Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Brennan told NBC News’ Chuck Todd on Sunday’s Meet the Press that he learned since retiring that Russians began hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails on the day Donald Trump joked about it in July 2016.

The problem: that widely-cited claim is untrue — a piece of “fake news” evidence, drawn from one of the indictments by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, that has fueled unfounded theories that Trump colluded with the Russians during the presidential election.

Last week, Brennan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in which he confirmed Trump’s joke at a July 27, 2016 press conference about inviting the Russians to find the 33,000 emails missing from Clinton’s illicit private server had prompted him to start a large counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. In addition, Brennan suggested that he had learned from media reports, since leaving his post in 2017, that there was further evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian hackers.

Todd asked Brennan to respond to a statement by Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) challenging him to produce