House Intelligence Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) “ought to have his ass kicked” for asking if ex-CIA head John Brennan had any evidence of collusion, according to CNN analyst and former CIA agent Phil Mudd on Wednesday.
“Trey Gowdy ought to have his ass kicked,” Mudd said on CNN’s “New Day.”
Mudd’s response comes after Gowdy asked Brennan if he could provide evidence of collusion between members of President Trump’s staff and the Russians during the presidential campaign.
{mosads}“I don’t do evidence, I do intelligence,” Brennan told Gowdy, declining to answer the question directly. “What we try to do is to make sure that we provide all relevant information to the bureau if there is an investigation underway that they’re looking into criminal activity.”
Mudd thought the chairman should have known better than to ask.
“He knows the difference between intelligence and evidence,” Mudd said of Gowdy.
Mudd joined the CIA in 1985 as an analyst specializing initially in South Asia and then the Middle East.
He would go on to become deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center in 2003 before being appointed the first-ever deputy director of the FBI’s National Security Branch in 2005.
Mudd retired from government service in 2010.
Mudd has drawn headlines for his unfiltered commentary, most recently on May 12 while providing analysis of Trump’s tweets directed at former FBI Director James Comey.
“You feel like you have to give the president of the United States a pacifier and a rattle and put him in the crib,” he told anchor Kate Bolduan.
It’s “a joke,” he said of the tweets. “You can’t take this seriously.”
Two days prior, Mudd called Trump a coward for firing Comey.
“The president acted in a cowardly fashion,” Mudd said. “He’s a coward.”