Donald Trump asked if outgoing CIA Director John Bennan was behind the leak of an unverified report about him. | Getty
By POLITICO Staff
Donald Trump on Sunday night questioned whether outgoing CIA Director John Brennan was behind the leak of an unverified report that accused the president-elect of salacious conduct.
“.@FoxNews ‘Outgoing CIA Chief, John Brennan, blasts Pres-Elect Trump on Russia threat. Does not fully understand.’ Oh really, couldn’t do 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?” Trump tweeted.
The president-elect was responding to Brennan, who harshly criticized the president-elect earlier in the day on “Fox News Sunday,” saying, among other things, that Trump’s comparison of the intelligence community to Nazi Germany was “outrageous.”
The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, took an unusual step last week to publicly say he didn’t believe the intelligence community was responsible for leaking the document and hadn’t made a judgment on whether the information was verified.
The tweet was Trump’s latest dust-up with the intelligence community. He earlier slammed the intelligence community after news reports came out that trump and President Barack Obama were briefed on the contents of a dossier containing unverified compromising information on the president-elect.
“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?” Trump tweeted last week.
In an interview that aired Sunday on 60 Minutes, Obama said the president-elect must improve relations with the intelligence community.
“You’re not going to be able to make good decisions without building some relationship of trust between yourself and that community,” Obama said.
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http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-fight-john-brennan-cia-233654