Former CIA Director John Brennan for the first time publicly said he is concerned about possible ties between Russia and members of the Trump campaign. “I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals,” Brennan said Tuesday at a House Intelligence Committee hearing on the matter.
He said these revelations, which popped up last year, raised questions of whether the Russians gained access to and colluded with individuals in the Trump campaign to get Trump elected, but he doesn’t know if the Russians succeeded. He said he passed along this information to the FBI, which started its own investigation.
Two weeks ago, President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was leading the bureau’s investigation. A week later, the Justice Department announced former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation.
“It should be clear to everyone that Russia brazenly interfered in our presidential election process,” said Brennan.
“Having known and worked with John Brennan, he’s not a nervous Nellie. When he says something concerns him, it’s a serious matter,” Steve Hall, a former CIA operative and Cipher Brief Expert, told The Cipher Brief.
Russian influence operations and meddling in U.S. affairs are nothing new. Russian communication and interaction with Americans falls under the purview of traditional human intelligence collection, said Brennan. It’s when there’s a particular backdrop – in this case, Russian contact with U.S. persons during the 2016 U.S. presidential election – that creates red flags, Brennan said.
If there was Russian contact with Americans in Trump’s campaign with the goal of getting Donald Trump elected president, that’s unprecedented, noted Hall.
What’s also unprecedented, he said, is “the idea that a guy like, for example, Flynn and other very senior people were the targets.”
Part of what has changed the playing field in intelligence – and, specifically, Russian intelligence – operations over the years is cyber.
Right now, the cyber domain is a “growing playground” for Russian activities that provides new opportunities to collect intelligence, leak intelligence, and influence events – and the Russians are increasingly adept at it, Brennan remarked.
Hall, who spent most of his CIA career in the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries, said the Russians are “experts at not simply spying … but they’re also very good at the cyber piece of it, and they have set up mechanisms to fully exploit the general population’s use of the Internet.” This means the Russians can watch people – their own citizens – using social media and the Internet, and all of this personal information becomes “extremely useful for them when they’re targeting individuals for potential recruitment down the road,” explained Hall.
The Russians aren’t only utilizing cyber capabilities to recruit operatives to infiltrate and influence U.S. affairs. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on worldwide threats Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats pointed out that a similar phenomenon is sweeping across Europe. “I was in France just after the election of [President Emmanuel] Macron, and that clearly had Russian influence attempting to address that election. I was in Berlin – Germany’s facing the same thing. The UK is experiencing the same thing with an election coming up. We see this happening all across Europe.”
“Russia has always been doing this kind of things with influence campaigns, but they’re doing it much more sophisticated through the use of cyber,” said Coats.
Even though the U.S. presidential election is over, Brennan said he thinks “Putin and Russian intelligence services are trying to actively exploit what is [currently] going on in Washington.” And he said the 2018 U.S. midterm elections are not immune from interference. “I have, unfortunately, a grudging respect for Russian intelligence capabilities, their aggressiveness, their pervasiveness and their determination to do what they can to undermine this country’s democracy and democratic institutions.”
Brennan also voiced concern over reports that President Trump decided to spontaneously share classified information with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak in a meeting in the Oval Office earlier this month, but he said the real damage comes from leaks to the media, including leaked details about that meeting.
“These continue to be very, very damaging leaks, and I find them appalling, and they need to be tracked down,” he said.
Coats also mentioned leaks to the media, saying, “Lives are at stakes in many instances, and leaks jeopardize those lives.”
The Washington Post reported on Monday that President Trump asked both Coats and NSA Director Mike Rogers to publicly deny the existence of evidence of collusion with Russia in the 2016 election.
Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee John McCain (R-AZ) asked Coats about this in Tuesday’s hearing, to which Coats replied, “As the president’s principal intelligence adviser, I’m fortunate to spend a significant amount of time with the president discussing national security interests and intelligence as it relates to those interests,” adding, “It’s not appropriate for me to comment publicly on any of that.”
President Trump has called the investigation into his campaign’s ties with Russia “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”
Kaitlin Lavinder is a reporter at The Cipher Brief. Follow her on Twitter @KaitLavinder.
