The Ratcliffe review did not dispute the intelligence community’s core judgment that Putin preferred Trump to then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton but argued that agency leadership rushed the process and then Brennan “risked stifling analytic debate” by “signaling that agency heads had already reached consensus before the ICA was even coordinated.” The review made no mention of Comey.
It’s not clear whether the FBI probe, first reported by Fox News, has moved beyond a preliminary stage.
“We do not comment on ongoing investigations,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.
“Nobody from the FBI or Department of Justice or CIA has reached out to me at all, so I am just waiting to hear more about what this might be,” Brennan said Wednesday on MSNBC, where he is a contributor.
“I am clueless about what it is exactly that they may be investigating me for,” Brennan added.
The CIA and Comey declined to comment.
On Wednesday, Trump told reporters at the White House he wasn’t aware of the reported investigation of Brennan and Comey but repeated his accusation that they are “very dishonest people.”
At the center of the dispute are statements by both men to Congress about the 2016 investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election, and the decision to examine claims in a dossier from former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, funded by the Clinton campaign, which alleged coordination between the Russian government and people associated with the Trump campaign.
Last month’s CIA report also argued that Brennan restricted access to key intelligence and “showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness” when faced with internal objections including information from the dossier.
Brennan, in his memoir, said he opposed including information from the Steele dossier in a briefing document provided to President Barack Obama. Officials decided instead to append a summary of the dossier’s allegations to the briefing document.
The FBI’s criminal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia began in 2016 and stretched into the first Trump administration. It became the subject of investigations by the Justice Department’s inspector general and by special counsel John Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr to also examine the handling of intelligence that led to the Trump-Russia probe.
The Durham probe ended with no finding of wrongdoing in the handling of the intelligence, but it did end with the indictment of three people, including a former FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to falsifying information in a surveillance warrant request targeting a Trump campaign aide.
