CIA Director John Brennan on Tuesday urged people to “wait and see” the forthcoming intelligence report regarding Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election before casting doubt on intelligence agencies’ findings.
In an interview Tuesday on PBS, Brennan addressed comments from President-elect Donald Trump, who has disputed a CIA report that concluded Russia intervened in the presidential race to help him get elected.
In a statement Trump released after news of the report surfaced, the president-elect said these are the “same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
Brennan said Tuesday during the interview that in the aftermath of the Iraq War, there was a “total review of the review process and the analytic process and the assessments that are done with the intelligence community with a number of steps that were taken to make sure that we were going to be as accurate as possible.”
{mosads}“And so, it’s been light-years since that Iraq WMD report has been done, and there has been tremendous further development of our analytic capabilities as well as our intelligence-collection capabilities,” Brennan said.
Brennan touted the U.S. intelligence community, saying there are no other intelligence agencies in the world with the same capabilities.
“I would suggest to individuals who have not yet seen the report, who have not yet been briefed on it, that they wait and see what it is that the intelligence community is putting forward,” he said, “before they make those judgments.”