President Donald Trump blasted former CIA director John Brennan as “a very bad person” in an interview to air Tuesday night — even as he publicly declared that he’s got “full faith and support for America's great intelligence agencies.”
In an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to air at 8 p.m., Trump answered Brennan’s condemnation of the president’s remarks at the Helsinki summit as “nothing short of treasonous.”
The Trump response was posted by the Daily Caller’s Saagar Enjeti ahead of the full Fox News interview.
“I think Brennan is a very bad guy and if you look at it a lot of things happened under his watch,” Trump told Carlson. “I think he’s a very bad person.”
Trump early Tuesday afternoon responded to the barrage of bipartisan attacks for his praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, saying he misspoke and that "I accept" the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies that Moscow meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
"I have full faith and support for America's great intelligence agencies,” he said. “And I have felt very strongly that while Russia's actions had no impact at all on the outcome of the election, let me be totally clear in saying that — and I've said this many times — I accept our intelligence community's conclusion that Russia's meddling in the 2016 election took place."
He added that “in a key sentence in my remarks, I said the word 'would' instead of 'wouldn’t.’ The sentence should have been: 'I don't see any reason why I wouldn't or why it wouldn't be Russia.'"
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.