Trump’s quest for vengeance against John Brennan

President Donald Trump’s obsession with former CIA director John Brennan could be on a collision course with an ongoing Justice Department probe as Attorney General Bill Barr takes a more hands-on approach to examining the intelligence community’s actions in 2016.

Barr has been meeting with the U.S.’ closest foreign intelligence allies in recent months, making repeated overseas trips as part of an investigation he is overseeing into the origins of the Russia probe and whether any inappropriate “spying” occurred on Trump’s campaign.

As part of that investigation, Barr and John Durham, the federal prosecutor he appointed to conduct it, have been probing a conspiracy theory for which there is little if any evidence, according to several people with knowledge of the matter: that a key player in the Russia probe, a professor named Joseph Mifsud, was actually a Western intelligence asset sent to discredit the Trump campaign — and that the CIA, under Brennan, was somehow involved.

Trump, meanwhile, has become “obsessed” with Brennan, who frequently gets under the president’s skin by publicly questioning his mental acuity and fitness for office, according to a former White House official. On Brennan, “it was always, ‘he’s an idiot, he’s a crook, we ought to investigate him,’” this person said, characterizing Trump’s outbursts.

Since the beginning of his presidency, Trump has also repeatedly attacked Brennan publicly, tweeting about the former CIA director more than two dozen times. He’s questioned Brennan’s mental acuity and called him a liar, a leaker and blamed him for having “detailed knowledge of the (phony) Dossier,” a reference to the raw intelligence reports on Trump’s alleged Russia ties by British former MI-6 officer Christopher Steele. He also tried to unilaterally strip Brennan of his security clearance — a process the White House reportedly never went through with — and urged the House to call him in for questioning.

The emerging focus of the Barr-Durham investigation — the CIA and intelligence community’s work with the FBI on the Russia probe — emphasizes the increasingly blurred lines between politics and law enforcement in the Trump era. In May, Trump gave Barr unprecedented authority to review the intelligence community’s “surveillance activities” during the 2016 election, issuing a sweeping declassification order that granted Barr “unprecedented” powers over the nation’s secrets, former officials said.

It was a break with protocol that Trump’s allies see as a necessary check on the so-called “deep state” but that critics have lambasted as an attempt to create the impression of scandal—especially given Barr’s comments earlier this year hinting at a predisposed belief that inappropriate “spying” occurred in 2016 and that the Steele dossier may have been Russian disinformation.

Barr’s evidently close involvement with the Durham probe is in keeping with his reputation as a micromanager—and a fierce advocate of presidential prerogatives. As attorney general during the George H.W. Bush administration, he described later for an oral history interview, he comes across as a seasoned, bare-knuckled bureaucratic brawler who closely coordinated his actions with the White House counsel’s office.

“He was very competent and very detail-oriented,” said Bill Kristol, who was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and worked with Barr back then. Barr was “a very involved manager” of his department, Kristol said.

Durham’s report is likely to land well after the results of an inquiry by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, who is examining the FBI’s applications to a secret court in 2016 and 2017 to obtain surveillance warrants on a Trump campaign aide. Trump-friendly commentators have been raising expectations about the IG report, predicting that it will show the FBI purposefully misled the court to surveil Trump’s campaign, and have expressed frustration in recent days over its delayed release.

But former FBI officials on the receiving end of that probe say the president’s allies are setting themselves up for disappointment.

“Is the IG report going to say we made mistakes? Yes,” said one of the former officials. “But it won’t say we did so for some nefarious purpose. So the report will be a dry hole for Trump and his supporters. Which is why [Barr and Durham] have now gone to this other theory, positing that the CIA was engaged in some rogue operation to overthrow Trump and therefore feeding the FBI bullshit,” he said. “It’s complete nonsense.”

“Haven’t you heard?” said another former FBI official, sarcastically. “Brennan was a puppet-master and we were just his puppets.”

Brennan has spoken openly about working closely with the FBI on counterintelligence investigations, and acknowledged in an op-ed last year that he had “many conversations” with former FBI Director James Comey in 2016 “about the potential for American citizens, involved in partisan politics or not, to be pawns in Russian hands.”

The FBI launched its counterintelligence probe after learning that a Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, was offered “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from a Russian proxy — Mifsud — and had told an Australian diplomat about it. Australian officials tipped off their American counterparts to Papadopoulos’s admission, though it’s still unclear who was initially tipped off, and that’s reportedly a subject of Barr’s investigation. The bureau then flew former FBI agent Peter Strzok over to London to interview Alexander Downer and an associate about his interactions with Papadopoulos.

Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his relationship with Mifsud, but he has since claimed, without evidence, that the professor was actually an intelligence plant sent by the CIA to entrap him and give the FBI an excuse to open an investigation.

The two agencies have a fraught history that at times has descended into open bureaucratic warfare. After the 9/11 attacks, for instance, officials at the CIA and the FBI blamed one another for lapses that failed to stop al Qaeda. And they sharply differed in their approaches to interrogating terrorist suspects, with FBI officials blasting their counterparts in Langley as brutish amateurs in the art of extracting valuable information.

The Durham probe also threatens to break those fissures back open.

The CIA and FBI “certainly strive to work together, and if information comes from the agency and they think it’s reliable, we do put a lot of weight on that,” said one of the former FBI officials. “But we also ask a lot of questions and don’t swallow anything hook line and sinker. No one is the toady of any other agency.”

Brennan allies and skeptics of the Durham investigation note that the CIA played no role in the probe involving Americans, and was narrowly focused on determining Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motivations and how the Kremlin was carrying out its election attack in 2016.

“The CIA was focused on Russia’s interference in the election and the role that Russian officials played,” said Nick Shapiro, who served as Brennan’s chief of staff at the CIA and is now his spokesman. “In our government, the FBI is who conducts counterintelligence investigations on U.S. citizens. What Barr and Trump are reportedly up to not only doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, but it is yet another dangerous abuse of power, something that seems to now happen on a daily basis in this administration.”

“Any investigation into John Brennan by this corrupt administration must — on its face — be viewed with a minimum with maximum skepticism,” said former CIA spokesman George Little. “The intelligence community deserves the respect of the president and his Cabinet, not politically motivated investigations.”

A source close to the White House said the president has been “warned repeatedly by smart legal minds around him to stay out of” the investigation. But he also claimed that “a big chunk of the Barr-Durham investigation” is believed to involve “top Obama administration officials, including Brennan.”

Another person close to the president said that Brennan is a “topic of conversation” in the White House. He said he didn’t know for sure whether Trump told Barr to focus on Brennan, but “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Durham hung up when called by POLITICO and didn’t respond to a follow-up text message. DOJ declined to comment.

Asked for comment, White House deputy press Secretary Hogan Gidley said: “John Brennan lied before Congress when he got caught spying on American citizens and lied about having Russian collusion evidence that never existed. The only way I’ve ever heard anyone in the White House mention him is as a punchline.”

It’s not clear what Gidley was referring to—Brennan has not been accused of lying to Congress.

Brennan has in the past called Durham a “very well-respected individual.” But he largely wrote off the ongoing Durham-Barr probe in an interview earlier this month. “I’m supposedly going to be interviewed by Mr. Durham as part of this non-investigation,” Brennan said on MSNBC. “I don’t understand the predication of this worldwide effort to try to uncover dirt” on the 2016 Russia probe.

One former White House official acknowledged that Brennan’s rhetoric has made him a target. Trump “is hyper-sensitive about any type of criticism of any kind, he’s always got to be the smartest guy, he’s always got to know more than everybody else,” he said.

Brennan has not been understated in his criticism: In July 2018, after Trump sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the U.S. intelligence community in a press conference in Helsinki, Finland, Brennan tweeted that Trump was “wholly in the pocket of Putin.” He has also called Trump “treasonous,” though —after Mueller could not establish that Trump had engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia — he softened his tone, saying he may have received “bad information” about the extent of the Trump campaign’s Russia ties.

What little Barr has said about the Durham probe is directly at odds with Brennan’s language. “How did the bogus narrative begin that Trump was essentially in cahoots with Russia to interfere with the U.S. election?” he said in July, describing one of the questions he hoped to answer.

As with the IG report, Trump’s allies have been raising expectations for the Durham investigation for months, predicting that he will uncover a deep state plot to stage a “coup” against the president. Durham and Barr have been focusing primarily on the intelligence community—reportedly seeking interviews with the CIA analysts who drew conclusions about Putin’s motivations in 2016—and have not requested interviews with any of the senior FBI or DOJ employees who were directly involved in the opening of the Russia investigation in 2016, according to people familiar with the matter.

Barr has also been fixated on the question of how the intelligence community determined that Russia intervened specifically to help Trump win rather than to just sow chaos and distrust in the Democratic process, according to the New York Times. But as POLITICO first reported, that question has already been asked and answered at the CIA’s highest levels — by Mike Pompeo, a Trump loyalist.

Just after Pompeo took over as CIA director in 2017, he conducted a personal review of the CIA’s findings, grilling analysts on their conclusions in a challenging and at times combative interview, people familiar with the matter said. He ultimately found no evidence of any wrongdoing, or that the analysts had been under political pressure to produce their findings.

The intelligence community also released a joint assessment in January 2017 concluding that Putin directed a wide-ranging interference campaign aimed at harming Clinton’s candidacy, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report detailed dozens of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians in 2016.

Trump has refused to accept the intelligence community’s conclusions, however, instead pointing the finger at Ukraine, the Obama administration, and the private cybersecurity firm that confirmed the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee.

Ironically, Barr’s long Washington career began at the CIA, he noted in the same oral history interview, at a time when the intelligence community was under assault from congressional Democrats who believed the agency had run amok in part by spying on the domestic political activities of American citizens.

As a young lawyer in the CIA’s office of legislative counsel, Barr helped the agency contain what it saw as damaging overreach by Capitol Hill. In testimony before his 1991 confirmation as attorney general, he described his role as “analyzing the impact of proposed legislation on Agency operations, drafting Agency bill comments, drafting Hill testimony, carrying on liaison with congressional committee staffs.”

He’s also no stranger to interagency battles: It was Barr who recommended that Bush oust FBI director William Sessions, who was accused of serious misconduct in an internal DOJ watchdog report. Barr was ultimately vindicated when Bill Clinton, a successor he disdained for what he called his defects of character, removed Sessions in 1993.

One veteran Washington Republican who has worked with Barr in past administrations and previously respected him said that he has been surprised and disappointed in Barr, describing him as a “henchman” for Trump.

And intelligence veterans affiliated with both parties have leapt to the defense of their former colleagues, noting that it wasn’t just the CIA that was concerned about Moscow’s support for the Trump campaign.

“Talk about witch hunts!” said former CIA director Michael Hayden, who served during the George W. Bush administration. “This is a perfect example of that. Russian interference in the 2016 election was the judgment of the entire intelligence community. And it remains so today.”