The rise and fall of John Brennan

In 1980, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin saw an ad for the Central Intelligence Agency on a bus.  John Brennan decided to apply, thinking that such a job would satisfy his "wanderlust."

This month, the "wanderlust" of John Brennan came to an end, as the former CIA director stands accused of false testimony regarding the Russian collusion investigation.

Ironically, Brennan was first selected for his honesty — at least in part. During his entry polygraph, Brennan admitted that he had voted for the communist party candidate for president in 1976. He was impressed that the agency took him anyway.

That honest young man seems like a faint and tragic echo of the man today. When Obama picked Brennan to be the CIA director, he had become the ultimate Democratic insider and loyalist. And it would be choosing loyalty over honesty that would prove Brennan's undoing.

Newly declassified information contradicts Brennan's testimony before Congress on the origins of the now-debunked Russian collusion conspiracy theory. There is a particular focus on the intelligence community assessment commissioned by President Barack Obama in December 2016, which suggested that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump.

Obama ordered the assessment after a prior assessment found no evidence of collusion or influence on the election in Trump's favor. But Obama's White House effectively quashed that finding from seasoned CIA analysts. To create a new version, Brennan handpicked new analysts, who effectively flipped the earlier finding on its head without any credible basis in the record.

The new assessment relied, to a significant degree, on the Steele dossier, a widely discredited report paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign that contained unfounded allegations about Trump.

In testimony on May 23, 2017, Brennan claimed that 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.” In short, Brennan dismissed any reliance on the dossier.

Yet in the material now declassified, Brennan is shown not just discussing the dossier but insisting upon its inclusion in the new assessment Obama had requested. Indeed, he expressly overruled the CIA’s two most senior Russia experts, who said it “did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.”

Analysts were appalled by the use of the Steele dossier and complained that it “ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment.” One CIA analyst told investigators that “[Brennan] refused to remove it, and when confronted with the dossier’s main flaws, [Brennan] responded, ‘Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?’”Brennan expressly ordered its inclusion in the assessment. It would appear not just in an annex but in the main body of the assessment.

The timeline here is important. In July 2016, Brennan briefed former President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s “plan” to tie then-candidate Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” The original Russia investigation — funded by Clinton's campaign — was launched days after this briefing. The resulting Steele Dossier's funding was hidden as a legal expense by the Clinton campaign's general counsel, Marc Elias.

So Brennan and the Obama Administration knew in advance about the planned political hit job. Yet, only months later, Brennan would intervene to force the dossier's inclusion in version 2.0 of the intelligence assessment. Unnamed officials then leaked false information to the media about non-existent intelligence implicating Trump. 

Keep in mind that Obama's ordering of the new assessment was occurring at the very end of his term. There was a rush to complete the report before Trump took office after defeating Hillary Clinton. The effort seeded the Russian collusion hoax that would consume much of Trump's first term.

In other words, it worked. However, it required the involvement of John Brennan, as well as then-FBI Director James Comey.

As time went on, Brennan continued to deny prior knowledge of the dossier. He would later become a paid contributor for MSNBC and, in 2018, insisted that he first heard “just snippets about” the dossier in the “late summer of 2016.”

As an MSNBC regular, Brennan accused Trump of "treason," to the delight of the network hosts and viewers. (He later tried to insist that, when he called Trump's actions "nothing short of treasonous," he did not actually mean that Trump had "committed treason.")

Whatever professional integrity Brennan had left after that, he set it aside in joining more than 50 former intelligence officials in signing a now-infamous letter dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 presidential election as likely “Russian disinformation.” 

Joining him on the letter was former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who says that he has now "lawyered up" in anticipation of potential criminal allegations. The laptop, of course, was later found to be authentic and incriminating for Hunter Biden.

Back in 2016 and in the years that followed, this must have seemed to Brennan like just another CIA operation with "plausible deniability." After all, he knew that he had the Biden administration and the media watching his back. Of course, the public would ultimately reject these hit jobs, not only reelecting Trump but also giving Republicans full control of Congress.

Brennan may be protected from perjury charges by the five-year statute of limitations. However, he is likely to be called again before Congress and asked the same questions. Even if he is not criminally charged, his past statements will remain an indictment of his role in history.

What is now clear is that high-level officials dismissed intelligence and evidence in order to create and spread the Russian collusion conspiracy as widely as they could. Their politicization of intelligence was raw and wrong. It succeeded only because it was an "all-hands-on-deck" effort, from the Obama White House to the CIA, the FBI, and the media.

The rise and fall of John Brennan is an all-too-familiar Beltway tragedy. People do not lose their idealism in this city in grand moments of corruption. It starts with small lies that steadily reduce your resistance until the biggest lies become happenstance. It can create a type of self-deception as one treats lies as a moral option for the sake of the greater good.

In “A Man for All Seasons,” Sir Thomas More is asked by his loving daughter Meg to sign a false affidavit to save his own life. More tells her, "When a man takes an oath, he's holding his own self in his own hands like water, and if he opens his fingers then, he needn't hope to find himself again."

In Washington, power tends to loosen fingers over time, and the truth drips out to the point that little recognizable remains. That is the true tragedy.

For Brennan, what began as a young man's wanderlust ended in a quagmire of contradictions and deceit. 

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”