Transcript: A Conversation with John O. Brennan

Director Brennan, John, let me begin with what's in the news. Last night, the director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, FBI Director Chris Wray, both warned the country in an unusual prime-time news conference about intervention in our elections by Iran and Russia. I want to ask you what you thought of that prime-time performance, what you think about this allegation that the Russians and Iranians are up to mischief, and whether you think this is the kind of thing that maybe should have been done at this time right before the election back in 2016.

MR. BRENNAN: Well, good morning, David, and thanks for doing this interview with Washington Post Live this morning.

Yes, I watched the statement that was issued by John Ratcliffe, the director of National Intelligence, and Chris Wray, the FBI director. I wish the director of National Intelligence had more credibility because I think there are real questions about whether or not what he says is being motivated by his political interests. Clearly, he is a very partisan supporter of Donald Trump and, unfortunately, has politicized his office by the selective release and declassification of some material that is designed to promote Donald Trump's prospects for reelection. And I haven't seen the material that they refer to in terms of Iranian and Russian efforts to try to interfere in the election.

I wouldn't be surprised if both countries are doing things particularly on the influence operations side to try to shape the attitudes and views of Americans, and interestingly, Mr. Ratcliffe led off with Iran and then talked about Russia but said that Iran was trying to damage Mr. Trump but didn't really say what the Russians were doing.

I believe that the Russians are the most active foreign actor right now, again, trying to shape the attitudes, the views, and the votes of American citizens, and I believe that Vladimir Putin and Russia want to see Donald Trump reelected because I think they see it very much in Russian interests.

MR. IGNATIUS: One particular point of what the two of them had to say last night was the allegation that Iran was sending out messages supposedly in the name of a right-wing group, the Proud Boys, to intimidate Democrats, and I found myself scratching my head. Why would the Iranians want to intimidate Democrats in this election? Did you find that allegation credible?

MR. BRENNAN: I found it very curious, like you, in terms of just how they know that this is something that was initiated by Iran, and the purpose of that effort, again, sending these emails or these letters to individuals, misrepresenting themselves as Proud Boys, and trying to intimidate them as far as voting for Donald Trump. So, I don't know. I haven't seen what is there.

Chris Wray didn't talk about any of those details. Again, this came from John Ratcliffe, who I think has just basically undermined any credibility that his office and he personally has on these matters.

MR. IGNATIUS: Ratcliffe shortly before this had issued another statement in which he said he didn't find any evidence of Russian disinformation in the way that the Trump campaign and the New York Post had obtained Hunter Biden's laptop with all the incendiary, inflammatory allegations that are there.

What did you think about that statement? Did that seem well grounded or appropriate for a director of National Intelligence?

MR. BRENNAN: I don't know. Again, I scratch my head at whatever John Ratcliffe said on these matters, and just asserting something without providing any type of information that is going to support that assertion, I think, again, just raises questions.

So, I think there are a lot of issues related to this New York Post story that reportedly referenced the Hunter Biden emails, and as I and several of my former colleagues have pointed out publicly, that it does bear the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.

Now, we don't know whether or not that is the case, but there's just a lot of things that are cropping up now that may not be what they appear at first blush, and I do think it's important that John Ratcliffe or Christopher Wray provides the underlying data or analysis to support their conclusions and assertions.

MR. IGNATIUS: One more question before we leave DNI Ratcliffe, and that is, what effect does it have on career intelligence professionals when it's seen, by critics at least, that the person who is director of National Intelligence coordinating the 17 intelligence agencies has a political agenda? What do the career officers at CIA or other agencies think when they're confronted with that?

MR. BRENNAN: Well, I think it's, first of all, very demoralizing because it really runs counter to what the intelligence professionals and the leaders of the intelligence community are supposed to be doing, which is to provide apolitical, nonpartisan, objective truth to policymakers and, when appropriate, to the American people. And the fact that you have somebody who is such a hyper-partisan and clearly is demonstrating loyalty and fealty to Donald Trump as opposed to upholding his oath of office, I can imagine that my former colleagues at the CIA and even in the office of the director of National Intelligence are just shaking their heads in disgust that we have somebody now at the helm of the United States intelligence community that is misusing and abusing his authorities in the interests of the political objectives and personal objectives of Donald Trump.

MR. IGNATIUS: Let's turn to President Trump, and I want to ask you the simplest baseline question. Could someone like Donald Trump, a businessperson with--it's reckoned by The New York Times--over $400 million in personally guaranteed loans coming due, could that person get a security clearance in the U.S. government if he was not president?

MR. BRENNAN: Well, there aren't too many people with $400 million in debt who apply for security clearances, but I would think that any fair review of a financial statement that indicated tremendous liability and debt would raise red flags in the eyes of those security reviewers who have to make those determinations, because you don't want to have somebody who is deeply in debt and therefore may be looking for ways to get out of that debt by compromising their obligations to the government. And so, I think it raises some serious questions about what Donald Trump is doing and has done in order to try to address that debt, either while he's president or afterward.

And so, no, I do not believe that he would qualify for a variety of reasons, not just because of his debt, but because of the other things that he has done and said and behaved throughout his life.

MR. IGNATIUS: John, let's just assume for the moment that Donald Trump is reelected November 3rd. What should citizens think about when they have a president reelected to a second term who has that level of indebtedness? What are some of the questions that we should have in our minds that an intelligence officer like you would have in his mind?

MR. BRENNAN: Well, I, quite frankly, shudder at the thought of Donald Trump being reelected because I think our country already has gone through some serious harm and damage because of his supposed leadership, which is anything but.

But I think Americans should be asking questions about what is he doing because of that indebtedness, what is he doing because of his fear that maybe because of his past financial dealings or because of something that he has done previously, whether it be with Russia or China, might be exposed, and therefore, is he actually carrying out his decisions with the eye to either enhancing his personal and financial fortunes as well as preventing some damaging information from being disclosed that really would, I think, further undermine any pretense he has to being a president of the United States?

MR. IGNATIUS: John, you write in the book a passage that I quoted in my review of it in The Washington Post that during the 2016 election, you told President Obama that the Russian effort to undermine the integrity of the November 2016 election is much more intense, determined, and insidious than any we have seen before. What accounted in your mind for the intensity of the Russian play in that election?

MR. BRENNAN: Well, I think the Russian attitude about the election started to evolve in the spring of 2016. The Russians have always tried to interfere in U.S. political environment, either by collecting intelligence or trying to divide us as a country.

But as Donald Trump continued to pursue his ambitions to become president and he was going up in the polls and winning primaries, I think Vladimir Putin and the Russians saw that he, in fact, could be a very attractive candidate from their perspective because, as I note in the book, I think the Russians prefer to have leaders, particularly of western democracies, who are businessmen, who are willing to make deals and be transactional and are not driven by principles or ethics or what the United States is trying to accomplish as a global leader.

And so, therefore, I think Donald Trump was a very attractive candidate to them, and they were not just trying to divide us as a country, but as the intelligence community assessment said, they were trying to enhance his prospects of being elected. And so, therefore, I think, unlike in previous elections, they were able to take advantage again of the growing environment of the digital domain and social media platforms, not just to stir the pot, but also to stir the pot in a way that really was trying to damage Hillary Clinton and enhance the prospects of Donald Trump.

And that came into--you know, struck a relief for me in the July time frame in particular, and that's why I asked for this immediate meeting with President Obama to tell him what exactly we were seeing.

MR. IGNATIUS: And I should ask you, are you disappointed that Obama didn't do more in the months after you gave him that briefing, that flashing red light, to deter the Russians from additional actions to destabilize our politics?

MR. BRENNAN: Well, 20/20 hindsight always provides, I think, greater fidelity than it does at the moment, and at the time, we wanted to understand exactly what the Russians were doing. We were concerned on two fronts--one, what type of technical intrusions they might decide to pursue in order to, for example, bring down voter registration rolls or cause havoc and chaos at the election booths. So, there was a technical concern there.

The social media and influence operations, I think we've learned a lot more about that as a result of the Mueller report, but when I look back on that time period, President Obama wanted to do everything possible to understand what the Russians were doing, try to deter it, but not try to do anything that might, in fact, interfere in the election and raise questions about the integrity of the election. President Obama is the titular head of the Democratic Party. His former secretary of state was running for president, and so, therefore, President Obama had to strike this balance between doing everything he could but without being seen as putting his thumb on the scale of the election.

So, when I look back on it, we decided not to engage in a cyber-rattling of the Russian cages at the time because the Russians could have stepped up their efforts on the technical intrusion side, and we didn't want to spur something like that.

So looking back on it now, should we have put out more of a clarion call to the American electorate that the Russians were trying to interfere, I'd like to think yes because I didn't anticipate at the time that Donald Trump was going to be elected, and if we thought he was going to be elected, would President Obama authorize additional things? I think only President Obama knows the answer to that question.

MR. IGNATIUS: Let me venture near the deep water here, John. Many of Obama's--or excuse me--many of President Trump's critics have wondered whether the Russians had something on him, in quotation marks, and I'm wondering whether you as CIA director ever conducted a real counterintelligence investigation that would address that question, a back room where level of secrecy, confidentiality was extreme, even by CIA standards. Did you ever do that in the case of Trump to see if there had ever been an approach or a moment where he might have been subject to that kind of pressure?

MR. BRENNAN: Well, the authorities of the CIA and of a CIA director are focused on foreign intelligence. We could pursue what the Russians were doing and try to understand that and try to collect intelligence against those efforts, but we have no authority to try to investigate any U.S. person. And so, whenever we would collect intelligence about Russian attempts to interfere in the election and try to cultivate relationships and contacts with members that were affiliated with the Trump campaign, we would pass that information immediately to the FBI for their follow-up counterintelligence investigation.

Now, the CIA and the FBI do conduct counterintelligence investigations together when the CIA is intimately involved in, let's say, the pursuit of a spy within our midst, but for the CIA to try to look at what a presidential candidate is doing or has done and look into that background and pull those threads, that wasn't our responsibility nor did we have the authority to do that. That was the FBI's job.

MR. IGNATIUS: And to follow up on that, do you think that we, the American public, will ever know with confidence the answer to the question what was going on, if anything, between the Russians, Russian intelligence services, and Donald Trump, or will this be one of those questions that just ends up not being resolved in people's minds? I think of the Kennedy assassination. So many years later, people still have so many different views. Do you think it's possible to get to a hard, clear, accepted answer?

MR. BRENNAN: I think there's a lot more to be known, and I think a lot more will be known, especially after Donald Trump leaves the protective cocoon of the office of the presidency.

Those financial strings were never pulled in terms of what Donald Trump was doing with Russia or other countries around the world. He has hidden his taxes, and the Mueller team never pursued that. And I do think those financial links and activities really provide great insight for law enforcement as well as intelligence officials when they're going after terrorists or proliferators or organized crime.

So once these contacts and these activities are revealed, and I believe they will be, we'll know a lot more about what Donald Trump has done in his past, and also, I believe we're going to learn what it is that he has been trying to hide from the American people.

MR. IGNATIUS: Let me turn to another aspect of the Russia issue, and that's the very aggressive operations tempo of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence unit, that was involved in hacking the DNC and other operations in 2016 but has continued with its very aggressive actions. A particular unit of the GRU, Unit 74455, is alleged to have offered bounties for American coalition forces in Afghanistan.

You've been watching Russia for a long time, John. Do you see a change in how the GRU and other Russian services are operating under Vladimir Putin? They seem sometimes to have taken the gloves off, if you can forgive that phrase, and to be doing things that were not typically done by their services or ours. Give us a sense of what's going on with the GRU.

MR. BRENNAN: Well, the GRU, which is Russia's military intelligence organization, is large. It has strong cyber capabilities, and it is very aggressive, as you point out. Also, I think it's a bit sloppy. It's sloppier than its counterparts, the domestic counterparts, the FSB in Russia as well as basically the CIA equivalent in Russia, which is the SVR.

But the GRU has a very rapacious appetite as far as gathering and collecting information and then also trying to push some things out, and so I do think that because of the growing capabilities within that digital domain that the Russians have a sophisticated capability to implement.

We see more and more evidence, not just here in the United States, but in other countries around the world, of the GRU's activities. They, in some respects, have almost sort of an unbridled authority and efforts, and as the Mueller report revealed, we found out a lot about what the GRU was doing in the 2016 election. We found out about it afterward, and I do think the GRU now has tried to learn lessons and maybe is trying to conceal some of their activities.

But you're right. I think Vladimir Putin sees that cyber digital environment as the venue to apply Russia's intelligence skills and trade, and we're going to continue to see this in the years ahead and not just on elections, in other areas as well.

MR. IGNATIUS: So, let's imagine that Vice President Biden wins the election on November 3rd, and he comes to you. And he says, "Director Brennan, you've been running U.S. intelligence for a while. You know the Russians. You had a back channel." You describe this in your book "Undaunted," a back channel with the head, I believe, of the Russian FSB service. And President-elect Biden says, "I want your advice, John, about whether we need to reopen channels to Russia and begin some kind of dialogue that gets us back to a more normal relationship." Would you think that's a good idea, and would you put any conditions on it, given all that's passed between the two of us?

MR. BRENNAN: Well, I think it's always a good idea to keep those channels of communication, particularly in the intelligence world, open, even when political and bilateral tensions are high, because I think that dialogue is critically important. So I would advise a President Biden that they need to try to reinvigorate those discussions at the intelligence level and also at the policy level in order to have an airing of views and grievances as well, as you point out, what are the steps that are necessary for Russia to take for us to be able to have a better, more productive relationship with Moscow.

I believe a good relationship or at least a cordial relationship between Moscow and Washington is very much in our interest as well as in global interests, but also, I think Vice President Biden is going to repair our relationships with our allies and partners around the world as a way to present a more united front against the Russians and Vladimir Putin. And once the Russians realize that the United States is going to reassert itself on that global stage and brings with it those alliances and partnerships that really strengthen our position, I think our ability to actually get the Russians to change some of their activities and behaviors will increase.

MR. IGNATIUS: Let's talk about one of those traditional partnerships in which you were deeply involved, and that is United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Do you think that it's possible for a future Biden administration, if he's elected in November, to have a meaningful reset with Saudi Arabia, which is effectively governed by the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman?

He has taken you on as a personal enemy. There has been a campaign on Saudi Twitter claiming that you, John Brennan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, others were conspiring to place his predecessor, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, as king. That doesn't make it easy for a rapprochement. But do you think there's a path back to a better U.S.-Saudi relationship? And describe what that path would require.

MR. BRENNAN: Well, first of all, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef was the crown prince, and he was displaced by Mohammed bin Salman. And so, Mohammed bin Salman is the one who changed the order of succession in Saudi Arabia.

Mohammed bin Salman is a quintessential authoritarian leader. Yes, there have been some reforms in Saudi Arabia under his leadership that have been positive, you know, the increased mixing of the genders and reducing some of these social morays in Saudi Arabia, but also, he has very aggressively tried to suppress people who speak out against a lot of his authoritarian practices. People have been incarcerated, and people have been maltreated, including women activists in Saudi Arabia.

So, yes, I will continue to speak out against Mohammed bin Salman who, according to reports, the CIA has determined with moderate confidence, was responsible for the horrific killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, one of your colleagues at The Washington Post.

And so, I do believe that we need to have a good relationship with Saudi Arabia. That is in our strategic interest, but Mohammed bin Salman really needs to be held to account for what he has done inside of Saudi Arabia, what he did to Jamal. And I do believe that a Biden administration is going to make it clear to the Saudi leadership that as long as Mohammed bin Salman continues along this path, it's going to be very difficult to repair the relationship to the point that we need to.

And I do think that we need to curtail the support for the Saudi military adventurism in Yemen that has led to thousands upon thousands of civilian deaths. I do think that there are things that we need to do in order to show our displeasure, even curtailing some of the support to Saudi Arabia's military, but the fact that the Trump administration has given Mohammed bin Salman a pass for these human rights atrocities is just unconscionable. And I do think Vice President Biden, when he becomes president, is going to make a change in that practice.

MR. IGNATIUS: John, let me pull the camera back for a last couple of questions before we have to leave. We've been living through a period of unusual partisanship, obviously, and some intense attacks on the intelligence community by President Trump and his allies as part of a deep state that seeks its own aims as opposed to those of the country's. What effect does that kind of barrage of criticism have on career officers at the CIA, and what do you think the consequences of this are going to be long term?

MR. BRENNAN: Well, I think it's certainly demoralizing, as the women and men of CIA and of the rest of the intelligence and law enforcement communities work around the clock at great risk and personal sacrifice. And the fact that a Donald Trump would denigrate their work, their profession, their institutions, clearly has to have a very damaging impact on their enthusiasm for trying to support who basically is the first customer.

Never in my 33 years or so of working for six presidents did any of them disrespect these professionals the way Donald Trump has, and so I'm sure it is demoralizing. But I think they also are very resilient, and I think they are just waiting to have somebody in the White House who is going to want and value and respect their work and the products that they provide to the policymakers.

I'm also very concerned about the impact it's having on young Americans who are looking at these professions, the diplomatic corps, the intelligence, law enforcement and military careers, and they're saying to themselves, "Is this really what I want to do if we have the commander in chief denigrating to such an extent their work?"

And so, I do think it's harmful. I think the impact is going to last beyond Donald Trump's presidency, but I have confidence that, again, the communities are going to be resilient, and they are going to respond very positively to the words of encouragement that they're going to be hearing from President Biden and the rest of his national security team.

MR. IGNATIUS: So, in the two minutes or so we have left, let me ask you a final question. Looking back over these years since you left as CIA director, you have been, as your book title says, undaunted in voicing your criticism of President Trump and of other things that trouble you. Looking back, do you think that sometimes you have gone further than you should have, or put a different way, do you think there's a cost to the CIA in terms of perceptions of its independence from politics when former directors speak out as forcefully as you have?

MR. BRENNAN: Well, I think, certainly, people who have these illusions and delusions of a deep state will use my words and my comments that I'm making publicly as a way to just reinforce their argument, but I don't believe I am engaging in politics at all.

I am, as a private citizen, I think, fulfilling my civic responsibility to call out officials, including a president of the United States who has so dishonored the office. And so, yes, it has come at some personal cost to me as people try to maybe separate themselves from me, believing that I am tainted in the eyes of this administration, but I am very fortunate that my parents taught me at a very young age that integrity and honesty are so critically important in whatever you do in life.

And, yes, I have been outspoken. I will continue to be outspoken as long as Donald Trump continues to trample the tenets of our democracy and what I believe is the essence of this great country of ours, which is to demonstrate leadership around the globe and to have someone in the White House who really is going to be that shining light for the rest of America and try to unite us and ensure that we reach our full potential as a country of tremendous capability and tremendous resources, and especially since we are the melting pot of the world, the fact that we come together as Americans should be what is driving a president of the United States. And, unfortunately, Donald Trump has only fueled divisions within our society.

MR. IGNATIUS: I want to thank Director Brennan, former director of the CIA, for coming on with us this morning. The book is called "Undaunted." It's been on the Best Seller List and, as you can see by my heavily annotated version, worth reading carefully. So, thank you very much, John, for spending the time with us and talking so frankly about issues that matter to all of us.

Coming up later today, stay tuned to Washington Post Live. We will be featuring my colleague Jonathan Capehart talking with Renee Montgomery, who is a WNBA super star, to discuss athletes and athleticism.

And I'll be back tomorrow with Larry Merlo, who is the chief executive officer of CVS Health Company, and we hope that you can join us for that.

Again, thanks to John Brennan. Thanks to all of you for watching.

[End of recorded session.]