Former CIA Director John Brennan made several statements under oath or otherwise before Congress that appear to contradict newly declassified intelligence documents, a Washington Examiner review of hundreds of pages of transcripts and other records found. In addition to his sworn statements, Brennan also made a multitude of claims to the public that clash with the recently released documents.
On July 23, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard declassified a report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that was completed in September 2020. The report analyzed and found significant flaws in the process that ultimately produced the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.” The 2017 assessment famously concluded that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help President Donald Trump secure the White House.
The new House report, alongside older reports released by CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Special Counsel John Durham, suggests that Brennan violated intelligence community standards, laundered information from the infamous Steele dossier into the 2017 intelligence community assessment, and even excluded evidence that contradicted the final narrative of the report despite denying having done such things in statements to Congress.
“If I represent to you that there are individuals who claim that you did personally edit a crucial section of the intelligence report to try to diminish the dissenting views and try to overcharacterize the extent to which Russia favored President Trump, what would be your reaction to that?” former Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz asked Brennan at a May 2023 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.
“That’s wrong,” Brennan, who wasn’t under oath, responded. “They are mistaken.”
While Brennan wasn’t under oath during his 2023 hearing, he did acknowledge during his testimony that lying to Congress was a crime regardless.
However, the House report shows that Brennan indeed placed his thumb on the scale in ways that influenced the ultimate findings of the 2017 intelligence community assessment. For instance, Brennan pushed for the publication and inclusion of a single piece of intelligence gathered through interpersonal contact, which became the basis of one of the report’s key judgments: Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” for Trump to win the 2016 election.
“Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails] after he had come to believe that the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [candidate Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory,” the fragment of intelligence says.
A senior CIA officer said the phrase “whose victory Putin was counting on” had an ambiguous meaning, as it could refer to either prediction or preference, and that “five people read it five ways.”
Multiple experienced CIA officers initially did not include the intelligence fragment in their report. However, according to the House report, Brennan countermanded their decision and ordered that it be included “so that it could be cited in the ICA.”
The process described in the declassified House report appears to contradict another sworn statement made by Brennan during his May 2023 congressional testimony.
“I deferred to the experts: the Russian, the counterintelligence, the cyber experts, and the analysts who actually drafted this,” Brennan said, answering a question from Gaetz regarding how he handled dissenting opinions among the report’s drafters. “And so I did not overturn or change any of the judgements and language in the document.”
Not only did Brennan overrule senior CIA officers regarding the inclusion of the aforementioned intelligence fragment, but he also pushed for the inclusion of the since-discredited Steele dossier as evidence within the intelligence community assessment against the judgment of top CIA experts, with the opposition research document being laundered through the drafting process to appear like genuine intelligence.
Two senior officers, both Russian specialists like those Brennan claimed to have deferred to, “argued with [Brennan] that the dossier should not be included at all in the ICA” as it did not meet the basic standards for evidence used within the intelligence community, according to the House report. When one senior CIA officer confronted Brennan about the dossier’s inclusion, he refused to remove it and addressed the officer’s concerns by simply asking, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”
The dossier’s inclusion was used to support the 2017 intelligence community assessment conclusion that the Russians sought to install Trump as president, according to the June CIA memo. That same memo tells a similar story regarding Brennan’s dismissal of concerns over the dossier’s inclusion in the final intelligence report.
“By placing a reference to the [Steele dossier] in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting bullet for the judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win, the ICA implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment,” the memo says.
On multiple occasions, Brennan provided Congress members with information about the dossier’s inclusion in the 2017 intelligence community assessment that clashes with the information made available in the now-declassified House report, as well as that included in the June CIA memo.
For instance, during his May 2023 testimony, Brennan said handling the dossier as it related to the drafting process was the “purview” of the FBI and that it was “their area, not ours at all.” However, the House report indicates that the CIA drafted Annex A of the 2017 intelligence community assessment, which summarized the dossier’s findings while concealing its source, in conjunction with the FBI. During the same testimony, Brennan said the CIA was “very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steel dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment,” conflicting with the House report’s finding that he supported its inclusion.
That wasn’t the only time Brennan said something during congressional testimony that conflicted with the House report and the June CIA memo.
While under oath, Brennan denied that the dossier played a role in the intelligence community’s Russian election interference report during a congressional hearing in May 2017.
“Did the CIA rely on [the Steele dossier]?” former Republican South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy asked Brennan.
“No,” Brennan answered. “It wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment.”
Brennan’s statement is contradicted by the declassified House report and the June CIA memo, which say the dossier wasn’t just used for the 2017 intelligence community assessment, but that Brennan pushed for its inclusion and that its inclusion was used to support its finding that Russia favored Trump in 2016.
In addition to saying the 2017 intelligence community assessment utilized the Steele dossier, the June CIA memo and House report listed several procedures and norms that were disregarded while drafting the document.
Among them were a failure to acknowledge the ambiguity and uncertain origin of the intelligence fragment related to the finding that Putin “aspired” to see Trump win, a highly compressed production timeline, failure to include evidence that cut against the report’s conclusion, namely that the Russians had troves of damaging information about Hillary Clinton that they didn’t release despite supposedly wanting her to lose, unusual involvement from political appointees, selectively quoting sources, and failure to “properly describe [the] quality and credibility of underlying sources,” including by tweaking language in the final report to make it appear as if the information contained in the Steele dossier came from “an FBI source” while failing to verify the legitimacy of its actual sources despite saying it was partially corroborated.
The Durham report also concluded that the FBI failed to corroborate the Steele dossier.
Many of these shortcomings violate ICD 203, the set of standards that govern intelligence community investigations. Despite this, Brennan presented the 2017 intelligence community assessment as having had a pristine production process while testifying under oath before lawmakers.
During his 2017 testimony, Brennan said the 2017 intelligence community assessment was compiled to have “as much accuracy and precision and consensus as possible.” He explained that analysts “rigorously interrogated the data” and that the document was prepared in the “traditional way” that such assessments are drafted, coordinated, and published. Brennan even told Congress he wanted to make sure CIA officers were “comfortable with the sort of language that was being used,” though he made no mention of the contention over the Steele dossier or the debate surrounding the “aspire” intelligence fragment.
When testifying before Congress in 2023, Brennan reinforced this by describing the 2017 intelligence community assessment as a “very comprehensive, thoughtful description and analysis of what the Russians were doing in that 2016 election.”
Though the June CIA memo and House report call into question the 2017 intelligence community assessment’s finding that the Russians sought to help the Trump campaign, Brennan nonetheless repeated that claim as fact before Congress and to the media. In addition to those recent intelligence reports, the 2023 Durham report also indicates Brennan knew the Russians had further unreleased negative information about Clinton, which Russia chose not to release, complicating his narrative.
Brennan, who has been a staunch public supporter of the Democratic Party since leaving his intelligence position and having been a one-time supporter of the Communist Party USA, described himself as “non-partisan” during the 2023 hearing.
Brennan’s contested statements before Congress were mirrored in his statements to the press.
RATCLIFFE SUGGESTS CLINTON, BRENNAN WON’T HAVE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS PROTECTION IN RUSSIAGATE CASE
Brennan famously told Meet the Press‘s Chuck Todd that the Steele dossier did “not play any role whatsoever in the intelligence community assessment.” He also repeatedly criticized individuals for questioning whether or not the Russians intervened on behalf of Trump, including the president himself.
Amid the controversy wrought by the release of the June CIA memo and House report, Brennan has reportedly retained legal representation. It is unclear if he will face prosecution.