On Fox News Sunday, CIA Director John Brennan pointed to the FBI when asked if there was any hard evidence of collusion between the Trump organization and Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Credit goes to writer Tommy Christopher for catching this. Let’s start with the relevant piece of the transcript, via FoxNews.com:
WALLACE: Does the intelligence community have any information—I’m not talking about rumors, any information—about contacts between the Trump camp and associates of the Kremlin about discussions during the campaign about hacking the Democrats?
BRENNAN: The intelligence community collects foreign intelligence on foreign parties, entities or people. If in the course of our intelligence collection, we pick up information related to U.S. persons or officials, which we refer to as incidental collection, we share that information with the appropriate authorities. In most instances, that’s the FBI.
And so, if we did come into contact with that type of information, it would have been shared with the FBI, and we would make sure that our intelligence committees then were aware of it as well.
WALLACE: So, is there such information?
BRENNAN: I’d just say, if we came into—if had that type of information, we would share it with the FBI.
WALLACE: I mean, I just would say, that’s not a denial, sir.
BRENNAN: Well, I wouldn’t confirm or deny something like that on your program, as much as I respect you, Chris.
WALLACE: Thank you, sir.
Christopher is a former White House correspondent and reporter for AOL so he is seasoned at interpreting bureaucratese. Here’s what he wrote on Shareblue:
Brennan’s response is an extraordinary departure from the standard non-denial, and included a very detailed description of how such hypothetical evidence would be collected, which Wallace did not ask him about.
Brennan volunteered that hypothetical twice, each time pointing the finger at the FBI as an answer to Wallace’s questions about the existence of information on Trump’s collusion with Russia.
So, does the FBI have information about collusion? In an interview on CNN today, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) also pointed to the FBI.
CUMMINGS: You’ve got to understand that we members of Congress have a lot of information that the public does not have. […] We need to be doing more, number one, [unintelligible] investigate this hacking and also, we need to be doing more with regard to looking at the FBI director and what he did in this whole situation.
I don’t think this will be going away.
Watch Brennan on the January 15, 2017 Fox News Sunday and Cummings on CNN’s New Day today below.
A Tale of Two Reality TV Shows
We’re familiar with Trump’s show ‘The Apprentice’ but there was a lesser known reality TV show called ‘The Surreal Life’, starring such luminaries as Vanilla Ice, Ron Jeremy and Tammy Faye Baker. Ron Jeremy for all of my fellow clean living newshounds is a porn star. And he sorta has a specialty if you want to call it that. That specialty is,….ahem,…sodomizing young beautiful women.
Anyway on the show, Vanilla Ice was all jazzed about working with Ron Jeremy saying “Yeah, man I love all your videos!” and the like. He was excited to work with his hero. In the mechanics of the show Ron Jeremy betrayed Vanilla Ice. And Vanilla Ice went apeshit crazy. What actors call chewing up the scenery. He even wrecked a nice drum set. All in front of an unphased Ron Jeremy. And I’m thinking, “Vanilla Ice do you understand what Ron Jeremy does for a living????!! Well, he just did it to you.”.
I like to think that Donald Trump will be playing the role of Ron Jeremy and Paul Ryan will be playing Vanilla Ice. It would be best if Trump breaks a lot of campaign promises. Let’s allow him room to do that. Not much else to do in the time being.
We’ll see.
