Iran has targeted Israel in the past and supported terror endeavors, Brennan went on to claim that assassinating leaders in other nations inspires a “chaotic” international environment.
In October, Brennan’s newly declassified handwritten notes signal that the intelligence community knew that Russia was potentially contributing disinformation in 2016 to Hillary Clinton’s anti-collusion claims that ultimately caused the special counsel. The notes also indicated that Brennan and other national security officials informed former President Barack Obama in the summer of 2016.
“We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED],” Brennan’s handwritten notes state. “Cite alleged approval by Hillary Clinton–on 26 July–of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify [sic] Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”
Other evidence suggests that the CIA under Brennan “created the contacts and interactions that they then reported to the FBI as suspicious,” thus prompting the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane surveillance and harassment of Trump campaign associates.