Ex-CIA Director John Brennan claimed President Donald Trump had “misrepresented the facts” on the Hunter Biden laptop story after his security clearance was revoked Tuesday.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 intel officials who signed the 2020 letter claiming that the release of emails from the laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Many of them were open supporters at the time of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign against Trump.
The signatories said in the letter they did not know if the emails “are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
Brennan, who was among the signers, called the executive order “bizarre” and claimed Trump distorted the letter.
“Signatories of the letter falsely suggested that the news story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign,” Trump’s executive order said of “the former intelligence officials who engaged in misleading and inappropriate political coordination with the 2020 Biden presidential campaign.”
“He misrepresented the facts in that executive order because it said that we had suggested that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation,” Brennan said on MSNBC Tuesday. “No, we said it was all the 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 effort to try to get back at those individuals who have criticized him openly and publicly in the past, and I think very legitimately,” 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 2020 presidential debate to rebut criticisms made by Trump.
“There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what this, he’s accusing me of, is a Russian plan,” Biden said during the debate.
In 2023, it was reported that the Department of Justice had known since December 2019 that Hunter Biden’s laptop contained “reliable evidence” and was “not manipulated in any way.”
Brennan said that Trump had previously announced he would revoke his security clearance in 2018, but his clearance was not taken away.
“The only reason why I still had a security clearance, as I have for the past number of years since I left government service, was for the benefit of the government, so that if the CIA or another government agency wanted to call me in to discuss a classified matter, they could do that,” Brennan said.
He added, “And so it was really for the government’s benefit. It was to facilitate those classified discussions with myself, as well as with former directors, as well as other former members of the intelligence community that had those clearances.”
Brennan has appeared regularly on MSNBC as a senior national security analyst and is one of Trump’s harshest critics.
In a Feb. 2024 appearance on the network, Brennan claimed that Russia is using Republican politicians “as tools.”
Fox News’ David Spector contributed to this report.
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