Rep. Peter T. King on Thursday called former CIA Director John O. Brennan the “evil force” who instigated the Russia investigation against President Trump, as pressure mounted for a probe of the origins of the FBI’s counterintelligence inquiry.
“For him to say the president’s guilty of collusion, of treason, that for me is evil to say unless he had absolute proof. Turns out he had none,” the New York Republican said on Fox News. “John Brennan has been the evil force here.”
Mr. Brennan, who has been one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal critics in the Russia probe, said this week that he might have received “bad information.”
Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky this week accused Mr. Brennan of insisting that the unverified and discredited Steele dossier be included in a classified intelligence community report on Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Mr. King said Thursday that the former spy chief “was going out of his way to slant the report against the president.”
“Now he says maybe he misinterpreted the evidence,” said Mr. King, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee. “If that’s the case, number one, either he’s a liar, or number two, he wasn’t smart enough to be CIA director. That he would go on national television and basically call the president a traitor by misinterpreting evidence, either way he disgraced his office. He should be brought before Congress to explain it.”
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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