John Brennan: The Intel Assessment ‘Never Mentioned’ the Word ‘Collusion’

Sanders: “— in preventing such leaks before the election.”

DANIELS: “Something I cannot get out of my head is Tulsi Gabbard, the DNI, sitting in the White House briefing room, spreading these lies to the American people and, you know, the briefing room is like, you know, there’s not a lot of back and forth. And so, you know, one of the things that she did is she accused you guys of things you did not do or say, right? She talked about the fact that, in her head, that Russia did not touch the voting machines. Well, President Obama said that they did it, right. So the facts that she’s creating in her head don’t even match up. So what are the facts to this day that you’re watching them trying to create some — a different world of?”

BRENNAN: “Well, as you point out, I think both Jim Clapper and I were aghast when we saw that the leaders of the intelligence community were pushing out this information that was taken from that period of time, declassified and pushed out, and then they make these outrageous claims and allegations. It is critically important to remember that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election. They tried to undermine the integrity of the election. They tried to hurt Hillary Clinton. They thought Hillary was going to win the election. But they wanted to bloody her, both before and after the election. But they also wanted to help Donald Trump’s prospects of being elected. And so, they had this influence campaign using information operations. They put out bots and personas and hacked into emails, the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, and others and pushed them out through Wikileaks and other types of things. It was restricted to the influence operations. Yes, they did some exploratory work looking at some of the technical infrastructure of our electoral system, but they didn’t change any votes. And the intelligence community assessment that we wrote back then, that the analysts wrote, said that we didn’t have any information whatsoever about what the impact was on the election. Then, an intelligence community assessment never mentioned the word collusion. Not at all. So what they do is they misrepresent the facts, mischaracterize what it said, and then claim that we were engaged in this big conspiracy. Well, as Symone pointed out, President Obama told us, make sure you don’t do anything at all that is going to any way affect the outcome of that election. Don’t do anything and make sure that you don’t get these reports released that named individuals, had American citizens’ names in them. And so, we did our utmost to make sure that we carried out our responsibilities with the integrity that we’re supposed to. Between Jim Clapper and myself, we have had 80, over 80 years of intelligence community experience. We took our our roles very, very seriously, our responsibilities. And so, therefore, we want to make sure that we’re able to put out this intelligence community assessment at President Obama’s direction that captured exactly what the Russians were doing, because, as it was said in the piece, this is a warning. Russians have done this for many, many years. They don’t just do it here in the United States. They try to affect the outcome of these democratic elections.”

Sanders: “They tried it in France right after the 2016 election.”

BRENNAN: “Yeah, they have a history.”