Skipping down para 4 and the British GCHQ role:
Todd asked Brennan if the intelligence on Papadopoulos came "through the C.I.A. via the Five Eyes thing," referring to the intelligence-sharing relationship between the five English-speaking powers, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Brennan’s response, though, went off-script.
He wasn’t "going to get into details about how it was acquired," he explained. "But the F.B.I. has a very close relationship with its British counterparts. And so the F.B.I. had visibility into a number of things that were going on involving some individuals who may have had some affiliation with the Trump campaign."
British counterparts? The Times report, based on interviews with former and current U.S. and foreign officials, had claimed that the Australians passed on the tip. Did the Times get that part of its story wrong? Perhaps Downer, Australia’s former foreign minister, had told British police who passed it to the FBI. Or maybe Brennan misspoke, or misremembered.
What seems more likely is that the former CIA director told the truth. Informed sources in Washington have been whispering for months that Britain’s intelligence service, the Government Communications Headquarters, the U.K.’s version of America’s National Security Agency, was intercepting the emails and phone calls of Trump officials. "It’s not impossible," a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officer told me, "that the information came from the Brits. Under certain circumstances, we can search their database, and they can search ours. Our intelligence-sharing relationship with the U.K. is much closer than it is with anyone else, by far the closest we have. But something like that wouldn’t be routine in our relationship."
Luke Harding of the Guardian, apparently one of the few journalists with access to Steele, first reported April 13 that the GCHQ had played a central part in uncovering Trump’s possible ties to Russia, and forwarding the information they had directly on to John Brennan. The next day CNN published a similar report.
Citing U.S. and U.K. intelligence sources, Harding wrote, "GCHQ played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, which began in late July 2016." According to one account, reported Harding, "GCHQ’s then-head, Robert Hannigan, passed material in summer 2016 to the CIA chief, John Brennan. The matter was deemed so sensitive it was handled at ’director level.’ After an initially slow start, Brennan used GCHQ information and intelligence from other partners to launch a major inter-agency investigation."
Brennan knows the noose is tightening. This is little more than a 'damage control' kabuki dance.