John Durham’s
investigation as Special Counsel passed on prosecuting ex-CIA chief John
Brennan as well as a host of other key Russiagate figures, but there's a
new sheriff in town.
Following a criminal referral
by CIA Director John Ratcliffe last week, the decision on potentially
charging the Obama spy chief will now rest with Attorney General Pam
Bondi and the Justice Department that she oversees.
Ratcliffe's referral to FBI Director Kash Patel is related
to possible criminality by Brennan, sources familiar with Ratcliffe's
actions who declined to be named told Just the News this week,
following a review by the CIA released last week. That report critiqued
the actions taken by Brennan related to the baseless Trump-Russia
collusion investigation, and it will likely be up to Bondi to decide if a
criminal investigation — and prosecution — is warranted.
The CIA’s “lessons learned" review
of the December 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment sharply
criticized Brennan for joining with anti-Trump forces in the FBI in
pushing to include British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s baseless anti-Trump dossier
in the assessment. In Ratcliffe's review, the CIA also critiqued the
“high confidence” assessment by the FBI and the CIA that Russian leader
Vladimir Putin had “aspired” to help President Donald Trump win in 2016.
Brennan's potentially false statements
While the specifics of Ratcliffe’s criminal referral of
Brennan to the FBI were not immediately made public, it is likely that
it has to do with Brennan’s potentially false statements
to Congress about the ICA and the Steele dossier. Brennan spoke with
Special Counsel John Durham in August 2020 and testified before the
House Judiciary Committee in May 2023. Given a five-year statute of
limitations, he could be in the crosshairs of law enforcement action
until August of this year or until May 2028, respectively.
Lying to Congress -- whether under oath or not -- can be a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. §1001,
which forbids making false statements to any branch of the federal
government. The statute of limitations of five years starts to run when
the crime is completed, which is when the false statement is made or the
false document is submitted. Thus, any false statements Brennan
allegedly made five years ago or more would not be prosecutable.
Brennan told
MSNBC on Wednesday that “I know nothing about this reported
investigation or referral to the DOJ” and that “nobody from the FBI or
Department of Justice or CIA has reached out to me at all.” He said
that "I am clueless about what it is exactly that they may be
investigating me for." He currently serves as a senior national security
and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC, but did not respond to the
network's request for comment.
Brennan told Reuters that he "knows nothing"
about the DOJ investigation, and added that the episode is
"unfortunately a very sad and tragic example of the continued
politicization of the intelligence community."
A spokesperson for the DOJ told Just the News that “we do not comment on ongoing investigations.”
Brennan calls Trump's denial "hogwash" but backtracks behind closed doors
It is unclear what exactly Brennan may have told Durham
about his role with the ICA and the Steele dossier, because the
transcript of Brennan’s August 2020 interview with Durham's team has not
been made public. It is apparent from statements made by Brennan's spokesman and his lawyer
that the ICA and Steele dossier came up during Brennan’s interview with
Durham, despite quotes from that portion of Brennan’s interview not
making it into the Durham report. Brennan’s testimony could be key in
Bondi’s decision making.
Then-Attorney General William Barr told The New York Times in a June 2020 interview that Durham was looking into the ICA.
“There was definitely Russian, uh, interference. I think
Durham is looking at the intelligence community’s ICA — the report that
they did in December [2016],” Barr said. “And he’s sort of examining all
the information that was … the basis for their conclusions. So to that
extent, I still have an open mind, depending on what he finds.”
Nick Shapiro, Brennan’s former deputy chief of staff and senior adviser, said
shortly after Brennan spoke with Durham in August 2020 that Durham had
informed Brennan that “he is not a subject or a target of a criminal
investigation, and that he is only a witness to events that are under
review.”
Brennan also went on MSNBC in September 2020 where he said
of the Durham team that “I think they were testing various theories
that they had heard and were asking for my views as well as my
recollections on things. But it was handled in a very professional
manner."
Most of the references to Brennan in the Durham report
are in reference to what Durham dubbed the “Clinton Plan intelligence”
although there are exceptions. Durham noted that, when interviewing
Brennan about special counsel Robert Mueller declaring a lack of
evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian
government, Brennan offered that "they found no conspiracy."
Despite this admission, the Durham report then noted
Brennan's contrary public statements, published less than a week before
his interview with Durham. Brennan had written a New York Times opinion piece titled “John Brennan: President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash”
where Brennan wrote that “Russian denials are, in a word, hogwash. …
Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash.”
Jim Jordan, others, seek access to Brennan transcript
Republicans in Congress continue to seek access to
classified information on the Trump-Russia saga — including material
related to Durham’s inquiry.
Last month, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court quietly approved
a Justice Department request to review information tied to the FISA
warrants that targeted Carter Page as FBI Director Kash Patel seeks to
hand over more Russiagate evidence to Congress.
The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee sent a letter
to Patel earlier this year asking him to provide a host of information
tied to Russiagate and special counsel John Durham’s inquiry.
The letter by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, also asked for any
and all documents and transcripts in possession of the FBI which were
cited or used by Durham’s inquiry and all transcripts of interviews which Durham’s team conducted — which would include the Brennan interview.
Jordan told Just the News
last Monday night he believes a Justice Department review of Brennan's
testimony is possible. "It looks like he may have said something that
wasn't accurate … when we deposed him in 2023," Jordan said.
"We want to take a look at this, and we'll see what else
Mr. Ratcliffe may do, or what, if anything, the Department of Justice
may do, what Attorney General Bondi may do with this information as
well," he added.
Brennan’s lawyer doubled down to Durham in 2022
Brennan’s lawyer, Kenneth Wainstein, doubled down on Brennan’s claims in a lengthy 2022 letter sent on behalf of his client to Durham — information which could be of value to Bondi. The letter was first reported by The Atlantic this week, and Wainstein confirmed to Just the News that “yes, that is the letter I submitted to John Durham in 2022.”
Wainstein had personally represented Brennan for years, and went on to be confirmed
as the Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis at Biden’s
Department of Homeland Security later in 2022. The lawyer had been a partner at the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell when he sent the letter to Durham, but he is now at the Mayer Brown law firm.
Wainstein told Durham at the time that his client had done
an “eight-hour interview” with Durham in August 2020. Wainstein also
noted he had represented former Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper and an unnamed “CIA Supervisor” as well, both of whom were also
interviewed by Durham, according to the letter.
Wainstein told Durham that “the Intelligence Community's
work on the 2016 election interference threat became the target of
factual distortions and baseless accusations from many pundits,
political operatives, and even government leaders who sought to demonize
the Intelligence Community and discredit its analytical assessments
about the Russian interference.”
Lawyer: Brennan had "minimal" involvement, but admits pushing Steele Dossier
Brennan’s lawyer claimed that
his client’s “involvement in the production of the ICA was minimal” and
that “prior to the publication of the ICA, Director Brennan met with
the participating CIA analysts on one occasion, for approximately an
hour and a half, to discuss the ICA draft. During that meeting, Director
Brennan discussed the analysts' findings and some of the specific
intelligence they relied upon, but made no changes to their analysis or
findings.”
Brennan “did actively engage in the preparation of the
report in one aspect — in response to the FBI's desire that the ICA
include a discussion of the Steele Dossier,” his lawyer told Durham.
“In the years since this episode, the Steele Dossier has
taken on an almost mythic significance in the minds of those who believe
that the Intelligence Community was intent on using the ICA process to
undermine Donald Trump's reputation and presidency,” Brennan’s lawyer wrote.
"That conspiracy theory is inconsistent with the facts, and the irony
is that” Brennan and Clapper “prevented the Steele dossier from playing
any role in the ICA analysis.”
Wainstein claimed that Brennan “objected to including the
Steele dossier in the ICA, citing the absence of corroboration for the
information it contained” and that he and his staff “expressed the
concern that combining the dossier's unvetted information with the rest
of the vetted intelligence would undermine the legitimacy of the report
and compromise the credibility of its findings.”
“This situation resulted in a brief interagency standoff,”
Brennan’s lawyer wrote. “The directors and their staffs reached a
compromise by which they agreed to include a brief summary of the
dossier in an appendix to the ICA — physically and formally distinct
from the analytical work product — and to attach that appendix only to
the highest classification version of the report, ensuring that it would
only be seen by a relatively small number of highly cleared government
officials. There was no mention of it in the report, and none of the
report's text or its over 400 footnotes relied in any way on information
from the Steele Dossier.”
Wainstein said that “the CIA and ODNI opposed the FBI
request to include the Steele Dossier in the ICA. They recognized that
it was unvetted and therefore not appropriate for an Intelligence
Community product like the ICA. They successfully held that line,
excluding the substance of the Steele Dossier from the analysis
contained in the ICA and relegating it to a brief summary that was
attached as an appendix to only the most highly classified version of
the ICA to avoid its public disclosure.”
The lawyer said that Brennan and Clapper “could have easily
agreed to the FBI's request and allowed the dossier to be included or
referenced in the body of the ICA, thereby publicly highlighting its
contents, which were highly critical of Trump” but that their “refusal
to do so is a credit to their professionalism and evidence of their
politically evenhanded approach.”
Brennan — among the 51 “Spies Who Lied” — spoke to House about ICA
Brennan testified before the House Judiciary Committee in
May 2023, where he was mostly questioned about his role as one of the 51
former intelligence officials who signed the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter in October 2020. But during the questioning, Brennan was also forced to talk about
the ICA and the Steele Dossier. That testimony is likely to be
scrutinized by Bondi’s team, and fall inside the reach of criminal law's
limitation period.
Brennan signed onto the October 2020 letter attempting to discredit New York Post stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, with the ex-spies baselessly arguing that the Russians were involved with the laptop.
It was later revealed
by the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee that former acting CIA
Director Michael Morell wrote the laptop letter after being “prompted”
by future Secretary of State Antony Blinken to put the letter together,
and that the debunked laptop letter was written to give Joe Biden a
“talking point” in his debate with Trump ahead of the November 2020
election.
Brennan had claimed to Congress that “I was not involved in
analyzing the dossier at all. I said the first time I actually saw it,
it was after the election. And the CIA was not involved at all with the
dossier. You can direct that to the FBI and to others.” Brennan said he
was aware of the FBI’s involvement with the Steele Dossier “because
there's an annex in the ICA, the Intelligence Community Assessment, that
the Bureau asked to be included in there. It was their purview, their
area, not ours at all.”
“I received a copy of it from the FBI when they were
wanting to have a summary of that document put into the — or, attached
to the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done. … And the CIA
was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele
Dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment,” Brennan said. “And
so they sent over a copy of the dossier to say that this was going to be
separate from the rest of that assessment. And that's when the CIA was
given formal access to it.”
The former CIA director said “no” when asked if he edited
the ICA, and said “yes” when asked if he was aware of dissenting
opinions about the conclusions of the ICA.
“There were individuals who had read the document within
CIA who were not involved in the drafting or the analysis [who disagreed
with the ICA conclusions],” Brennan said. “And so I listened to some of
their concerns, but I deferred to the experts: the Russian, the
counterintelligence, the cyber experts, and the analysts who actually
drafted this. And so I did not overturn or change any of the judgments
and language in that document.”
Durham testifies about his report
Durham appeared before the House Judiciary Committee in June 2023 to testify
about his report — and at no point was he asked about Brennan’s role
with the ICA, nor about the Steele dossier’s inclusion in that 2016
assessment.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, brought up the Clinton Plan
intelligence, with Durham agreeing that Hillary Clinton had approved a
plan to tie Trump to Russia, that the intelligence was important enough
for Brennan to brief a host of top Obama administration officials
including Comey, and that the CIA eventually sent a referral memo to the
FBI about it. Durham said he did not believe Comey had shared the
information in the referral memo with the FISA Court, with the lawyers
preparing FISA applications, nor with agents on the Crossfire Hurricane
team.
“We interviewed the first supervisor of the Crossfire
investigation — the operational person. We showed him the intelligence
information. He indicated he’d never seen it before. He immediately
became emotional, got up and left the room with his lawyer, spent some
time in the hallway, came back and—” Durham said, and Jordan asked if
the FBI supervisor was “ticked off.” Durham said he was, because “the
information was kept from him.”
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, asked the special counsel if it was
correct that “the FISA application relied, according to your report, at
least in part on the Clinton Plan intelligence.” Durham said “yes.”
Senate Intel vs. House Intel on the ICA
The Durham report’s only direct mention
of the ICA was to praise prior “careful examinations” such as the
Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2020 report on Russia, which included
examining the 2016 ICA.
The Senate committee released a bipartisan report
in 2020 defending the 2016 ICA. The panel said congressional
investigators found no evidence of political pressure and determined the
assessment “presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis
for the case of unprecedented Russian interference” and the Senate
committee “did not discover any significant analytic tradecraft issues
in the preparation or final presentation of the ICA.” The Senate
committee also said it “found that the information provided by
Christopher Steele to the FBI was not used in the body of the ICA or to
support any of its analytic judgments.”
The Senate committee's
findings clashed with a 2018 report from the House Intelligence
Committee, led at the time by former Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., which concluded
that “the majority of the Intelligence Community Assessment judgments
on Russia’s election activities employed proper analytic tradecraft” but
the “judgments on Putin’s strategic intentions did not.”
The House report said it “identified significant
intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA
judgments regarding Putin’s strategic objectives.” That report was not
bipartisan – and many of its findings remain classified.
Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., the current chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sent Trump a letter
last week telling him that a still-classified 2018 report by the
committee “exposes the truth about the politically driven Obama-era
assessment.”
Crawford urged Trump to read the classified report and argued in his letter that “public interest declassification is merited.”
The Clinton Plan intelligence
Most of the 2023 Durham report’s mentions of Brennan
largely centered on the “Clinton Plan intelligence.” Durham wrote that,
when interviewed, “Brennan generally recalled reviewing the materials
but stated he did not recall focusing specifically on its assertions
regarding the Clinton campaign's purported plan. Brennan recalled
instead focusing on Russia's role in hacking the DNC.”
Durham said Brennan's handwritten notes — declassified by
Ratcliffe when he was the director of national intelligence in 2020 —
reflect that Brennan briefed Comey, then-President Barack Obama,
then-Vice President Joe Biden, and others in early August 2016 regarding
the "alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from
one of her [campaign] advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a
scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services."
Durham’s report said
that the still-classified appendix to it “provides further information”
about the Clinton Plan intelligence, “facts that heightened the
potential relevance of this intelligence” to his special counsel
investigation, and the Durham team’s “efforts to verify or refute the
key claims found in this intelligence.”
Durham’s report pointed to a double standard in how the FBI
handled baseless allegations of Trump-Russia collusion as compared to
how the FBI handled alleged foreign influence efforts aimed at the
Clinton campaign.
“These examples are also markedly different from the FBI's
actions with respect to other highly significant intelligence it
received from a trusted foreign source pointing to a Clinton campaign
plan to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin so as to divert
attention from her own concerns relating to her use of a private email
server,” Durham wrote.
The CIA referral memo sent to the FBI — which Durham said
was completed on September 7, 2016 — was addressed to Comey and
later-disgraced FBI special agent Peter Strzok, according to Durham, and
stated in part: “Per FBI verbal request, CIA provides the below
examples of information the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell has gleaned
to date [Source revealing information redacted]: … An exchange ...
discussing U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's approval of a
plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian
hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public
from her use of a private email server.”
Brennan’s lawyer, Kenneth Wainstein, had told Durham
in 2022 that “Director Brennan became aware of intelligence that
Hillary Clinton had allegedly approved a plan to generate a narrative
associating Donald Trump with Russian security services' efforts to
interfere with the election. Director Brennan shared this information at
a National Security Council meeting, and the CIA shared it with the FBI
via a transmittal memo.”
CIA review blasts Brennan
The largely declassified CIA review
released this month focused on the ICA about Russia and the November
2016 election. It was put together by the CIA's Directorate of Analysis
(DA) at Ratcliffe’s direction and concluded that “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.”
The agency review memo also stated that the CIA’s Deputy
Director for Analysis warned in a December 29, 2016, email to Brennan
that including the dossier in any form risked “the credibility of the
entire paper.”
The review by the CIA also revealed
that “despite these objections, Brennan showed a preference for
narrative consistency over analytical soundness” and that “when
confronted with specific flaws in the [Steele] 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.”
The CIA review memo stated that Brennan ultimately
formalized his position in writing, arguing that “my bottomline is that I
believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”
Durham's prosecutions skipped Brennan
Durham carried out three prosecutions — but Brennan dodged all three criminal law actions.
FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who worked on both the FBI’s
Hillary Clinton email investigation and on the Trump-Russia collusion
inquiry, pleaded guilty to falsifying a document during the bureau’s efforts to renew FISA authority to wiretap Carter Page. The ex-FBI lawyer confessed
in August 2020 that he had manipulated a CIA email in 2017 to state
that Carter Page was “not a source” for the CIA when that agency had
actually told the bureau on multiple occasions that Page was in fact an
“operational contact” for the CIA.
FBI notes of a January 2017 interview
with Steele Dossier source Igor Danchenko showed he told the bureau he
“did not know the origins” of some Steele claims and “did not recall”
other dossier information. Danchenko also noted much of what he gave to
Steele was “word of mouth and hearsay,” some of which stemmed from a
“conversation that [he] had with friends over beers,” and the most
salacious allegations may have been made in “jest.”
Danchenko was on the FBI’s payroll as a confidential human source from March 2017 to October 2020 before he was charged in November 2021 with five counts of making false statements to the bureau. The FBI agent assigned to be the handler for Danchenko testified that he sought to have the bureau pay Danchenko more than $500,000.
According to Durham, Danchenko had anonymously sourced a fabricated claim about Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to Hillary Clinton ally Chuck Dolan,
who spent years, including 2016, doing work for Russian businesses and
the Russian government. Danchenko denied this, and the judge tossed that charge out before the jury could decide on it. He was acquitted of all remaining charges.
Marc Elias, a former Perkins Coie lawyer who served as
general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, played
a key role in the funding and spreading Steele’s discredited anti-Trump dossier. That work resulted in the Federal Elections Commission fining both the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign for not properly disclosing the more than $1 million they spent on pushing the Steele Dossier.
Durham filed charges against Elias’s former Perkins Coie
law partner, Michael Sussmann, with whom Elias worked closely in 2016.
Sussmann had pushed debunked allegations
to the FBI claiming there was a secret back channel between Russia’s
Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization. Durham charged Sussmann, and he
was also found not guilty.
It remains to be seen if the Justice Department —
undergoing its own drama about Jeffrey Epstein — will launch what could
be a sprawling criminal conspiracy investigation related to the 2016
election and beyond. Brennan may find himself at the very center of that
investigation.
