House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte confirmed to Fox News Channel’s Maria Bartiromo Sunday morning that his committee among others want former CIA Director John Brennan and other former Obama officials to testify before its members.
“We have lots of questions for John Brennan and he will definitely be sought by the Committees for an interview,” Goodlatte said. “This is an extremely disturbing thing to see both he and James Comey, supposedly impartial government officials carrying out their jobs in very important areas in intelligence gathering and law enforcement, express the kind of extreme bias that they’ve shown now, which I think reflects quite accurately on what they were doing back in 2016.”
Goodlatte went on to confirm that not only will Brennan and Comey be sought but also former Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch, whose meeting with President Bill Clinton on an Arizona tarmac during the 2016 election became scrutinized as it happened while his then-presidential candidate wife Hillary Clinton was under federal investigation.
The news comes as the FBI released over 400 pages of highly redacted FISA document applications relating to the surveillance of onetime foreign policy advisor Carter Page during the 2016 Trump campaign. (RELATED: DOJ Releases Carter Page FISA Applications)
Brennan previously testified before House Intelligence Committee in 2017 to give information about Russian interference in the 2016 election. The New York Times noted it was the first time Brennan ever publicly stated concern about a connection between Russia and the Trump campaign.
The Atlantic noted in its coverage that when asked if the Russian government wanted to damage Clinton’s candidacy in favor of Trump, Brennan said at the time: “My assessment is it was both.” According to Brennan, Russia expected Clinton to win the election, but believed Trump had a better chance “even though they probably thought they were not that great.”
However, Brennan does not have a clean track record when testifying before Congress. In 2014, as CIA Director, the agency was accused of hacking into Senate Intelligence Committee staffer computers –something to which Brennan later publicly denied when questioned about it by lawmakers on Capitol Hill and then later had to retract.
Goodlatte criticized the FBI’s use of the Christopher Steele dossier as a primary reason to get a FISA warrant on Page, saying it was a document paid for by Democrats involved with the Hillary Clinton campaign to use against Donald Trump.
“The Clinton campaign the Democratic National Committee paid for the creation of this so-called Steele dossier and turned it over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said. “But what’s so unprecedented about this is that the FBI took it weaponized it without ever verifying its credibility and brought it to the FISA court without disclosing the source of that information.”
