The “rogue intelligence officer” being called a “whistleblower” likely coordinated his complaint with Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), speculated Fred Fleitz, president and CEO of the Center for Security Policy and a former member of the intelligence community.

Fleitz — who served as deputy assistant to President Trump and to the chief of staff of the National Security Council — has previously held national-security jobs with the CIA, the DIA, the Department of State, and the House Intelligence Committee staff. He offered his analysis of the “whistleblower” complaint during a Thursday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Colin Madine.

Fleitz reflected on Thursday’s hearing before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Schiff, with Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire’s testimony. The hearing ostensibly sought to investigate a “whistleblower” complaint released to Congress and the public regarding President Donald Trump’s July conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Let’s start with how strange this hearing was today,” began Fleitz. “We had the director of national intelligence before the committee. He couldn’t answer the questions because they were all about policy. You see, this is not an intelligence matter. The president is a part of the intelligence community, and intelligence officers can’t lodge complaints with their inspector general because they don’t agree with the president’s policies, but that’s what happened here.”

In a Thursday-published op-ed in the New York Post, Fleitz wrote, “It appears likely to me that this so-called whistleblower was pursuing a political agenda.”

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Fleitz continued, “Concerning the complaint, it looked like it was written by a team of attorneys. I was an intelligence analyst for 19 years. We don’t write that way. We see the very detailed legal footnotes to this. This, I think, was a setup job that included others, probably attorneys with the House Intelligence Committee.”

“Adam Schiff was talking and tweeting about the president meddling in Ukraine and leveraging aid to Ukraine to hurt the Bidens in August before this appeared, and lo and behold. this complaint happens to be filed so it will hit his committee,” added Fleitz. “I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

Trump is withholding vital military aid to Ukraine, while his personal lawyer seeks help from the Ukraine government to investigate his political opponent. It doesn’t take a stable genius to see the magnitude of this conflict. Or how destructive it is to our national security. https://t.co/X4yhTS2q1Z — Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) August 29, 2019

Mansour asked, “One of the accusations that they kept going after is that this conversation, this phone call, the transcript of it, was placed in some super secret special secure file database, and that shows that they were trying to keep this secret. What did you make of that?”

Fleitz replied, “As executive secretary of the NSC, I edited and processed transcripts of presidential phone calls with foreign leaders, and there’s a very secure area of the computer system where these are places. [The accusation], I think, is false, absolutely false, because I already know there’s a secure place to put this stuff. The allegation was, to protect this stuff, they were putting it into an intelligence computer system controlled by the CIA. That doesn’t make any sense. Why would the White House store something sensitive in a CIA computer system? It’s ridiculous. I just think the person who said this made it up.”

Fleitz explained protocol for documenting presidential phone calls with foreign leaders. “These phone calls are listened to and transcribed by intelligence officers in the White House Situation Room, and there may be an intelligence officer and a regional officer — like the Europe-Russia office that may also see it — and I would have seen it as the executive secretary. Anyone who works on these or has access has to control them very strictly and not tell anyone about them who’s not on the dissemination list.”

“If you read this complaint, it’s pretty clear,” Fleitz stated. “This person wasn’t on the dissemination list. People were talking to him about the complaint, even though he did not have the need to know or the right to know about this document. That said, people aren’t following the rules. … Extremely sensitive material is supposed to be kept confidential. They’re violating the president’s trust.”

Fleitz remarked, “There’s no question the president didn’t do anything illegal or anything required to be reported or anything that was impeachable. … If this whistleblower really thought that something had been done wrong by the president, he could have gone to the Foreign Affairs Committees, to the defense committees, the government oversight committees, but he can’t go to the intelligence committee because it’s not an intelligence matter, but it had been made one so Adam Schiff could handle it. Schiff was trying to argue any complaint submitted to the [intelligence community] inspector general has to be reported to Congress and is considered serious. What if the complaint doesn’t belong with the intelligence community inspector general, like this one? What I would’ve done if I was [inspector general], I’d say, ‘Well, you can’t bring this to us. You’re going to have to bring this to someone on the Hill, because this doesn’t involve an intelligence equity.’”

“If this is so serious, you should be prepared to stand behind it,” said Fleitz of the “whistleblower,” adding, “if you get fired for it, you’re standing on your honor. But we know very well that if this person was fired, he’ll be hired immediately by MSNBC. So this is not going to be a career-ending incident. This is political, 100 percent, and as I said, I think the House Intelligence Committee Democrat lawyers are deeply involved in it.”

“I think he’s a rogue intelligence officer,” said Fleitz of the bureaucrat who filed the aforementioned complaint, “and I’d say further, he is a rogue intelligence officer who is politicizing intelligence to destroy the president.”

Fleitz went on, “It just seems like the Democrats are going to stop at nothing to get this president out of office before the next election. The Russia collusion turned out to be a fraud, so they cooked this up. I heard Catherine Herridge say on Fox, ‘This seems to be a very well-written complaint,’ and I thought to myself, ‘Uh oh.’ Usually whistleblower complaints are not well-written. They’re written by people who are a little bit paranoid. They don’t want to consult with other people, but this was written by a team of people. I have no doubt of that, and I’m just thinking if this doesn’t work, they’re going to come up with something else.”

“There are many, many good guys [in the intelligence services],” estimated Fleitz. “The bad guys are a distinct minority. Some of them are in management. Even the vast majority of them [on the analytic side] are not political, they just want to do their jobs. I shared offices with people who were quite partisan Democrats who didn’t like President Reagan or really liked President Clinton, and they never let their politics get into their work, and that’s still the way it goes today.”

Fleitz determined, “It seems pretty clear to me that Adam Schiff and the Intelligence Committee Democrats knew about this. That makes me think that attorneys with that committee were working with this person or they directed him maybe to an outside attorney or to an outside expert who could help draft it, but I think the Schiff angle is very important, because things he said in August almost exactly match this whistleblowing complaint. That’s not a coincidence.”

“[Adam Schiff] sent out a tweet on the 28th of August which faulted President Trump for withholding military aid from Ukraine to harm Joe and Hunter Biden,” recalled Fleitz. “I mean, come on. This is two weeks before this whistleblowing complaint shows up making the same allegation, and it comes to his committee? Think about it. … Because it happened to be Adam Schiff, and this unusual request that shouldn’t have been in the intelligence sphere came into the intelligence sphere, forcing it into his committee, it’s just too many coincidences to be believed.”

.2/ Its pretty clear from the Washington Post story that someone knew the details of this complaint who is hostile to @realDonaldTrump and leaked it to the press. My guess is this leak came from House Democrats who have been heavily involved in orchestrating this complaint. — Fred Fleitz (@FredFleitz) September 26, 2019

“I think that by bringing this up, the Democrats are hurting Joe Biden, because a lot of Americans are wondering why was Hunter Biden getting $50,000 a month from the Ukrainians,” assessed Fleitz. “I told that to an Israeli official — I was at a reception with him, recently — he said to me, ‘Well, that sounds like a bribe.’ I said, ‘No, they’re buying influence.’ He said, ‘No, in Israel, that’s a bribe.’”

Fleitz concluded, “I think this is going to backfire [on Democrats].”

Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.