Former CIA Director John Brennan responds to accusations of a treasonous conspiracy to commit a soft coup” against Donald Trump from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard:

FORMER CIA DIRECTOR JOHN BRENNAN: Here we are again, Nicole. It is unsurprising, very troubling, and very dangerous. As Representative Haines said, the person who leads our intelligence community today would put out something like this that just mischaracterizes and misrepresents, in a wholesale manner, what the intelligence community did during the 2016 run-up to the presidential election. Again, the misrepresentations just are ludicrous. When I read through the material, it reminded me of sort of a third-rate lawyer who realizes she has nothing to defend her client and is going to put together an absurd brief that’s laughable on its face. Anybody who looks at the intelligence community assessment and the work that was done will see that it was very carefully worded, meticulously done, and it stands up to scrutiny. In time, as you pointed out, there have been numerous reviews about it, and it didn’t say any of the things that Tulsi Gabbard alleges it said or didn’t say. I really do encourage people to read it because it was very clear in terms of what it said: that the Russians were using, at President Putin’s direction, influence operations to try to denigrate Hillary Clinton, to try to increase the prospects for Donald Trump’s election, and also just to undermine the integrity of our election system. Those were the primary judgments, and they are ones that certainly I and others who are involved continue to stand behind. NICOLE WALLACE, MSNBC: I guess, importantly, they’re also corroborated by Trump 2.0 CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who, in the same document in which he smears you, the assessment is the same. I mean, where did she come up with her own unique set of allegations? FORMER CIA DIRECTOR JOHN BRENNAN: Well, unfortunately, I think she’s been able to pull some people together who are going to put together this brief that, again, is ludicrous in terms of the substance-the content of it. Then they make the specious allegations. As I said, like a lawyer’s brief, what she’s doing is pushing this out into the social media environment and trying to gain some attention and ingratiate herself with Donald Trump. Clearly, over the past several weeks, it appears she has lost some favor and is trying to use this as an opportunity to curry favor once again. But again, the specious allegations that both she and Ratcliffe are making, based on the things that they’re putting out, really are quite concerning and quite dangerous.

RealClearPolitics Videos