Of all the villains of the piece, the CIA director’s role was and would always be the hardest to pin down.
This is the second of a three-part series on reports that Trump CIA Director John Ratcliffe has referred two Obama-era officials — John Brennan and James Comey, then directors of the CIA and FBI, respectively — for criminal investigation. To understand what the referral is about, and why it is a political gambit rather than a viable prosecutorial exercise, we need to go back to the so-called Russiagate scandal that beleaguered the first Trump administration. Here is part 1.
J ohn Brennan, then director of the CIA, was indeed one of the prime movers on the government side of what should have been the real 2016 collusion scandal: the Clinton campaign’s collaboration with the Obama administration to slander Donald Trump as a Russian mole.
In Ball of Collusion (discussed in part 1), I opined that Brennan was the prime mover. I believe history is already bearing me out. Yet, of all the villains of the piece, the CIA director’s role, I have maintained, was and would always be the hardest to pin down. This is something I believe federal prosecutor John Durham learned to his frustration when he investigated Russiagate during and after the first Trump administration.
The Brennan Clearinghouse
Brennan dealt with the top echelon of foreign intelligence services. Not only were all their exchanges highly classified; to expose them would reveal the extent to which foreign governments, encouraged by the Obama administration, intruded into U.S. electoral politics by providing “intelligence” (mainly nonsense and innuendo) that our national security officials could spin into alarming evidence about Trump that supposedly cried out for surveillance and other techniques of covert investigation. The Crossfire Hurricane investigation was launched on just such false pretenses: light banter in a bar that Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, along with the Obama State Department and the FBI, whipped into a Trump-Putin conspiracy theory.
European governments, in particular, had good relations with the transnational-progressive Democratic administration of President Barack Obama. On the 2016 campaign trail, the Democrats’ Republican rival, Donald Trump, while running against Obama’s former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, was bashing NATO. Trump seemed poised to upend the post–World War II international order. Hence, some European governments were willing to help the Obama administration monitor Trump. It may be decades before we know the details of that story because U.S. national security depends on maintaining intelligence relationships between our government and allied spy agencies. The dynamics of those relationships are shrouded in secrecy.
As Brennan himself conceded in testimony during eventual congressional probes of Russiagate, he served as a clearinghouse: getting leads from foreign sources, sprinkling them with his purported concerns that the people implicated — Trump and his associates — were in “witting or unwitting” collaboration with Russia, and then passing his analysis along to the FBI “to determine whether such collusion — cooperation occurred.” The bureau’s role in the Obama administration/Clinton campaign scheme was always going to be more readily detectable than the CIA’s. FBI counterintelligence activities are subject to strict judicial and congressional oversight (e.g., applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court). Historically, the CIA’s misadventures are much tougher to uncover — at least until they have blown up into Bay of Pigs–level catastrophes.
The existing public paper trail, though sparse, already demonstrates that Brennan was much more of a player in developing and promoting the Russia collusion smear than he pretends.
Ratcliffe’s 2020 Disclosure of Brennan’s 2016 Notes and a CIA Memo
In the stretch run of the 2020 election, Brennan and his intelligence community confederates were trying to help Biden beat then-President Trump by concocting the shameful public letter suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation (the enterprise that led to Brennan’s 2023 House Judiciary Committee testimony; I mentioned the testimony in part 1, and more is coming presently). At the same time, then–National Intelligence Director Ratcliffe was trying to help Trump beat Biden by publicizing intelligence related to the Obama-Biden administration’s stoking of the 2016 Clinton campaign’s Trump-Russia collusion narrative. For Ratcliffe, it was critical to highlight Brennan’s 2016 machinations because they entangled the Clinton campaign, the Obama White House, and the FBI in the Russiagate web.
As I related in October 2020, Ratcliffe first publicized U.S. intelligence reporting — intercepted from Russian communications — that corroborated Hillary Clinton’s orchestration of the Russiagate farce. Shortly afterward, Ratcliffe declassified and released Brennan’s notes of a meeting that appears to have taken place at the White House on July 28, 2016, attended by Brennan, Obama, Comey, and other Obama officials (probably the then–White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and National Security Adviser Susan Rice). According to the heavily redacted notes, one topic at the meeting was Clinton’s approval a couple of days earlier of a campaign strategy to “vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services” — the purpose being to divert attention from Clinton’s email scandal.
To accompany Brennan’s notes, Ratcliffe also publicized a three-page document that he described as an “investigative referral” from the CIA to the FBI, dated September 2016 (the exact date is hard to make out — I believe it says “07 September”). The word “referral” was inartful in this context. Describing an official communication to a law enforcement agency as a “referral” often connotes that the sender was calling a person to the attention of law enforcement for a potential criminal investigation. But that’s not what the 2016 document was about.
Brennan’s CIA was not referring Clinton to the FBI for a criminal investigation. The CIA was instead passing along to the FBI for further investigation intelligence that had been gathered by the “Crossfire Hurricane fusion cell.” That is the vehicle, led by Brennan — with counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok as the laboring oar at the FBI — which was designed to keep the relevant intelligence agencies and the Obama White House apprised of developments in the then-ongoing monitoring of Trump. The CIA document is a memo formally directed to Comey, and specifically to the attention of Strzok. Although Ratcliffe left it heavily redacted, the memo detailed:
US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US election as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.
It further added that, according to public information, a hacking outfit known as “Guccifer 2.0” was believed by “U.S. officials” to be “tied to Russian intelligence services,” and had “claimed credit for hacking the Democratic National Committee (DNC) this year.”
Let’s pause here since this was nine years ago. The Russia collusion narrative alleged that Trump had tried to steal the 2016 election by collaborating with Kremlin-directed hackers to steal the DNC emails. The claim was incoherent: The FBI theorized but could not prove that Russia directed the DNC hacking; there was no evidence that Trump had anything to do with the hacking; Hillary Clinton was not a participant in the DNC emails; and the hacking (while an embarrassing story for some Democrats at the time of their national convention) had no effect on the election. (To the extent that emails factored into the 2016 election, it was Clinton’s emails, not the DNC’s.)
Obviously, the purpose of the CIA “Crossfire Hurricane fusion cell” memo to the FBI was not to point a finger of suspicion at Clinton. It was to alert all the Obama administration players that the Clinton plan was to project a Trump-Russia conspiracy that was somehow tied to the hacking of the DNC emails. And — what a coincidence! — the FBI formally opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation at the end of July. That would be within days of the July 28 White House meeting attended by Brennan and Comey. (The pretext was the aforementioned Downer’s barroom banter with a young Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, that was baselessly inflated into a “suggestion” that Putin might help Trump’s campaign by releasing “information that would be damaging to Clinton.”)
The 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment: Brennan vs. His Subordinates
Brennan was a core player in the Obama administration’s promotion of Clinton’s Trump-Russia collusion storyline. Perhaps it’s understandable, then, that Ratcliffe is outraged by Brennan’s 2023 testimony. Ratcliffe implies that, in the testimony, Brennan intended to convey the false impression that, back in 2016, he had pooh-poohed the collusion storyline. But in the testimony, Brennan did not refer to his personal position at the time; he asserted that the CIA was opposed to the Steele dossier’s inclusion in the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. That’s true. In fact, the new CIA “lessons learned” report that Ratcliffe just released proves that it’s true.
As the new CIA report documents, Brennan and Comey were hot to include the bogus dossier allegations in the ICA. There was, however, significant pushback from Brennan’s deputy David Cohen, as well as other top-tier CIA officials. Cohen argued that the dossier’s poor tradecraft — its uncorroborated claims, dodgy sourcing, and general shoddiness — would undermine the ICA as a credible intelligence product.
Why were Cohen and other CIA analysts so concerned? Well, it turns out that many agency officers were more interested in doing what the CIA is supposed to do — namely, credible intelligence analysis — than in doing partisan politics, which was Brennan’s specialty. Despite the compressed schedule under which they were operating, CIA officials had ensured that analytical assertions in the ICA were based only on intelligence that met CIA reliability standards. By contrast, the dossier was political, not analytical; it was Clinton campaign opposition research, not CIA tradecraft. CIA officials working on the ICA, particularly those who were not Obama political appointees, justifiably feared that the infusion of even a small amount of the dossier dross could eventually destroy the credibility of their work and damage their reputations.
But Brennan pushed back. As the new CIA report tells it, quoting Brennan’s 2016 email:
Despite these [internal CIA] objections, 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 ultimately formalized his position in writing, stating that “my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.” [Emphasis added.]
Problem for a Criminal Referral: Brennan’s 2023 House Testimony Was True
According to press reports about Ratcliffe’s referral of Brennan for a criminal probe, this nine-year-old email is grist for an investigation and potential prosecution, apparently premised on false-statements charges. How so? Because in 2023, Brennan testified under oath: “The CIA was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the [ICA].” (See May 11, 2023, transcript, p. 113.) In the same House testimony, Brennan elaborated that the CIA would agree only that a pared down version of the dossier would accompany the ICA as an addendum but would be “separate from the rest of that assessment.”
Now, no matter what we think of Brennan’s participation in Crossfire Hurricane (it was significant), and no matter whether we’re convinced that Brennan in 2023 was trying to peddle the misimpression that he eschewed the dossier in 2016 (in reality, he favored inclusion of the dossier), his 2023 testimony about the dossier was still literally true. His testimony is also not contradicted by his 2016 email.
Ratcliffe’s own “lessons learned” report confirms that the CIA, institutionally, was very much opposed to the inclusion of the dossier in the ICA. That is precisely the reason why it was not included in the ICA – except in summary form, as an annex that was not part of the analysis. Was Brennan personally in favor of including the dossier? Yes, the email shows he was. But the email was in response to his CIA subordinates’ objections to including it, and the testimony affirms that, institutionally, the CIA was against including it — and mostly succeeded in excluding it.
Add to that: In the 2023 testimony, Brennan appeared, voluntarily and without immunity, to be interviewed by Republican-led House investigators, not about Crossfire Hurricane (as to which he’d already testified extensively in other forums), but about his participation in the former national security officials’ October 2020 open letter about the Hunter Biden laptop. Leaving aside the indecorousness of that episode, when Republican interviewers suddenly pivoted to the topic of the Steele dossier and the 2016 ICA, Brennan was advised by his lawyer that it was beyond the scope of the hearing and that he therefore didn’t have to answer. Knowing that, Brennan nevertheless answered the questions voluntarily. And why not? Brennan knew that he couldn’t be contradicted if he stressed that the CIA was institutionally opposed to the dossier’s inclusion in the ICA. That was true.
Unsurprisingly, when Brennan referred to the CIA’s opposition to the dossier, House Republicans did not confront him with his 2016 email showing that he personally wanted the dossier included — the email Ratcliffe now highlights. I suspect the Republicans didn’t know about the email. But even if they had known of it, they’d have realized that it didn’t actually contradict Brennan’s testimony about the CIA’s general position (which is reflected in how the ICA was written).
A perjury or false-statements case can only be based on statements that are actually false. If what the declarant says is literally true, it makes no difference whether he hopes the listener will be fooled. In a false-statement prosecution, the ineliminable requirement is that the statement that is the subject of the indictment be false.
In part 3, we’ll turn briefly to the apparent lack of evidence justifying a referral of Comey for a criminal investigation, and why, in my view, drawing renewed attention to Russiagate is an unforced error by the Trump administration.