Appearing Friday on MSNBC, former CIA Director John Brennan said he welcomes “further investigation” into the Obama administration’s role in surveilling the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.
A partial transcript is as follows:
HALLIE JACKSON: The president has been talkative lately, including on Hannity overnight, Sean Hannity over on Fox News, his first sort of interview if you will in depth since we’ve seen some of these developments from the Mueller report. And he invoked your name. and I want to play what he had to say.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP: I really say Now we have to get down — because this was a coup. This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government. These are sick people, sick people. So let’s see what happens with McCabe and Comey and Brennan and Clapper. They were in on the act. And let’s see what happens. And let’s see how high it goes up. Because it’s inconceivable — when it goes to Clapper, Brennan, Comey, these people. I would imagine that some other people, maybe a little higher up, also knew about it — and maybe a lot higher up.
JACKSON: So that’s the president alleging you, among others, were in on the act in some kind of attempt to overthrow. How do you respond?
JOHN BRENNAN: Well, I don’t think it’s surprising at all that we continue to hear the sociopathic ramblings of Mr. Trump, claiming that there was this effort to try to prevent him from being elected or to unseat him. And I welcome any type of continued investigation in terms of what we did during that period of time while we were in government. I testified in front of Congress. Absolutely I would do it again. People have called for me to do. Rand Paul and others, they make these very specious allegations that have no basis in truth. But they put it into the bloodstream and then, unfortunately, certain networks will propagate that.