Ex-CIA director John Brennan claimed President Donald Trump ‘misrepresented the facts’ on the Hunter Biden laptop story after his security clearance was revoked Tuesday.
By executive order, Trump revoked the security clearances of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed the 2020 letter, claiming that the release of emails from the laptop had “all the classic hallmarks of a Russian information operation.” Many of them were open supporters during Joe Biden’s presidential campaign against Trump.
The signatories said in the letter that they did not know whether the emails “are real or not” and that we have no evidence of Russian involvement – only that our experience makes us deeply suspect that the Russian government played a significant role in this case. “
Brennan, one of the signatories, called the executive order “bizarre” and claimed Trump had distorted the letter.
JOHN BRENNAN’S CLOSED-DOOR HEARING ‘CONFIRMED’ HUNTER LAPTOP LETTER WAS ‘VERY POLITICAL’: JIM JORDAN
Former CIA Director John Brennan expressed President Donald Trump’s view on the Hunter Biden laptop story. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
“Signatories of the letter falsely suggested that the news story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign,” Trump says executive order said of “the former intelligence officials who engaged in misleading and inappropriate political coordination with Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.”
“He misrepresented the facts in that executive order because it stated that we had suggested that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation,” Brennan said on MSNBC on Tuesday. “No, we said these were all hallmarks of Russian information operations, including the dumping of accurate information, which is what we said in that letter.”
“So again, this was just, you know, his attempt to get revenge on the individuals who have openly and publicly criticized him in the past, and I think this is very legitimate,” he said.
Other officials named in the EO include former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Jr., former CIA Director Michael Hayden, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
Three days after the letter was made public, Biden used it as a talking point in the final presidential debate of 2020 to rebut Trump’s criticism.
“There are 50 former national intelligence people who said what he’s accusing me of is a Russian scheme,” Biden said during the debate.
Shortly after taking office, President Trump revoked the security clearances of Brennan and fifty others by executive order. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
In 2023 it was reported that the Department of Justice knew it since December 2019 that Hunter Biden’s laptop contained “reliable evidence” and was “not tampered with in any way.”
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Brennan said Trump had previously announced he would do so revoked his security clearance in 2018but his consent was not withdrawn.
“The only reason I still had a security clearance, as I have had for the last few years since I left the government service, was for the benefit of the government, so that if the CIA or any other government agency wanted to call me in to discuss a classified matter, that they could do,” Brennan said.
He added: “And so it was really for the benefit of the government. It was to facilitate those secret conversations with myself, but also with former directors, as well as with other former members of the intelligence community who had that clearance.”
Former CIA Director John Brennan discussed the executive order Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.” (MSNBC screenshot)
Brennan has appeared regularly on MSNBC as a senior national security analyst and is one of Trump’s fiercest critics.
In a February 2024 appearance on the network, Brennan claimed that Russia uses Republican politicians ‘as a tool’.
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Fox News’ David Spector contributed to this report.
