Senator Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, leads the only credible congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

It is getting harder to have confidence in his leadership.

Last week, The New York Times published an op-ed by John Brennan, the Obama administration national-security official who presided over extrajudicial drone killings and made false statements to Congress about CIA spying on its congressional overseers during his tenure.

Lately, he has been criticizing President Donald Trump, who decided to revoke his ability to view classified information. Brennan claimed that the decision to do so was politically motivated. But that wasn’t the focus of his op-ed.

Mostly, he criticizes Trump for the July 2016 news conference where he encouraged Russia to find the emails of his opponent Hillary Clinton.

Candidate Trump’s exact words:

I will tell you this: Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be next.

In Brennan’s telling, “Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen”—so far, so good—“but also openly authorizing his followers to work with our primary global adversary against his political opponent.” Does that follow?