Here's Trump's tweet:

Brennan didn't hold back, saying Trump has a right to challenge the intelligence community — but not in this manner.

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“It’s when there are allegations made about leaking or about dishonesty or a lack of integrity, that’s where I think the line is crossed,” Brennan said.

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He added: “Tell the families of those 117 CIA officers who are forever memorialized on our wall of honor that their loved ones who gave their lives were akin to Nazis. Tell the CIA officers who are serving in harm’s way right now and their families who are worried about them that they are akin to Nazi Germany. I found that to be very repugnant, and I will forever stand up for the integrity and patriotism of my officers who have done much over the years to sacrifice for their fellow citizens.”

That's pretty strong.

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Brennan will not continue on as CIA director in the soon-to-be-installed Trump administration — that's Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) -- so his decision to lash out at Trump isn't all that significant going forward. But it's worth acknowledging just how stern a rebuke the CIA director delivered to Trump just days before he takes the oath of office.

And were this not Trump — and had there not been a kind of slow boil of the president-elect's controversial statements about the intelligence community — this is the kind of thing that would register as major news. In a way, we've become desensitized to it.

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A few examples of how we got to this point:

Trump has tempered these comments by occasionally inserting some praise of the intelligence community, and he has left enough wiggle room in the things he has said so that it doesn't seem as though he's directly accusing them of working against him — only suggesting as much.