Could we see some real accountability for corrupt lawfare? Even that from La Résistance 1.0, the Russia-collusion hoax? Be still my heart.
Perhaps that’s getting ahead of developments. However, Miranda Devine reported last night that ‘authorities’ have begun an investigation into whether former CIA chief John Brennan committed perjury in congressional testimony. Eight years ago, when the Steele Dossier first began to fall apart, Brennan insisted that it didn’t form the basis of his conclusions that Russia had interfered with the election, possibly with the collusion of the Trump campaign.
Last week, however, an internal review by the CIA concluded that Brennan insisted on using the Steele Dossier to justify those conclusions, even though red flags had been raised internally:
The CIA, FBI and National Security Agency’s Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) evaluating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election diverted from intelligence standards and featured some “procedural anomalies,” according to a new lessons-learned review of the assessment that CIA Director John Ratcliffe ordered for declassification Wednesday. …
Specifically, the new review found that the CIA’s deputy director for analysis said in a December 2016 email to Brennan that including the dossier in any capacity jeopardized “the credibility of the entire paper.”
“Despite these objections, Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness,” the new review stated. “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. Brennan ultimately formalized his position in writing, stating that ‘my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.’”
Not only did Brennan lie about the importance of the discredited Steele Dossier in his conclusion, the report suggested that Brennan leaned on people to back him up on the Russia-collusion hoax:
“While agency heads sometimes review controversial analytic assessments before publication, their direct engagement in the ICA’s development was highly unusual in both scope and intensity,” the review said. “This exceptional level of senior involvement likely influenced participants, altered normal review processes, and ultimately compromised analytic rigor.”
Additionally, the review said that Brennan sent a note to intelligence community analysts one day before their only session coordinating on the ICA that he had met with then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-FBI Director James Comey. The review said that Brennan told the CIA workforce that “there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our recent Presidential election.”
“While officers involved in drafting the ICA consistently said they did not feel pressured to reach specific conclusions, Brennan’s premature signaling that agency heads had already reached consensus before the ICA was even coordinated risked stifling analytic debate,” the review said.
In other words, the Obama administration forced the intel to fit the narrative, not the other way around. Those conclusions make it clear that the Obama team cooked up Russiagate as an extension of Hillary Clinton’s political dirty trick, first to clear the way for Clinton and then to kneecap Trump’s first term. If true, that would make the Russiagate a massive scandal — but one that reflects on Obama and his administration rather than Trump.
According to Devine, the Trump administration now wants accountability for that alleged corruption, and now they have a potential entry point — Brennan:
John Brennan, the disgraced former Obama CIA director, may have opened himself up to perjury charges after a new email was uncovered in a scathing internal review by CIA career professionals of the agency’s 2016 Trump-Russia collusion assessment.
Brennan is said to be under renewed scrutiny by authorities over discrepancies between his sworn testimony to federal investigations and his written orders to underlings conducting the Intelligence Community Assessment commissioned by President Barack Obama in December 2016 that found Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump.
At that time, Brennan testified that the Steele Dossier didn’t figure into the conclusions at all. And Brennan isn’t the only member of the Obama administration who may have lied about it, either:
The review found that former FBI Director James Comey also insisted on the dossier’s inclusion in the ICA. “FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in the ICA hinged on the Dossier’s inclusion and, over the next few days, repeatedly pushed to weave references to it throughout the main body of the ICA.”
Yet in congressional testimony under oath on May 23, 2017, Brennan 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.”
That seems pretty clearly to have been a false statement to Congress, if not outright perjury. Both are actionable as criminal charges, if the Department of Justice chooses to enforce the law. During the Obama administration, Eric Holder declined to do so with then-ODNI James Clapper when he lied to Congress about domestic surveillance programs. However, the Biden-era DoJ under Merrick Garland prosecuted both Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon for contempt when they refused to respond to congressional subpoenas over nonsense political activities. That sets a clear precedent for going after Brennan for a far worse cover-up of a far worse scandal — the potential politicization of American intelligence to undermine an election and a duly elected president.
It’s worth squeezing Brennan to see what he might offer in terms of potential conspirators in this effort to cook intelligence against his political opponents. But even if he doesn’t cough up anyone else, the accountability juice will be well worth this squeeze on its own.
