After a wave of indictments against Donald Trump’s enemies, the president’s allies in Congress are now pushing the Department of Justice to file criminal charges against Barack Obama’s former CIA director John Brennan, who they have accused of lying to Congress.
In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan claimed Brennan “knowingly made false statements” to the panel during an interview in May 2023.
The allegations against Brennan, who led the nation’s intelligence agency during a federal investigation into allegations of Russian interference in U.S. elections in 2016, center around the so-called Steele dossier, a series of largely discredited documents compiled by a former British intelligence officer who accused the president and his allies of conspiring with the Kremlin.
Christopher Steele handed his memo to the FBI in 2016, and a summary of allegations were included in an intelligence report ordered by the Obama administration following Trump’s election.
“Brennan’s assertion that the CIA was not ‘involved at all’ with the Steele dossier cannot be reconciled with the facts,” Jordan wrote Tuesday.
His testimony “was a brazen attempt to knowingly and willfully testify falsely and fictitiously to material facts,” the Ohio Republican wrote.
Brennan, who emerged as a high-profile Trump critic after leaving the agency the moment Trump was first sworn into office in January 2017, has long been a target of the president, who is seeking political retribution against Democratic figures and others tied to a federal probe into his 2016 campaign.
Criminal referrals from Congress typically carry little, if any, weight in the hands of federal prosecutors, particularly those that involve evidence that has been publicly available for years.
But the Justice Department now appears to be inextricably linked to the president’s personal campaign against his perceived enemies. Former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were indicted in rapid succession following Trump’s commands last month.
After last month’s indictment against Comey, Brennan said he would not be “intimidated” by Trump’s threats and the “corruption and a perversion of the justice system” within the executive branch.
“I’m not going to be intimidated by the likes of Donald Trump. I have always tried to speak my mind and do what I thought was right,” he told MSNBC at the time.
“I think more and more people have to speak out, and I’m waiting for those Republicans in Congress to come to their senses, because the damage that’s being done to this country and the dangerous times that we’re in, I think too many Americans do not appreciate the extent of that,” Brennan said.
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The Steele dossier’s sensational allegations were largely uncorroborated, while Republicans held up the memo to allege a bogus, Democratic-led conspiracy to undermine Trump’s campaign.
U.S. intelligence agencies, however, ultimately determined that Russian-backed interference in 2016 sought to boost Trump while damaging his then-opponent Hillary Clinton with a flood of disinformation.
In his testimony to the House Judiciary committee in 2023, Brennan said he was “not involved in analyzing the dossier at all.”
“I said the first time I actually saw it, it was after the election,” he said, according to the transcript Jordan included in his letter to Bondi. “And the CIA was not involved at all with the dossier. You can direct that to the FBI and to others.”
Jordan alleges that the findings in the conclusive intelligence report are “false,” and that Brennan “made the ultimate decision, along with then-FBI Director James Comey, to include information from the dossier” in the report.
The Republican’s referral follows indictments against three Trump enemies, all of whom have dismissed the allegations against them as politically motivated and baseless.
Comey is similarly accused of lying to Congress over testimony involving the so-called Russiagate investigation. He has pleaded not guilty.
Trump’s former national security adviser-turned-prominent critic John Bolton has also pleaded not guilty to charges against him. James, the New York attorney general, is expected to be arraigned in federal court this week.
