John Brennan Says Putin’s Days Are Numbered

BRENNAN: The truth is something that Mr. Putin terribly fears and which is why he’s going to try to choke off any type of flow of information about what actually is happening in Ukraine. But in this day of social media, in this day of text messages and emails and other types of things, I am certain that more and more of the accurate information is going to get into Russia.

Putin and his henchmen around him, I think they believe that the only option they have is to continue with this ferocious intensity and trying to devastate Ukraine. This is only going to lead to, I think, Putin’s unraveling. I do believe that Putin’s days are numbered, maybe in the double digits.

BUCK: I do believe that former CIA director John Brennan is a loon, and nobody should listen to him about anything having to do with, well, anything. Welcome back to the Clay and Buck show. Brennan, you’ll recall, was the guy who actually said that what Trump did with Russia collusion was “tantamount to treason.” That was his phrase.

So a sitting president was essentially a traitor to his country, according to this guy who was very close to Obama, was his White House, kind of terrorism czar and then became CIA director. And the CIA I will tell you — as an alumni of that institution — it just keeps losing ground and credibility in the public’s eyes every year, I think, because of the people at the top.

There are a lot of good men and women who work there, no question. But the people at the top, the people who are involved in the policy side of it, they are very politicized. It’s unfortunately a left-of-center institution just like all of federal bureaucracy is. And, Clay, with Brennan saying to get to this point here about Putin’s days are numbered, Putin fears the truth?

The Assad regime had a vicious civil war going on, there were accusations of uses of women weapons, air strikes, the Russians were there, Iran. Do you know who still runs Syria? The Assad ream the notion that if there’s in and out of Facebook videos and enough tweets, text messages, dictators will fall. Dictators tend to be good when they’ve been in power for decades at one thing: That’s staying in power a whole lot longer.

CLAY: No doubt. And he’s saying double-digit days, basically. That would mean that he’s gonna be gone in the next three months? Yeah, that’s a big range, but it is a really big prediction, and it feels to me a bit — and that’s why I was talking about Lindsey Graham where we started the show that many people are trying to speak this into existence, right?

They desperately want for Vladimir Putin to be gone and so they are reading all the tea leaves and trying to project that he is going to be gone, and I’m just skeptical that what you think the best outcome is going to be is going to occur, and, to your point, we don’t know who replaces him. So this idea that you’re gonna somehow get a pro-Western, pro-democracy leader who is just gonna come sweeping in and replace Vladimir Putin seems wildly optimistic and without any basis in reality.

BUCK: Yeah. Look who replaced the buffoonish drunkard Yeltsin.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Vladimir Putin. So you don’t always know what you get ’til you get it, folks.