CIA’s Ratcliffe sent a criminal referral on John Brennan to the FBI for investigation

CIA Director John Ratcliffe sent a referral to FBI Director Kash Patel related to possible criminality by ex-CIA chief John Brennan, a source on Wednesday told Just the News, following a review by the CIA that critiqued the actions taken by Brennan related to the Russiagate scandal.

The source familiar with Ratcliffe’s actions said the CIA director referred elements of Brennan’s actions to the FBI for an investigation into potential criminality. 

The source, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss the sensitive matter, did not provide specificity on which activities Brennan had undertaken which Ratcliffe believed could be criminal.

Last week, Ratcliffe released a "lessons learned" review of the December 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment. 

The review sharply criticized Brennan for allegedly joining with anti-Trump forces in the FBI in allegedly pushing to include British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s baseless anti-Trump dossier in the assessment. In the review, the CIA also critiqued the “high confidence” assessment by the FBI and the CIA that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had “aspired” to help President Donald Trump win in 2016.

It was originally revealed by Fox News on Tuesday that the FBI had reportedly opened investigations into Brennan and fired agency Director James Comey, according to anonymous Justice Department sources cited by the outlet.

The sources told Fox News that Patel opened an investigation into Brennan after receiving the criminal referral from Ratcliffe. The source told the outlet that Brennan had "violated the public’s trust and should be held accountable for it."

As for Comey, DOJ sources reportedly told Fox News that an investigation into the former FBI director is underway, but could not share details of what specifically is being probed. It is not clear what Comey is being investigated for, but two sources told the outlet that the FBI views the interactions between Brennan and Comey as a possible "conspiracy."

Ratcliffe tweeted last week, in announcing the CIA review being made public, that Trump “has trusted me with helping to end weaponization of U.S. intelligence” and that the report “underscores that the 2016 IC Assessment was conducted through an atypical & corrupt process under the politically charged environments” of Brennan and Comey.

A spokesperson for the DOJ told Just the News on Wednesday that “we do not comment on ongoing investigations.”

Brennan was not one of the recipients of then-President Joe Biden's thousands of pardons and grants of clemency, and lying to Congress can be a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, which forbids making false statements to the federal government, including Congress.

The statute of limitations of five years starts to run when the crime is completed, which is when the false statement is made or the false document is submitted. Thus, any alleged false statements Brennan may have made five years ago or more would not be prosecutable. 

Nonetheless, Brennan spoke with special counsel John Durham in August 2020 and testified before the House Judiciary Committee in May 2023, which could put him in the crosshairs of law enforcement action until August of this year or until May 2028, respectively.

The largely declassified eight-page “lessons learned” CIA review from last week focused on the ICA about Russia and the November 2016 election. It was put together by the CIA's Directorate of Analysis (DA) at Ratcliffe’s direction and concluded that “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.”

Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe pushed in December 2016 to include Steele's debunked dossier in the body of the 2016 ICA on alleged Russian meddling. The dossier was included in a classified annex to the assessment with the agreement of Brennan and Comey.

The new CIA review stated that “the ICA authors and multiple senior CIA managers – including the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia – strongly opposed including the dossier, asserting that it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.” 

The agency review memo also stated that the CIA’s Deputy Director for Analysis warned in a December 29, 2016 email to Brennan that including the dossier in any form risked “the credibility of the entire paper.”

The review by the CIA also revealed that “despite these objections, Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness” and that “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.” 

The CIA review memo stated that Brennan ultimately formalized his position in writing, arguing that “my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”

The new CIA memo also stated that “ultimately, agency heads decided to include a two-page summary of the dossier as an annex to the ICA” with an accompanying disclaimer stating that the dossier material was not used “to reach the analytic conclusions.” 

The CIA review memo, however, found that “by placing a reference to the annex material in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting bullet for the judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win, the ICA implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment.”

Brennan testified before the House Judiciary Committee in May 2023, where he was mostly questioned about his role as one of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter in October 2020. But during the questioning – mostly when it was the turn of former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) – Brennan was forced to talk about the ICA and the Steele Dossier.

The former CIA chief claimed that “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 he was aware of the FBI’s involvement with the Steele dossier “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.”

“I received a copy of it from the FBI when they were wanting to have a summary of that document put into the — or, attached to the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done. … And the CIA was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment,” Brennan said. “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. And that's when the CIA was given formal access to it.”

The former CIA director said “no” when asked if he edited the ICA, and said “yes” when asked if he was aware of dissenting opinions about the conclusions of the ICA.

“There were individuals who had read the document within CIA who were not involved in the drafting or the analysis [who disagreed with the ICA conclusions],” Brennan said. “And so I listened to some of their concerns, but I deferred to the experts: the Russian, the counterintelligence, the cyber experts, and the analysts who actually drafted this. And so I did not overturn or change any of the judgments and language in that document.”

​​It is unclear what Brennan may have told Durham about his role with the ICA and the Steele dossier, because the transcript of Brennan’s August 2020 interview with Durham's special counsel team has not been made public. It is apparent that these topics came up during Brennan’s interview with Durham, despite quotes from that portion of Brennan’s interview not making it into the Durham report.

Then-Attorney General William Barr told The New York Times in a June 2020 interview that Durham was looking into the ICA.

“There was definitely Russian, uh, interference. I think Durham is looking at the intelligence community’s ICA – the report that they did in December [2016],” Barr said. “And he’s sort of examining all the information that was … the basis for their conclusions. So to that extent, I still have an open mind, depending on what he finds.”

Nick Shapiro, Brennan’s former deputy chief of staff and senior adviser, said shortly after Brennan spoke with Durham in August 2020 that Brennan and Durham met at CIA headquarters and that the former CIA director “welcomed the opportunity to answer Mr. Durham’s questions related to a wide range of intelligence-related activities undertaken by CIA before the 2016 presidential election as well as the Intelligence Community Assessment published in early January 2017.”

Shapiro said that Durham had informed Brennan that “he is not a subject or a target of a criminal investigation, and that he is only a witness to events that are under review.”

Brennan also went on MSNBC in September 2020 where he said of the Durham team that “I think they were testing various theories that they had heard and were asking for my views as well as my recollections on things. But it was handled in a very professional manner.”

Most of the references to Brennan in the Durham report are in reference to what Durham dubbed the “Clinton Plan intelligence” – although there are exceptions. Durham noted that, when interviewing Brennan about special counsel Robert Mueller declaring a lack of evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, Brennan offered that "they found no conspiracy."

Despite this admission, the Durham report then noted Brennan's contrary statements published less than a week before his interview with Durham. Brennan had written a New York Times opinion piece titled “John Brennan: President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash” where Brennan wrote that “Russian denials are, in a word, hogwash. … Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash.”

The rest of the Durham report’s mentions of Brennan largely centered on the Clinton Plan intelligence. Durham wrote that, when interviewed, “Brennan generally recalled reviewing the materials but stated he did not recall focusing specifically on its assertions regarding the Clinton campaign's purported plan. Brennan recalled instead focusing on Russia's role in hacking the DNC.”

Durham said Brennan's handwritten notes – declassified by Ratcliffe when he was the director of national intelligence in 2020 – reflect that Brennan briefed Comey, then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and others in early August 2016 regarding the "alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from one of her [campaign] advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services."

Brennan had repeated his claims about the ICA and the Steele dossier when speaking to Congress more than five years ago, but that testimony would likely fall outside the five-year statute of limitations on lying to Congress.