The FBI has launched a criminal investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey for perjury and potentially other crimes related to the Trump-Russia hoax. This comes shortly after a CIA tradecraft review revealed their manipulation of a December 30, 2016, Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russian President Vladimir Putin favored Donald Trump in the 2016 election. And on Friday, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard reported that former President Barack Obama, former DNI James Clapper, Brennan, and others participated in the deception.
“The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government. Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people…. As such, I am providing all documents to the Department of Justice to deliver the accountability that President Trump, his family, and the American people deserve,” Gabbard said on Friday.
In the words of Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright, the chickens may be coming home to roost.
The report and documents issued by Gabbard demonstrate that the Intelligence Community (IC) consistently assessed that Russia probably was not using cyber means to influence the election. On December 9, 2016, Obama’s National Security Council principals, including Clapper, Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, and others, met to discuss Russia. After the meeting, Clapper directed an email to IC leaders tasking them with creating an ICA “per the President’s request” that detailed the “tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election.”
Even before the assessment began, Obama officials leaked false statements to media outlets that the IC had definitively concluded that Russia had used cyber means to intervene in the election, specifically to help Trump win.
Responding to Gabbard, Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a statement that “the years-long Russia investigation carried out by the Senate Intelligence Committee reaffirmed that the ‘Russian government directed extensive activity against U.S. election infrastructure’ ahead of the 2016 election, and that it ‘used social media to conduct an information warfare campaign’ in order to benefit Donald Trump. This conclusion was supported on a unanimous basis by every single Democrat and Republican on the committee.”
The rushed preparation of the ICA ordered by Obama, conclusions reversing six months of IC analysis, and reliance on the discredited Steele Dossier suggest that Gabbard likely has the better of this argument.
Setting the Stage
John Brennan served as President Obama’s CIA director from March 2013 until just before Trump took office in January 2017. Since leaving office, he has been an outspoken Trump critic. In October 2020, he was one of 51 intelligence analysts who signed the intentionally misleading assessment that Hunter Biden’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Brennan and the other intelligence analysts used their training in deception to trick American voters just before the 2020 presidential election. As many signatories then knew, the FBI had already vetted the legitimacy of the laptop and its content. The oblique allegation was intended to convey that its content was fake, while preserving the analysts’ ability to deny that was their conclusion.
The letter also gave cover to the FBI to falsely deny knowledge of the laptop, allowing it and other federal agencies to induce and coerce the media to suppress coverage. Numerous surveys suggest that wider knowledge of Hunter’s laptop could have changed the outcome of the 2020 election, sparing America the Biden-Harris Administration.
Three years later, when it introduced the laptop into evidence in the Hunter Biden prosecution, the FBI publicly confirmed its contents were authentic. Asked how that squared with the analysts’ letter, Brennan disingenuously asserted they had never suggested the content was false, but merely observed there were similarities to a Russian intelligence operation. Mirrors within mirrors. Just days after again taking office, Trump revoked Brennan’s security clearance.
Brennan wasn’t the only high-profile Obama appointee targeting Trump. Obama’s FBI director Comey and DNI Clapper were integral to the effort.
In mid-2016, Comey opened an FBI criminal investigation of the Trump campaign, at least partially motivated by the Steele Dossier. No later than January 2017, the FBI knew that much of the information in the dossier was false, and shortly after, it learned the dossier was disinformation funded by the Clinton campaign using the law firm Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS as cut-outs to engage the putative author, erstwhile British spy Christopher Steele.
At the start of the first Trump Administration, Comey apparently lied to Trump and then misled congressional committees by denying Trump was under investigation. On March 20, 2017, he finally revealed the FBI investigation to the House Intelligence Committee. The Justice Department’s inspector general and special counsel John Durham criticized Comey’s handling of these matters, and, as a result of Durham’s investigation, former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pled guilty to falsifying information in a surveillance warrant request targeting Trump campaign advisor Carter Page.
When Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017, Comey retaliated by disclosing confidential information unfavorable to Trump to Columbia Law professor Daniel Richman for delivery to the press. Comey became a Trump critic only somewhat less vitriolic than Brennan. Trump then revoked Comey’s security clearance.
Though Democrats and the media have savaged the criminal investigation of Brennan and Comey as political retribution, it is clear that while in their Obama-appointed positions atop the world’s premier law enforcement and espionage agencies, they broke their oaths, exceeded their authority, ignored the Constitution, and investigated, harassed, and sought to prosecute Trump and his campaign team for their opposition to the Deep State. Both lied in testimony to congressional committees about the status, origins, process, and findings of the FBI investigation and related IC activities.
Violating Norms
When, just six weeks before the end of his term, Obama ordered the IC to prepare a predetermined assessment of Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 campaign, the CIA completed the effort in just one week, over the Christmas holiday. The ICA concluded with “high confidence” that Russia sought to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process and damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Analysts buckled to pressure and included the claim that Putin “aspired” to help then-candidate Trump win the election, but applied the reduced “moderate confidence” standard to that inference.
The CIA’s Directorate of Analysis (DA) routinely conducts internal after-action reviews of its work on controversial and high-profile intelligence topics, but no review was conducted after the ICA’s publication, because it was considered “too politically sensitive,” according to DA officers involved in the process.
Current Trump-appointed CIA Director John Ratcliffe rectified that failure two months ago, ordering the DA to undertake a tradecraft review of the ICA. The review shed considerable light on Obama’s, Clapper’s, Brennan’s, and Comey’s politicization of the IC, and the likelihood that agency heads repeatedly perjured themselves in congressional testimony. It also provides a view into the tortured abuse of facts that undergirds the lawfare waged against Trump by the Biden-Harris Administration and Democratic prosecutors.
The tradecraft review concluded that the IC generally—and the CIA specifically—violated norms for the development, drafting, and issuance of similar assessments. Work that usually occurs over many months was compressed into one holiday week, during which the agency heads were unusually and intensely involved in drafting the ICA in a “chaotic,” “atypical,” and “markedly unconventional” process. Strict compartmentalization prevented members of the team from accessing information required to evaluate the proposed findings.
The conclusion that Putin “aspired” to help Trump win was largely based on one classified CIA report that Brennan refused to share with most team members. From the outset, Brennan and Clapper excluded the National Intelligence Council. In his book Undaunted, Brennan acknowledges that the agency heads and Obama White House agreed on this process prior to initiating the assessment.
The tradecraft review noted, “The decision by agency heads to include the Steele Dossier in the ICA ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment…. FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in the ICA hinged on the Dossier’s inclusion and, over the next few days, repeatedly pushed to weave references to it throughout the main body of the ICA.”
The ICA authors and multiple senior CIA managers—including the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia—strongly opposed including the dossier, asserting that it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards. The CIA’s deputy director for analysis warned in an email to Brennan that including it in any form risked “the credibility of the entire paper.”
Brennan overruled their objections, insisting that narrative consistency was more important than accuracy. As the tradecraft review explained, “Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness. When confronted with specific flaws in the Dossier by the two mission center leaders—one with extensive operational experience and the other with a strong analytic background—he appeared more swayed by the Dossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns.” Brennan issued written instructions to include the Steele Dossier in the report. A summary was attached as an appendix, though it was expressly referenced in the main body of the ICA only once.
The tradecraft review determined that the ICA not only relied on information from the problematic Steele Dossier, but excluded “credibly sourced” differing reports.
Brennan’s Perjury
Contrary to the ICA and Brennan’s written instructions to its authors, in congressional testimony under oath on May 23, 2017, Brennan claimed the Steele Dossier “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 that was done.” In January 2017, the Office of National Intelligence issued a statement from Clapper that “we did not rely upon [the dossier] in any way for our conclusions.” Several months later, Clapper assured Congress the dossier was “not a formal part of the Intelligence Community Assessment.”
More recently, during a May 2023 House Judiciary Committee interview, Brennan asserted that “the CIA was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment.” Though Brennan was apparently the ICA’s architect and gave specific instructions to use the Steele Dossier, he testified he was “not involved in analyzing the dossier at all.” In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry reported that Clapper swore in the same May 2023 House Judiciary Committee interview that the Steele Dossier was not used “in” the ICA or “for” the ICA, and the team “didn’t draw on it.”
The tradecraft review and the information released by Gabbard on Friday show a systematic breach of oath, duty, and honor by Barack Obama and the nation’s highest-ranking intelligence officials.
The statute of limitations has likely run on the initial wrongdoing and most efforts to cover it up, though not the 2023 testimony. A congressional investigation should bring clarity to the American public, while the FBI focuses on prosecutable crimes. The standards for perjury should be those applied to former White House strategy chief Steve Bannon and White House trade advisor Peter Navarro, both of whom were prosecuted and imprisoned for their testimony before congressional committees. To the extent other wrongdoing can be prosecuted, the standards should be those applied to senior government officials who betrayed their oaths in an effort to subvert the country.