Trump railed against the investigation for years and has repeatedly dismissed it as the “Russia hoax.”
The probe was then taken over by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
Brennan led the CIA when U.S. intelligence assessed, in a report made public in January 2017, that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to sway the 2016 U.S. vote in favor of Trump.
A CIA review released last week found flaws in the preparation of the 2017 assessment, but it did not contest its underlying conclusion.
The Fox News report on the investigations broke as Trump’s top officials at the FBI and Justice Department faced online criticism from some Trump supporters for concluding that there was no evidence to support long-held conspiracy theories about the death of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
During Trump’s first term, the Justice Department appointed a separate special counsel, John Durham, to examine any missteps in the FBI’s Russia investigation. Durham brought charges against three lower-level figures who worked on the probe or provided information to investigators, but did not find evidence of a conspiracy to target Trump.
