(Reuters) -Former CIA Director John Brennan said on Wednesday he "knows nothing" of the Department of Justice investigations into himself and ex-FBI Director James Comey but slammed the probes as politically motivated.
A Justice Department spokesperson on Wednesday confirmed the probes but declined to provide further details.
Fox News, citing unnamed sources, first reported on Tuesday that the two men were being investigated for alleged wrongdoing during probes of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
"I know nothing about this reported investigation or referral to the DOJ, other than what I've read in these press reports, these leaks, which are not really supposed to happen if there is an investigation going on," Brennan said in an interview with MSNBC in his first public comments on the probes.
Brennan said no one from the Justice Department, FBI or CIA had reached out to him.
"I think this is unfortunately a very sad and tragic example of the continued politicization of the intelligence community, of the national security process," Brennan said, adding that the investigation "clearly is just politically based."
Comey has not commented on the investigations.
Reports of the investigations come as the Justice Department and FBI face blowback from some Trump supporters after concluding that there was no evidence to support a number of long-held conspiracy theories about the death of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged clientele.
Brennan headed the CIA when U.S. intelligence assessed that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to sway the 2016 election vote in Trump's favor over his Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton, through an online disinformation campaign.
That finding was confirmed by a bipartisan report released in August 2018 by the Senate intelligence committee whose acting chairman was Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state. It did not find any evidence of a coordinated scheme between Russia and Trump’s campaign.
The roles played by Brennan and Comey in handling the intelligence community report on Russia’s 2016 election interference were investigated during Trump’s first term by Special Counsel John Durham, who found no criminal wrongdoing by either man.
Trump, who has repeatedly attacked Brennan and Comey for their roles in the investigations into Russian interference, said on Wednesday that he knew nothing about the probes "other than what I read today."
"I think they're very dishonest people, I think they are crooked as hell, and maybe they have to pay a price for that," Trump told reporters. "Whatever happens, happens."
(Reporting by Christian MartinezAdditional reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Jonathan Landay; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Michael Perry)
