Brennan writes: "When Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia's internal security service, told me during an early August 2016 phone call that Russia wasn't interfering in our presidential election, I knew he was lying."
Former CIA Director John Brennan. (photo: Al Drago/The New York Times)
President Trump's Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash
17 August 18
That’s why the president revoked my security clearance: to try to silence anyone who would dare challenge him.
hen Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s internal security service, told me during an early August 2016 phone call that Russia wasn’t interfering in our presidential election, I knew he was lying. Over the previous several years I had grown weary of Mr. Bortnikov’s denials of Russia’s perfidy — about its mistreatment of American diplomats and citizens in Moscow, its repeated failure to adhere to cease-fire agreements in Syria and its paramilitary intervention in eastern Ukraine, to name just a few issues.
When I warned Mr. Bortnikov that Russian interference in our election was intolerable and would roil United States-Russia relations for many years, he denied Russian involvement in any election, in America or elsewhere, with a feigned sincerity that I had heard many times before. President Vladimir Putin of Russia reiterated those denials numerous times over the past two years, often to Donald Trump’s seeming approval.
Russian denials are, in a word, hogwash.
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