It’s not clear who leaked word of these salacious allegations. The dossier that BuzzFeed published had been commissioned by Trump’s opponents during the 2016 campaign, and had been circulating among journalists and political operatives — as well as intelligence officials — for months. It is possible that CNN would have needed an intelligence-community source to report that our spy agencies had briefed Trump on the dossier. But the list of people who could have sent the documents themselves to BuzzFeed extends well into the private sector.
Nonetheless, Donald Trump decided to pin the blame on the intelligence agencies he will soon rely upon — and in the most incendiary possible terms.
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to "leak" into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany?
4:48 AM - 11 Jan 2017
32,040 32,040 Retweets 109,146 109,146 likes
These remarks did not endear the president-elect to outgoing CIA director John Brennan.
And in an interview with Fox News Sunday, Brennan did not mince words when assessing the incoming president’s command of geopolitics.
“I don’t think he has a full understanding of Russian capabilities and the actions they are taking on the world,” the CIA director said. “Mr. Trump has to understand that absolving Russia is a road that he needs to be very, very careful about moving down.”
Brennan also decried Trump’s assumption that the intelligence community was “leaking or releasing this information,” arguing that it had been “circulating for many months,” and thus, “was already out there.”
Trump responded by observing that several bad things happened in the world while Brennan was running the CIA — and that this (somehow) amounted to evidence that Brennan was the mystery leaker.
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
.@FoxNews "Outgoing CIA Chief, John Brennan, blasts Pres-Elect Trump on Russia threat. Does not fully understand." Oh really, couldn't do…
4:16 PM - 15 Jan 2017
11,223 11,223 Retweets 42,299 42,299 likes
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
much worse - just look at Syria (red line), Crimea, Ukraine and the build-up of Russian nukes. Not good! Was this the leaker of Fake News?
4:29 PM - 15 Jan 2017
13,793 13,793 Retweets 55,381 55,381 likes
The CIA director then turned his indignation up to 11, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
“Tell the families of those 117 CIA officers who are forever memorialized on our wall of honor that their loved ones who gave their lives were akin to Nazis,” Brennan said, referring to Trump’s days-old tweet. “Tell the CIA officers who are serving in harm’s way right now and their families who are worried about them that they are akin to Nazi Germany. I found that to be very repugnant, and I will forever stand up for the integrity and patriotism of my officers who have done much over the years to sacrifice for their fellow citizens.”
This is all remarkable for a number of reasons. Most obviously, the outgoing CIA director and incoming president are publicly describing each other as repugnant and incompetent, on the one hand, and ineffectual and Nazi-esque, on the other. While Trump won’t need to rely on Brennan in the coming years, he’ll presumably need to rely on some of the old director’s loyalists. That Trump is choosing to further heighten tensions with the CIA, days before he takes office, seems inauspicious — both for his relationship with the intelligence community, and for the prospects of the next commander-in-chief responding rationally to attacks on his ego.
But Trump isn’t the only one who made some curious remarks during this exchange. Brennan claims that the information in the dossier was “already out there,” and so there’s no reason to suspect the intelligence community was involved in its publication. But as Marcy Wheeler notes, the last report in the dossier is dated December 13, 2016 — many months after the FBI first got wind of the documents. Which is to say: The iteration of the dossier that leaked was a newly updated one, a fact that shrinks the pool of people who could have leaked it.
