The House Judiciary Committee referred former CIA Director John Brennan to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution on Tuesday over allegations that he “knowingly made false statements” to Congress about his role in the Russia collusion hoax.
In the letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi obtained by The Federalist, Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, argued that “Brennan made numerous willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact contradicted by the record established by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and the CIA.”
“Making false statements before Congress,” Jordan wrote, “is a crime that undermines the integrity of the Committee’s constitutional duty to conduct oversight.”
The referral highlights numerous instances in which Brennan allegedly issued untrue remarks when testifying before the Judiciary Committee in May 2023. Among them are comments the former CIA director made when discussing his agency’s role in helping craft the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that advanced the false narrative that Russia “developed a clear preference” for Donald Trump and “aspired to help” him win the 2016 election.
As noted by Jordan, “This conclusion — now known to be false — was based in part on the Steele dossier,” a series of reports containing salacious and unproven allegations about Trump that was bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign’s law firm. The dossier was ultimately shopped to the FBI in early July 2016 and later used by the agency to obtain a warrant to spy on Trump campaign official Carter Page.
Despite being uncorroborated, a 2020 HPSCI report declassified earlier this year by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard showed how the dossier’s contents were included in the ICA’s main body and a two-page annex at the behest of intel leaders like Brennan.
In his referral to the DOJ, Jordan pointed to testimony Brennan gave before the House Judiciary Committee about the CIA’s role in the decision to include the dossier in the ICA. When asked by then-Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., about whether he was “involved in analyzing” the dossier, Brennan claimed, “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,” Brennan said.
“Were you aware of the FBI’s involvement with the dossier?” asked Gaetz, to which Brennan replied, “Yes, 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.”
[READ: Top Intelligence Officials Contradicted Brennan: ‘No Intelligence’ To Support Key Russia Hoax Claim]
According to the aforementioned HPSCI report, however, the CIA was not only involved in the decision to include the dossier in the ICA, but that Brennan overrode the objections of CIA officials concerned about its inclusion in the assessment due to its lack of substantiation.
As The Federalist’s Brianna Lyman previously summarized, “Two senior CIA officers contended that the dossier should have been omitted from the ICA ‘because it failed to meet basic tradecraft standards,’” but one senior official said that “Brennan, when ‘confronted with the dossier’s many flaws,’ said, ‘Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?’”
“Brennan’s assertion that the CIA was not ‘involved at all’ with the Steele dossier cannot be reconciled with the facts,” Jordan wrote.
[EXCLUSIVE: ‘This Should NOT Be Included’ — Read Intel Officials’ Objections To ‘Extremely Sketchy’ Steele Dossier]
Brennan’s role in overriding senior CIA officials’ objections to the dossier’s inclusion in the ICA also appears to contradict testimony he gave to Congress, according to Jordan. The House Judiciary Committee chair cited an exchange he had with Brennan about who he “learn[ed] [about the Steele dossier] from” and how he learned “about the dossier in December [2016].”
Seemingly at odds with the HPSCI report’s findings, Brennan testified that he received a copy of the dossier from the FBI prior to his and other intel chiefs’ visit with Trump briefing him on its contents. More notably, however, he claimed that “the CIA was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment.”
“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,” Jordan wrote. “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]’ because as the Director of the CIA, Brennan spoke for the Agency.”
[READ: John Brennan’s 5 Lies That Set Russiagate In Motion]
The committee’s Tuesday referral for investigation also included an instance of Brennan allegedly providing false statements to Congress in 2017, which Jordan noted were “made beyond the five-year statute of limitations … [but] indicates a pattern of Brennan’s willingness to lie to Congress about the Steele dossier.” During a back-and-forth with then-Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., in May 2017, Brennan claimed that the dossier “was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community assessment that was done …”
“In sum, Brennan’s testimony before the Committee on May 11, 2023, was a brazen attempt to knowingly and willfully testify falsely and fictitiously to material facts,” Jordan wrote. “We therefore make this referral for the Department to examine whether any of Brennan’s testimony warrants a charge for the violation of [federal law].”
Even after the HPSCI report’s declassification earlier this year, Brennan has continued to parrot falsehoods about his extensive role in the ICA’s creation and the Russia collusion hoax writ large. In a late July New York Times op-ed, for example, Brennan and former DNI James Clapper — another major player in the ICA’s creation and Russiagate — regurgitated the untrue claim that “the dossier was not used as a source or taken into account for any of its analysis or conclusions.”
2025-10-21 JDJ to DOJ – Bondi Re Brennan Criminal Referral (1) by The Federalist
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