John Brennan’s tenure as CIA Director was a disgrace. He was deeply involved in the Russia Collusion Hoax, and, true to form, he has devoted the time since he left office to being a television shill for the Democratic Party. It is widely agreed that Brennan committed perjury in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on May 23, 2017, when he denied the CIA’s involvement in the fraudulent Steele “dossier.” But the statute of limitations on perjury is five years. We wrote about those issues here.
Now the House Judiciary Committee has referred Brennan to the Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecution. Chairman Jim Jordan’s letter to Attorney General Pamela Bondi is here.
Jordan’s letter says that Brennan perjured himself in testimony he gave a committee investigator in an interview on May 11, 2023. In that interview, Brennan repeated essentially the same statements that he made in 2017:
No, 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.
In fact, documents that have recently come to light confirm the CIA’s role in promoting the Steele dossier, and that of John Brennan in particular. Chairman Jordan’s letter recites some of the evidence:
This claim is contradicted by multiple sources that reveal Brennan’s support for including the dossier in the ICA. According to a CIA memorandum declassified by the Trump Administration, when two CIA mission center leaders confronted Brennan with “specific flaws” in the dossier, Brennan disregarded their concerns, “appear[ing] more swayed by the [d]ossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns.”20 Brennan later “formalized his position in writing, stating that ‘my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.’”21 Similarly, the HPSCI report notes that when senior CIA officers demanded that Brennan remove the Steele dossier from the ICA, Brennan “refused to remove it.”22 When the officers presented evidence of the dossier’s “many flaws,” Brennan responded, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”23 Ultimately, Brennan “had to order [the dossier] included over the objections of [CIA] professionals.”24
As the newly declassified documents demonstrate, Brennan eagerly wanted to include information from the Steele dossier in the ICA, a fact Brennan himself documented in writing. This directly contradicts Brennan’s testimony that “the CIA was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the [ICA]”25 because as the Director of the CIA, Brennan spoke for the Agency.
Why would Brennan repeat, in 2023, lies for which he was, at that point, off the hook, based on the statute of limitations? The answer may be that some of the documents that show Brennan’s involvement had not become public at that time, although the outlines of the Russia Collusion Hoax were well known then. More important, probably, is that Brennan did not expect Donald Trump to be elected president in 2024. If Joe Biden or another Democrat had won that election, there would have been zero chance of more documents being disclosed, or of Brennan (or anyone else) being indicted for their roles in the hoax.
So Brennan may simply have been a victim of overconfidence.
What are the chances that he will be convicted of perjury? I assume that any prosecution will be venued in the Eastern District of Virginia, like the Comey prosecution. If it were in D.C., there would be no chance of a conviction, as the jury would be overwhelmingly composed of partisan Democrats. Is that any less true in Alexandria? The jury pool is probably a little less Democratic and a little less partisan in Alexandria, but I would think that securing a conviction will be an uphill battle, no matter how clear the evidence appears to be.
