Durham calls out former CIA Director Brennan for Trump-Russia statements to media

Special Counsel John Durham highlighted CIA Director John Brennan's public statements to the media on the Trump-Russia collusion narrative that appeared in conflict with testimony he gave on the matter as part of the investigation.

Throughout the news cycle, Brennan was a prominent voice from the intelligence community promoting the collusion theory.

"President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash" he wrote in a New York Times op-ed from August of 2018. In 2017, he testified before the House Intelligence Committee that "I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign."

A consistent theme throughout Durham's report was that the intelligence community lacked any meaningful evidence to substantiate the allegations of collusion, and Brennan proved no exception.

"CIA Director John Brennan and Deputy Director David Cohen were interviewed by the Office and were asked about their knowledge of any actual evidence of members of the Trump campaign conspiring or colluding with Russian officials," Durham wrote. "When Brennan was provided with an overview of the origins of the Attorney General's Review after Special Counsel Mueller finding a lack of evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian authorities, Brennan offered that 'they found no conspiracy.'"

"In fact, Special Counsel Mueller's report explicitly states that "[u]ltimately, [his] investigation did not establish that the [Trump] Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities," he continued. "Relatedly, however, shortly after Special Counsel Mueller delivered his report to the Attorney General and the Attorney General had issued a short summary of the Report's findings, Brennan appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe program, where he stated that '[he] suspected there was more than there actually was' with regard to collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election, thus suggesting that he had no actual knowledge of such information."

"Moreover, Deputy Director Cohen advised that he had no recollection of knowing anything Trump was doing with Putin, as opposed to what Putin and the Russians were doing to interfere in the election," Durham continued.

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on Twitter.