The intelligence chiefs who met with President-elect Donald Trump to outline the role of Russian President Vladimir Putin in hacking activities during the 2016 presidential election themselves have a history of public deception, journalist Glenn Greenwald said Friday.

"[FBI Director] James Comey has become, after Vladimir Putin, probably the most despised villain in the Democratic narrative about what happened in the election," Greenwald told "Democracy Now" host Amy Goodman on the KPFA radio program, according to a transcript from the program.

Meanwhile, CIA Director John Brennan, also a CIA official under former President George W. Bush, "is a supporter not of all aspects of the Bush torture program, but some aspects of it, including rendition and other interrogation techniques that are widely regarded as torture."

Greenwald went on to stress that after she lost the election in November, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton didn't blame Putin or WikiLeaks, but Comey because of a letter he wrote just days before the election saying he was reopening the investigation into her use of a private email server.

Comey, he continued, was also a former Bush administration Justice Department official appointed by President Barack Obama as FBI director.

Brennan ultimately became CIA director after liberals at first protested him, said Greenwald, so both men were "high-level Bush officials in the middle of important, controversial war on terror policies. And they have a long history — not just their agencies, but they themselves — of approving legally dubious, if not outright illegal, programs and lying to and deceiving the public."

There are many who were involved in the "extreme war on terror programs" who came to regret it, Greenwald conceded, and Brennan has said that CIA officers and the military would not obey calls for the use of torture from Trump, who has said he favors some of the methods.

"There is a significant part of that world that thinks that Trump has gone too far or will go too far," said Greenwald. "But there are also — and that includes, actually, the person that he wants to make his defense secretary, which is General [James] Mattis, who is a pretty outspoken opponent, actually, of the reintroduction of torture."

Other "unhinged extremists" such as Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and John Bolton, however, "want to do all of that and even worse," said Greenwald. "So, there is this jockeying for power over who it is who’s going to have what levels of influence in what the U.S. government and the Trump administration does. And we still simply don’t know who’s going to prevail among these factions."



The Constitution puts limits on what a president can do, but sometimes that fails, Greenwald noted, saying he believes the "only truly effective check against true abuse of power is popular revolt, popular protest. But in order for that to work, it can’t just be confined to some sort of partisan movement."