Former CIA Director John O. Brennan said he has “lawyered up” after the declassification of a report that accuses him of treason for using shoddy intelligence and secondhand information to create the now-discredited Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
Mr. Brennan and others, including former FBI Director James B. Comey, are poised to be the focus of the Justice Department’s newly created strike force that is examining how Obama-era appointees launched the discredited narrative that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.
Mr. Brennan, who once voted for a communist candidate, played a pivotal role in creating the Russian collusion storyline, which inarguably hobbled Mr. Trump’s first term, a newly declassified intelligence report concluded.
He insisted on including the unverified and lurid “Steele dossier” about Mr. Trump in a critical December 2016 intelligence assessment despite the staunch opposition of senior CIA officers who said the dossier was flawed and did not belong in the report because it failed to meet the agency’s basic tradecraft standards.
However, Mr. Brennan refused to remove the dossier from the intelligence assessment.
The dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and included unverified, wild claims about Mr. Trump. Among them was a tale that he hired prostitutes to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel room where the Obamas had once stayed.
According to the now-declassified report, Mr. Brennan acknowledged the problematic inclusion of the dossier but justified it to dissenting CIA officers by saying, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”
President Trump and his supporters are now demanding accountability for what appears to be a string of purposeful, deceptive and politically motivated actions aimed at convincing the public during Mr. Trump’s first term that he was elected with the help of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I’d like to see all the records just wide open. I want to see the notes. I want to see the documentation,” Rep Tim. Burchett, Tennessee Republican, told The Washington Times. “Bring the receipts.”
The CIA initially determined that Russia did not substantively interfere with the 2016 election, but the narrative changed suddenly in December 2016, a month after Mr. Trump’s victory.
President Obama ordered a new intelligence assessment from the CIA and other agencies. The president wanted the revised assessment to show Russian involvement in the presidential election.
Mr. Brennan helped steer the new assessment to center on the Trump-Russia collusion hoax using poorly sourced evidence, according to a newly declassified report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
The House panel found that the 2016 intelligence assessment’s claim that Russia was working to help Mr. Trump win was never verified by direct intelligence. Instead, the assessment relied on secondhand information provided to a Russian spy named Oleg Smolenkov, who lived in suburban Washington.
He told the CIA that an unidentified source with alleged Kremlin ties had told him he believed Mr. Putin was “counting on” Mr. Trump’s victory.
Those two words, provided to Mr. Smolenkov from an unknown person, were the sole basis for the U.S. intelligence community’s claim that Russia was working to secure Mr. Trump’s victory.
A senior CIA operations whistleblower told House investigators at the time that “counting on” was interpreted five ways by five different people and nobody knew what it really meant.
“The CIA did not cite any report where Putin directly indicated helping Trump win was the objective,” the House intelligence committee found. “That judgment rested on a questionable interpretation of this one, unclear fragment of a sentence.”
Mr. Smolenkov disappeared in 2017.
Mr. Brennan, 69, defended the revised assessment he spearheaded and said he is concerned about facing prosecution from the Trump administration.
“After 8½ years of this … I don’t know of an intelligence product that was more scrutinized, more investigated than that product was by numerous people. You know, it’s very disconcerting,” he said on CNN.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard accuses Mr. Brennan and other former Obama officials of “treasonous conspiracy.”
She has referred the newly released documents to the Justice Department.
“No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again,” Ms. Gabbard said.
She issued a memo last week naming Mr. Brennan and others for manipulating intelligence to advance the Trump-Russia collusion narrative before Mr. Trump took office.
The memo names dozens of other former Obama officials, including former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper and former FBI Director James B. Comey.
It also points the finger at Mr. Obama, who ordered the revised intelligence community assessment that tied Mr. Trump to Mr. Putin.
Mr. Obama’s directive to investigate and make public “Russian election meddling” caused the intelligence community to withdraw its assessment that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
The plan was hatched at a Dec. 9, 2016, White House meeting that included National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Mr. Brennan, Mr. Clapper, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Secretary of State John Kerry and others.
Information was then leaked to The Washington Post that the CIA concluded that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election to help Mr. Trump win the presidency.
“It looks like this meeting on December 9 was where it all began — where they altered the process, didn’t follow the normal intelligence community assessment and how that process works, altered the plan, and went out and briefed the President. And it just continued for the next eight years,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican.
Mr. Trump has taken to social media to accuse Mr. Obama of manufacturing the “Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX.”
Mr. Trump called it “the crime of the century” and “a major threat to our country.”
Mr. Obama is unlikely to be prosecuted. In a case brought by Mr. Trump, the Supreme Court ruled that former presidents cannot be prosecuted for actions taken while in office.
Mr. Brennan and other high-ranking officials named by Ms. Gabbard do not have the same immunity.
Mr. Brennan left the CIA when Mr. Trump began his first term.
He became a regular on liberal news outlets and was a paid contributor on MSNBC, where he pushed the narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and worked to help Mr. Trump win.
In August 2018, Mr. Brennan penned an op-ed in The New York Times saying, “President Trump’s claims of no collusion are hogwash.”
Mr. Comey also promoted the unverified dossier as credible.
During a White House meeting on Feb. 8, 2017, about two weeks after Mr. Trump took office, he explained to Trump officials why the material was included in the intelligence assessment.
White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus questioned why the unverified dossier was in the December 2016 intelligence assessment.
Mr. Comey wrote in a memo after the meeting that he told Mr. Priebus that analysts from the FBI, CIA and the National Security Agency “agreed it was relevant and portions of the material were corroborated by other intelligence.”
His statement turned out to be false.
The NSA was not involved in the decision to include the dossier, and Mr. Brennan included the material over the objections of senior CIA officers.
Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey on May 9, 2017. Like Mr. Brennan, Mr. Comey went on to become a prominent Trump critic on the TV talk show circuit.
He also wrote a book that was highly critical of Mr. Trump.
In an April 15, 2018, interview on ABC News, Mr. Comey called Mr. Trump “morally unfit to be president.” In a May 21, 2024, interview on MSNBC, Mr. Comey warned against a second Trump presidency.
“For the Justice Department and the FBI, Trump is coming for those institutions. He knows their power. And that’s a danger for all Americans. I don’t care how you feel about Joe Biden. You must vote for him,” Mr. Comey said.
House and Senate leaders told The Washington Times that the investigation into the Obama-era push of the Russia collusion hoax wouldn’t end at the Justice Department.
“Now, our committees are going to go to work,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said.
The Louisiana Republican said lawmakers “have a lot of work to do to find out more.”
House and Senate lawmakers are planning to hold hearings and seek the testimony of Mr. Comey, Mr. Brennan and other Obama officials involved in the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.
“You follow the evidence where it leads,” Mr. Scalise said. “If somebody broke the law, you take action. We’re at the beginning stages of this.”
