Ex-CIA chief John Brennan blasts Trump’s ‘virtual decapitation’ of spy agencies

Former CIA director John Brennan warned that President Donald Trump had effectively decapitated the intelligence community by placing an inexperienced partisan atop the nation’s spy agencies.

Brennan, who served a variety of roles under six presidents, appeared Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to explain why the leadership change represents a national security crisis.

“I didn’t agree with a lot of the presidents’ decisions throughout the course of the six administrations, but I never got the sense that they didn’t want the intelligence community to do its work,” Brennan said.

He also suggested that Trump’s Republican congressional allies were more interested in protecting the president politically than preserving national security.

“What we’re seeing now is an anomaly, such an aberration from what we’ve seen in the past, about the importance, the independence of the intelligence community,” Brennan said. “Two non-partisan national security officials have been removed at the helm of the intelligence community. [Ex-acting DNI] Joe Maguire and then Andrew Hallman, a senior CIA officer who was Joe Maguire’s deputy. That is a virtual decapitation of the intelligence community.

“Who is going in there?” he added. “Someone who has no experience, no credentials as far as the intelligence community is concerned, Richard Grenell. Intelligence professionals can only see this as one more example they are not being allowed to do their job.”