April 6, 2018, "Ex-top CIA official: Brennan is doing Putin's 'bidding' by speculating about Trump blackmail," Yahoo News, Michael Isikoff
"A former top CIA official who served as the agency’s station chief in Moscow is sharply criticizing his former boss, John Brennan, accusing him of doing Vladimir Putin’s “bidding” through his harsh attacks on President Trump.
In an interview on the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery,”
CIA veteran Daniel Hoffman charged that Brennan’s public comments and
tweets in recent weeks have played into Putin’s hands, helping the
Russian leader stoke political divisions within the country and thereby
undermine U.S. national security.
“I
don’t think we’ve ever seen something like this,” said Hoffman about
Brennan’s public comments about the president. “Gosh, I can’t remember
ever seeing an instance of this in our history where a retired director
of the CIA went as far as he did.”
Hoffman
was reacting to a series of tweets and public statements the former CIA
director has made in recent weeks after signing a contract to be a
commentator for NBC News.
In one tweet on March 17,
Brennan reacted to Trump’s apparent gloating about the firing of FBI
Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (the president called it a “a great day
for Democracy”) by writing about the president: “When the full extent of
your venality, moral turpitude and political corruption becomes known,
you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the
dustbin of history.”
Then, in a March 21 appearance
on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Brennan said of Trump: “I think he is afraid
of the president of Russia. One could speculate as to why. The Russians
may have something on him personally that they could always roll out and
make his life more difficult.”
Brennan declined to comment for this story. But shortly after his “Morning Joe” comments, he emphasized to the New York Times
that he had no hard evidence that the Russians had blackmail material
on Trump, notwithstanding the contents of a still-uncorroborated dossier
prepared by former British spy Christopher Steele making similar
allegations. “I do not know if the Russians have something on Donald
Trump that they could use as blackmail,” he told the Times.
But
Hoffman, who served as CIA station chief in Moscow during President
Barack Obama’s first term and later worked under Brennan as chief of the
agency’s Near East operations, was not dissuaded.
“Sometimes,
the president can bring out the worst in his enemies or his opponents,
for all that entails,” said Hoffman in his “Skullduggery” interview.
Even though Brennan appeared to back away from his “Morning Joe”
comments, “the damage is done.”
“I
found it quite disconcerting that he went as far as he did,” Hoffman
said on the podcast. “Basically, accusing the president of being subject
to blackmail by Vladimir Putin is an extraordinarily strong statement
to make and carries with it a lot of damage.
“The
people hearing that — the viewers, not just in our country but
worldwide — would presume that John Brennan, based on his former
position, would actually know the answer to that [Russian blackmail]
question.”
“There’s
no speculation there. He was the director of the CIA. He knows a lot.
The nuance is lost on those who heard John Brennan’s statements.”
Hoffman first detailed his discomfort with Brennan’s public comments in an article he wrote this week for the Cipher Brief,
a website that specializes in coverage of the U.S. intelligence
community.
The article got attention because Hoffman is the first CIA
insider to publicly call out Brennan over his postgovernment comments.
He wrote in the piece that Brennan’s tweets were “cringe worthy” and
that, in his public statements, “partisanship reached a new low — and
they were shocking to intelligence officers, who expect former and
sitting CIA directors to carefully parse their words, especially when
speaking to the media.”
Hoffman
expanded on the critique in his “Skullduggery” interview, saying that
the former CIA director appears to have been “blinded by his antipathy
towards the president.”
To
be sure, Brennan is not the only former U.S. intelligence official to
publicly criticize Trump. Many of these officials were offended when, in
one of his first acts as president, Trump visited CIA headquarters and,
while standing in front of the Hall of Stars honoring former officers
who died in the line of duty, devoted much of his talk to boasting of
the crowd size at his inaugural speech.
“Look,
freedom of speech is something we all value in this country,” Hoffman
said. “But I think, if I could be so presumptuous to say, that as a
retired director of the CIA — and Russians like to say there’s no such
thing as a former intelligence officer, that just doesn’t exist for them
— you almost want to say that you almost take the Hippocratic Oath of
doing no harm to our national security when you’re exercising your
freedom of speech.”
Hoffman
noted that a principal goal of Putin’s influence operations against the
United States was to stoke partisan tensions within the country and
undermine the public’s faith in the government, including the
intelligence community. In that sense, he argued, Brennan inadvertently
aided Putin in his goals.
“What
Vladimir Putin wants is what John Brennan delivered,” said Hoffman.
Brennan, he said, “drove the partisan wedge between the two parties that
much deeper. Democrats and Republicans are at each other’s throats over
just about everything. It’s hard for them to agree on anything. When
you have a retired director of the CIA immersing himself in this
dialogue in a not-so-productive way, … that’s going to drive that
partisanship to a new low.”
And,
he added, it will “cause the president, frankly, to be concerned, and
his team to be concerned, that maybe, yes, the Obama administration
intelligence community team was in some ways biased against him.”
What Brennan should have done, he said, is hold his fire and “trust the process.”
“Go
to the special counsel [Robert Mueller] and explain to the special
counsel what your concerns are, if there are any, and avoid the damage
that you would cause by the public statement that he made against the
president.”"
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