DOJ Launches Criminal Investigations Into Brennan and Comey
The Department of Justice has launched criminal probes into former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey over their alleged roles in the Trump–Russia hoax, Fox News reported Monday evening.
The FBI is looking into allegations of potential perjury and conspiracy against both men, according to Fox’s sources.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe last week declassified a “lessons learned” review on the discredited 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which alleged Russia sought to influence the 2016 presidential election to help then-candidate Donald Trump.
The review found that the creation of the ICA was rushed and filled with “procedural anomalies” that diverted from intelligence standards and 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 dossier — an anti-Trump document filled with unverified and wholly inaccurate claims that was commissioned by Fusion GPS and paid for by Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC — has been widely discredited. Last week’s review marks the first time career CIA officials have acknowledged politicization of the process by which the ICA was written, particularly by Obama-era political appointees.
Records declassified as part of that review further revealed that Brennan insisted on the inclusion of the discredited Steele dossier, over the strong objections of the CIA’s two most senior Russia experts, who said it “did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.”
In a newly declassified email sent to Brennan in December 2016, the former deputy CIA director said that including the Steele dossier in the ICA jeopardized “the credibility of the entire paper.”
“Despite these objections, Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness,” the CIA review states. “When confronted with specific flaws in the 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.”
According to the review, “Brennan ultimately formalized his position in writing, stating that ‘my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.’”
Yet when Brennan testified under oath before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on May 23, 2017, he claimed the Steele dossier “wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done.”
“The CIA was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment,” Brennan testified. “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.”
Ultimately, Steele’s reporting was not included in the body of the final ICA prepared for then-President Barack Obama, but instead detailed in a footnote, “largely at the insistence of FBI’s senior leadership,” according to a review by the Justice Department inspector general, and later, the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Ratcliffe was not surprised by the review’s findings, but felt compelled to refer details of Brennan’s potential perjury to the FBI for review of possible criminality, a source told Fox, adding that the former CIA director “violated the public’s trust and should be held accountable for it.”
“All the world can now see the truth: Brennan, Clapper and Comey manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals — all to get Trump,” wrote CIA Director John Ratcliff on X last week. “Thank you to the career CIA officers who conducted this review and exposed the facts.”
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December 2019 report on the FBI’s alleged abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) also indicated that Brennan had lied to Congress about the CIA’s role in including the dossier in the ICA.
Investigators “found the quantity of omissions and inaccuracies in the applications and the obvious errors in the Woods Procedures deeply concerning,” the IG report stated.
The FBI’s FISA warrants for former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page relied heavily on Steele’s shoddy reporting, despite a complete lack of corroborating evidence against Page, the report concluded..
Fox News reported in October 2020 that Brennan had “briefed former President Obama and administration officials on intelligence that then-Democrat nominee former Secretary of State Clinton was stirring up a plan to tie Trump to Russia.”
Ratcliffe, then the director of national intelligence, declassified Brennan’s handwritten notes memorializing that meeting, which were exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital in October 2020.
On July 28, 2016, Brennan briefed Obama on a plan from one of Clinton’s campaign foreign policy advisors “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”
Comey, then-Vice President Joe Biden, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were in the Brennan-Obama briefing.
After that briefing, the CIA properly forwarded that information through a Counterintelligence Operational Lead (CIOL) to Comey and then-Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, with the subject line: “Crossfire Hurricane.”
“Per FBI verbal request, CIA provides the below examples of information the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell has gleaned to date,” the CIOL said. “An exchange (REDACTED) discussing US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”
The FBI went on to open the “Crossfire Hurricane” intelligence operation against candidate Trump and members of his campaign in an effort to frame them with allegations of collusion or coordination with Russia to influence the 2016 campaign.
After Trump was sworn into office in January 2017, the operation intensified and within a few months, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to take over “Crossfire Hurricane.”
After two years of constant leaks to the corporate media about how “the walls were closing in on President Trump,” Mueller and his team of anti-Trump prosecutors in April 2019 concluded their exhaustive investigation, yielding zero evidence of a criminal conspiracy or collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials during the 2016 presidential election.
Shortly after that embarrassing debacle, then-Attorney General William Barr appointed John Durham as special counsel to investigate the origins of the expensive and damaging “Crossfire Hurricane” sham.
In his damning 300-plus page report released in May 2023, Special Counsel John Durham concluded that the FBI had no verified intelligence or evidence to justify the Trump-Russia investigation.
According to Durham’s scathing report, “neither U.S. nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
Notably, the report states, “on July 26, 2016, Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”
The report continued: “The aforementioned facts reflect a rather startling and inexplicable failure to adequately consider and incorporate the Clinton Plan intelligence into the FBI’s investigative decision-making in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
Durham asserted that the Department of Justice and FBI “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law” when it launched the Trump-Russia investigation.
“Indeed, had the FBI opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation as an assessment and, in turn, gathered and analyzed data in concert with the information from the Clinton Plan intelligence, it is likely that the information received would have been examined, at a minimum, with a more critical eye,” the report stated.
Durham added that the FBI “failed to act on what should have been—when combined with other incontrovertible facts— a clear warning sign that the FBI might then be the target of an effort to manipulate or influence the law enforcement process for political purposes during the 2016 presidential election.”
The White House reportedly wants all complicit Obama-era intelligence officials to be held accountable for the hoax that hobbled Trump’s first term.
“President Trump was right — again,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to Fox News. “Those who engaged in this political scandal must be held accountable for the fraud they committed against President Trump and the lies they told to the American people.”