Now a commentator for NBC and MSNBC, Brennan was accused of making false statements in a 2023 interview with lawmakers.
Republicans who lead the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday referred former CIA Director John Brennan to Attorney General Pam Bondi for criminal prosecution in connection with an investigation in 2016 into alleged Russian–Trump collusion.
The chairman of the panel, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), wrote in a letter that Brennan allegedly “knowingly made false statements during his transcribed interview” in May 2023 with the House Judiciary Committee, and that he provided “numerous willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact” during his testimony.
As an example, the letter said that Brennan, who had served as CIA director under President Barack Obama, had denied that the intelligence agency used the “Steele dossier” in coming up with a post-election assessment following Donald Trump’s first presidential win in 2016. The reference is to a collection of documents and claims that were put together by former UK intelligence official Christopher Steele.
Used as Democratic-funded opposition research against Trump in 2016, the dossier has long been discredited as false by Republicans as well as by former special counsel John Durham. In a report released in 2023, Durham said that FBI investigators did not corroborate a “single substantive allegation” in the dossier, even though it was continually cited in warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveil former Trump aide Carter Page.
According to Jordan’s Oct. 21 letter to Bondi, Brennan told lawmakers that he wasn’t involved in analyzing the Steele dossier and that he only saw it after the 2016 election. Jordan said that Brennan’s statement to Congress about the CIA not being involved was false.
“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 had testified before the lawmakers, according to the letter.
Jordan, who cited declassified documents that were obtained by news outlet The Federalist, said that after “a CIA officer drafted the annex containing a summary of the dossier,” Brennan and then-FBI Director James Comey allegedly included information from the dossier in a post-2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).
Jordan also accused Brennan of overruling top-level CIA officials who didn’t want to include that information.
