Former CIA Director John Brennan claimed President Donald Trump’s oft-repeated pledge that there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russian government is not true in a New York Times op-ed Thursday.
Brennan’s incendiary op-ed comes hours after Trump revoked his security clearance citing his frequent TV appearances questioning the president’s mental state, his character and even encouraging his removal from office. The former CIA Director responded in his op-ed that he believes the revocation of his clearance is an effort to silence him.
Brennan then posits in his op-ed that Trump’s claim of no collusion is “hogwash” because “Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, publicly called upon Russia to find the missing emails of Mrs. Clinton.”
The former CIA director then explains his theory of collusion, saying that “by issuing such a statement, Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen, but also openly authorizing his followers to work with our primary global adversary against his political opponent.”
Brennan offers no evidence of Trump or anyone in his campaign actively working in a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential election. The furtherest Brennan goes is when he asks readers to imagine “what Mr. Trump privately encouraged his advisers to do — and what they actually did — to win the election.”
With these two claims, which do not show any evidence of a criminal conspiracy, Brennan is ready to declare, “Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash.”