Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s recent document dumps expose the determined and persistent campaign of former CIA Director John Brennan to use and abuse his office for the political aim of defeating Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, trying to undermine Trump after he won, and weakening or derailing Trump’s presidency before it even began in 2017. Lying to Congress is just the beginning of Brennan’s malfeasance, and he must be held accountable.

Brennan admitted that he became obsessed with keeping Trump out of the White House in July 2016. He gathered every scrap of information and dirt he could find, regardless of its source or validity, to make the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin was determined to help Trump win the 2016 election. By September 2016, two months after WikiLeaks published hacked Democratic National Committee emails, Brennan was already on Capitol Hill, selling his Russiagate narrative to lawmakers. Republicans were rightly suspicious of the CIA director’s obviously partisan efforts to use the intelligence community to undercut the Republican nominee’s campaign.

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As Brennan prosecuted his anti-Trump crusade, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security separately began warning state and local elections officials that Russian actors were probing online election information systems for weaknesses. That same month, an intelligence community assessment was published. It concluded that while “many adversaries are capable of detectable, disruptive cyberattacks against computer-enabled U.S. election infrastructure, it is most likely beyond the means of our adversaries to use cyberattacks to affect a covert and widespread shift of the recorded votes to decisively favor a particular candidate during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

That same report went on to conclude “that Russian intelligence services were behind the compromises of the DNC and DCCC networks,” but it noted that the FBI and National Security Agency had only “low confidence” in the assessment that Russia was behind the leaking of that data. The September assessment did not assert that Putin preferred either candidate to win the election.

Instead, the report found “that Russia is motivated to exploit the period surrounding the U.S. presidential election either to try to shape the U.S. political environment or to advance other Russian interests. For example, Putin may simply wish to make the U.S. electoral process appear illegitimate, or to undermine the legitimacy of the president-elect, in order to strengthen Moscow’s hand.”

A subsequent draft intelligence community assessment was scheduled to be released in early December but was pulled before publication. It found “that foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the U.S. presidential election outcome this year” and “no evidence of cyber manipulation of election infrastructure intended to alter results.” The draft assessment did note that the “U.S. intelligence community has high confidence in its attribution” of the DNC hack to “the Russian government,” and “most IC agencies assess with moderate confidence that Russian services probably orchestrated at least some of the disclosures of U.S. political information.” No motive was determined in the assessment.

While the intelligence agencies worked on the December assessment, senior intelligence community officials, most likely Brennan, pushed the unfounded narrative that Russia’s express purpose in hacking the DNC and releasing the information was to help Trump win. The intelligence services did not know this. It was Brennan’s fable. Former President Barack Obama ordered former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to produce a new broader assessment of the 2016 election, including an answer to the question, “Why did Moscow direct these activities?”

Even before this assessment was produced, indeed even before it was started, there were intelligence community leaks, one could suspect from Brennan, to news media, asserting that Russia’s aim was to help Trump. According to a June 2025 memo composed by the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis, there were “multiple procedural anomalies in the preparation” of the subsequent Jan. 6, 2017, assessment, including “stringent compartmentation,” “excessive involvement of agency heads,” and “departures from standard practices.”

Behind all of these “departures from standard practices” was Brennan, who was determined that the end product must conclude that Russia intended to help Trump specifically. To reach this predetermined conclusion, Brennan insisted on using faulty information, including from the Steele dossier, a fact he later lied about under oath to Congress. An email from the CIA’s deputy director for analysis warned Brennan at the time that the inclusion of the Steele dossier risked “the credibility of the entire paper.” Brennan ignored these warnings and forged ahead with his political escapade, and in direct contravention of his sworn duty.

CALIFORNIA SHOULD FOCUS ON GOVERNING, NOT REDISTRICTING

Once Brennan had the assessment with his predetermined Russia motives published, he and his allies in the Democratic Party and the press used it to push the false narrative that Trump colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election, thus seeking to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, and successfully hobbling it for four years. This is exactly what Russia hoped to accomplish all along. It wanted public faith in America’s democratic system undermined, and it achieved this with the help of malicious actors such as Brennan and others of his ilk.

Brennan abused his office and lied to the public and Congress, and the Department of Justice must hold him accountable.