Brennan: ‘Clearly’ Trump had ‘nefarious intentions,’ ‘nothing short of our national security at stake’

John Brennan, former CIA Director, appeared on MSNBC’S "The ReidOut" Wednesday to discuss how he considers former President Donald Trump to be a "national security" risk with "nefarious intentions" after the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago home.

Host Joy Reid discussed the ongoing FBI and Justice Department investigation into Trump as he continues to criticize the act as a political attack. Although there has been skepticism of the reason for the raid by Republicans, Brennan insisted that Trump could have allowed foreign agents to gain access to classified information based on his carelessness.

"I think we know both Trump and Mar-a-Lago were high priority targets when Trump was in office and I think it became more of an intelligence target of foreign adversaries after he left office because there’s probably a strong suspicion that there was information there that would have provided insight into national security, so I’m sure the Russians were looking at it after January 20th of 2021 and trying to determine how best to gain access to Mar-a-Lago," Brennan said.

He then detailed a process of how Russian agents could have infiltrated Mar-a-Lago and stolen the documents kept by Trump.

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"The intelligence community will not know whether or not individuals made copies of those highly sensitive documents which is why I think the damage potentially is incalculable based on the failure to be able to understand exactly what might have been compromised," Brennan said.

Reid criticized Republican attacks against the FBI that suggested a double standard between their treatment of Trump and their treatment of Hillary Clinton, who was also accused of improperly handling classified materials, as "a bunch of whataboutism."

"Hillary Clinton, first of all, was investigated for almost two years for having a server at her house. She never retained documents that she tried to keep and conceal," Reid said.

Although Reid claimed Clinton never retained classified documents, the FBI found that the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate kept classified material on her private email server. In addition, Clinton had deleted over 30,000 emails and several devices, servers and computer drives were also lost or destroyed prior and during the investigation.

Reid added, "Hillary Clinton never attempted to obstruct, conceal or move her server around. They knew exactly where it was. She had things like records about a meeting that, you know, she was going have with a foreign official, they were things declassified after the fact. There was nothing anywhere close to this." 

Brennan went even further and defended Clinton’s character.

"First of all, I worked very closely with Hillary Clinton. She worked tirelessly to advance U.S. national security interests around the clock. She didn’t do the things that Donald Trump has done, as you had pointed out, as he has so many multiple interests in terms of financial, personal, political, partisan, you name it," Brennan said.

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He went on to cast aspersions on Trump, appearing to imply that he was like a traitor who spied on his own government for foreign adversaries. "And the types of things that he’s doing, it reminds me of some individual U.S. government officials who were recruited by foreign intelligence services who did their utmost to conceal their activities, to conceal the documents that they might have taken and stolen from the U.S. Government," he continued.

"Therefore, it’s clearly [sic] that he had nefarious intentions which is why I think it’s so important that the Department of Justice and the FBI and the intelligence community get to the bottom of this, because there’s nothing short of our national security that is at stake," he said.

"Absolutely," Reid agreed. "The thing that was always very clear was Hillary Clinton was a patriot."

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Brennan and Trump have butted heads repeatedly, although their tenures didn't overlap, with the former president revoking the former CIA director's national security clearance in 2018. 

Brennan, who often implied he was privy to damning information about Trump and Russia, was forced to admit after the Mueller report was released, "I don't know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was." 

He was also among the former intelligence operatives who infamously signed a public letter claiming Hunter Biden's laptop was "Russian disinformation."