Ex-CIA Chief Warns Trump May Betray Intelligence Capabilities to Russia
Former CIA Director John Brennan said that the president’s secretive deal-making has eroded allies’ trust.
A former director of the Central Intelligence Agency fears that President Donald Trump may share information about the United States’ intelligence capabilities with Russia.
“Who knows what the Trump administration might do in terms of providing insight to the Russians about what intelligence capabilities Western nations have?” said former CIA Director John Brennan in an interview with MSNBC’s The Weekend on Saturday.
Brennan was head of the agency from 2013 to 2017.
Brennan’s comments come during an eventful week for U.S.-Russia relations in which Trump halted military aid to Ukraine and stopped sharing intelligence information with the war-torn country. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also paused cyber operations against Russia.
In the interview, co-host Symone Sanders-Townsend raised concerns about Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, who has released few details about a secretive three-and-a-half hour meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in February.
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Fellow host Alicia Menendez chipped in that other key members of the Trump administration held similarly secretive meetings with political opponents of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier this week.
“I think the rest of the world recognizes that President Trump is cutting deals, and cutting them out of these deals,” Brennan replied. “It’s absurd, absolutely absurd.”
The former top spy went on to say that Trump’s insistence on “doing all of these things privately” has rattled U.S. allies all over the world.
“[A lot of our partners] no longer can rely on us to do what is right, not just for the United States, but also for this Western alliance that really has been so critically important to our national security since World War II, but also to the rest of the Western world,” he said.
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