Until recently, it seemed clear that former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan had engaged in a sickening conspiracy, first to create a false “Russian collusion” narrative in order to spy on candidate Donald Trump and, after his election, to continue the canard to destabilize the incoming Trump Administration, perhaps resulting in impeachment.

But, also, until recently, both partisan actors could rely on the reputedly professional Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of December 2016, which concluded that, yes, Russia interfered in the 2016 elections so massively, in favor of Trump, that the result may have been affected. As a demonstration of the gravity of this harm, President Obama ordered thirty-five Russian diplomats expelled, a major insult to our adversary by our Nobel Peace Prize winner, perhaps inviting retaliation and crisis.

So, even if Trump were to show that his campaign did not participate in an election skewed by our enemy in his favor, it would have been challenging to show that the investigation of Trump, including electronic surveillance of his entire team, was unwarranted. In essence, this ICA was not only a sword Comey and Brennan could use against Trump, but a potential shield against their prosecution if Trump ever were to unearth their biased dishonesty in Russiagate. “Maybe we were overzealous,” they could argue, “but we were protecting America based on the ICA.”

However, with Tulsi Gabbard’s recent revelation that Obama suborned a false conclusion of meaningful pro-Trump Russian interference, a falsity adopted by Comey and Brennan, this December 2016 ICA is now a significant link in what has now become a strong case against these two treacherous plotters. Given Brennan’s false 2023 congressional testimony, the statute of limitations is no longer a bar to a coverup and lying conspiracy reaching back to 2016.

Let’s outline the conspiracy. In April 2016, the Clinton campaign realized that there was an internal DNC download (proven by its quick speed), not an outside hack, showing Clinton’s corruption of the DNC, unfairly harming her chief Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders. The solution? Blame any public revelations (WikiLeaks was looming) on a Russian hack. The cartoonishly false story sucked in credulous Democrats, hungry to destroy Trump.

In Europe, where the CIA may legally operate and the FBI is not constrained, the CIA and the FBI formed a task force, working with their English-speaking “Five Eyes” intelligence services. On July 10, 2016, after the DNC download was discovered, DNC staffer and Bernie Bro Seth Rich was murdered in a late-night hit without a robbery motive. Earlier, the ostensibly “Russian-connected” Professor Joseph Mifsud had approached lowly, young, European-based, non-advising Trump Advisor George Papadopoulos out of the blue, telling him that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Mifsud, who claimed to hang with “Putin’s niece,” was closely aligned with Claire Smith, a prominent British diplomat and the UK’s chief of spy-vetting.

After the spy group unsuccessfully tried to “honeypot” young Papadopoulos with an attractive pulp-fiction female agent, using the pseudonym “Azra Turk,” he was then approached by Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, who, again out of the blue, told Papadopoulos that he had heard the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary. When Papadopoulos also affirmed hearing that, Downer immediately went to report to the American embassy. Comey and Brennan now had their tissue-thin, bootstrapped predication for the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation.

But how does one obtain a FISA spy warrant, which requires identifying a suspected foreign agent? Enter Clinton’s dime-store novel, the Steele Dossier, a hoax processed through a Clinton cutout law firm, naming Trump’s non-advising advisor, Carter Page, as a foreign agent—who was a straight-arrow Annapolis grad doing business in Russia and who had always cooperated with the CIA.

Using this and other manufactured Steele Dossier tidbits, the FISA court issued four successive warrants. Lawyer Kevin Clinesmith told the FISA Court vetting team, falsely, that Page was “not a source” for the CIA. Does any rational human believe that this young man did this on his own?

Meanwhile, on July 5, 2016, Brennan reported to the Oval Office, with Comey in attendance, that the “Russian collusion” narrative had been a canard invented by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to deflect Bernie Sanders supporters’ wrath. Brennan followed with a written criminal referral to the FBI. Meanwhile, long-time FBI agent Michael Gaeta reported this Clinton campaign initiative after interviewing Steele in London. In short, they all knew of the hoax as a Clinton campaign lie.

Seemingly, Brennan then lied to members of Congress about the collusion, sparking an angry, public, anti-Trump screed from Senator Harry Reid.

Now, Gabbard’s key revelation. After the 2016 election, the professionals with the CIA, FBI, DNI, and NSA reported in the draft ICA that the campaign “bots” from Russia were minor and had no effect on the election and that Putin expected a Hillary win. There was no finding that Putin was behind these penny-ante trolls of the type coming from many countries.

But Obama ordered the ICA to be changed to say the opposite, using it publicly to blame Trump’s win on Russian interference. In faux-outraged retaliation, he expelled thirty-five Russian diplomats. So, Obama ordered falsity in both our country’s most important national security and election integrity reporting. There could not have been a more profound fraud on the American public.

Comey and Brennan did not fight this canard, and, to the contrary, did all they could to promote it, with Brennan urging that the false Steele Dossier be attached to the false ICA. Then, DNI James Clapper, clearly conferring with his allies Comey and Brennan, leaked the existence of the dossier, which was soon published in full by BuzzFeed.

Now to January 5, 2017. In the Oval Office, Comey stated he “potentially” would withhold the anti-Trump Russian investigation facts from the incoming Trump national security team, prompting Rice’s cover-your-flanks email to herself on January 20, 2017, in which she had Obama supposedly saying that the investigation was to be “by the book.” In short, they all had noticed that Comey would likely be concealing his schemes from his innocent targets.

Thereafter, Comey did just that, frightening and thereby trapping Flynn and Papadopoulos into denying what Comey already knew. He then played with Trump, never divulging the truth about Russiagate’s provenance. Susan Rice, in turn, withheld details from Flynn and aide K.T. McFarland about Russiagate. Comey continued this concealment in two sets of congressional testimony in 2017.

After he was fired in May 2017, James Comey bullied the hapless reputation manager, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Democrat, into appointing a special counsel, even though a special counsel investigation must be predicated on a criminal case under 28 CFR 600.1, whereas there had only been, thus far, a contrived counterintelligence investigation. By urging a special counsel investigation, which he knew would be staffed by partisan FBI and DOJ allies, Comey could rest assured no one would be looking under his sheets.

While Comey previously prepared five memos detailing his interactions with Trump in early 2017, setting traps for the President-elect, he later realized that these memos constituted a roadmap of his material subterfuge against the Commander-in-Chief.

Query: Can an FBI director lie to the president about important national security and election matters? The answer is as obvious as Comey’s guilt.

It is unclear how much of Comey’s wrongdoing has been concealed in a continuing coverup of the FBI’s “Prohibited Access” documents, the existence of which had been hidden from all but a partisan few until recently.

Brennan, meanwhile, has been publicly lying about Russiagate, often as a commentator for MSNBC, at least through his testimony of March 2023, when he falsely denied urging inclusion of the Steele Dossier in the ICA.

Brennan’s 2023 testimony, if part of a long-running cover-up and false statement conspiracy that includes Comey, as it likely was, should all fall within the statute of limitations of six years, running from the last overt act in 2023, thus allowing the conspiracy to encompass fraudulent acts occurring in 2016 and 2017, which were plentiful.

In short, Tulsi Gabbard’s recent revelations have destroyed the only fig leaf of legitimacy that Comey and Brennan could have brandished to ward off a searching inquiry into their dishonest work.

The jury pool for this case, if it is indicted, will not be ideal, with Northern Virginia preferred slightly over D.C. At the very least, the present tableau promises a comprehensive narrative of perhaps the most notorious scandal in American history. Even if our legacy media once more choose to ignore this scandal, all they will thereby accomplish is to push themselves even lower in the estimation of the American public. And, like Biden’s dementia, the fraud will still be there for all citizens to see.

John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the books Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened.