US President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, says former CIA chief John Brennan needs to stand trial for orchestrating the ongoing probe into investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged “collusion” with Russia.
Speaking to Fox News on Monday, Giuliani said Brennan was the "quarterback" who took the “phony” Trump dossier from British intelligence agents and passed it over to Democratic leaders, triggering a chain of action that led to the ongoing investigation led by the Justice Department’s Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
“Well the guy running it is [John] Brennan and he should be in front of a grand jury. Brennan took an affidavit – a dossier, unless he’s the biggest idiot intelligence agent that ever existed, although he never did much intelligence work, it’s false. You could look at it and laugh,” Giuliani stated.
The former New York mayor went on to describe as “puppets” Mueller and the people who have been working with him on the case for more than a year.
The US has long accused Russia of seeking to intervene in its democratic process, a claim that received much more attention following Trump’s surprising victory over his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race for the White House.
Then-US President Barack Obama and all 16 US intelligence agencies, including Brennan’s CIA, alleged that Moscow had orchestrated a massive online campaign, including hack attacks against the Democratic Party, to turn the page in Trump’s favor.
It is not clear what exactly triggered the Russia probe. Former and current officials have said in the past that the first suspicions about a possible collusion were raised when Trump’s adviser George Papadopoulos made alleged comments made about Russian dirt on Clinton in July 2016.
Brennan, an outspoken Trump critic, told NBC News in February this year that the dossier did in no way affect the intelligence assessment, which was presented to both Obama and Trump. However, the former CIA chief admitted in the same interview that there were items in the dossier that raised his suspicions on whether it was accurate.
“I do think it was up to the FBI to see whether or not they could verify any of it,” he said.
In a more recent appearance on MSNBC, Brennan claimed that Russia might have dirt on Trump although he clarified he did not have any information to back this theory.
When earlier this year Trump fired Andrew McCabe, the former deputy of the FBI, Brennan sent out a tweet that included harsh words for Trump..
“When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history,” Brennan wrote in the tweet before deleting it shortly after.