Durham passed on prosecuting John Brennan — will Bondi do the same?

John Durham’s investigation as Special Counsel passed on prosecuting ex-CIA chief John Brennan as well as a host of other key Russiagate figures, but there's a new sheriff in town.

Following a criminal referral by CIA Director John Ratcliffe last week, the decision on potentially charging the Obama spy chief will now rest with Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department that she oversees.

Ratcliffe's referral to FBI Director Kash Patel is related to possible criminality by Brennan, sources familiar with Ratcliffe's actions who declined to be named told Just the News this week, following a review by the CIA released last week. That report critiqued the actions taken by Brennan related to the baseless Trump-Russia collusion investigation, and it will likely be up to Bondi to decide if a criminal investigation — and prosecution — is warranted.

The CIA’s “lessons learned" review of the December 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment sharply criticized Brennan for joining with anti-Trump forces in the FBI in pushing to include British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s baseless anti-Trump dossier in the assessment. In Ratcliffe's 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.

Brennan's potentially false statements

While the specifics of Ratcliffe’s criminal referral of Brennan to the FBI were not immediately made public, it is likely that it has to do with Brennan’s potentially false statements to Congress about the ICA and the Steele dossier. Brennan spoke with Special Counsel John Durham in August 2020 and testified before the House Judiciary Committee in May 2023. Given a five-year statute of limitations, he could be in the crosshairs of law enforcement action until August of this year or until May 2028, respectively.

Lying to Congress -- whether under oath or not -- can be a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. §1001, which forbids making false statements to any branch of the federal government. 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 false statements Brennan allegedly made five years ago or more would not be prosecutable.

Brennan told MSNBC on Wednesday that “I know nothing about this reported investigation or referral to the DOJ” and that “nobody from the FBI or Department of Justice or CIA has reached out to me at all.” He said that "I am clueless about what it is exactly that they may be investigating me for." He currently serves as a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC, but did not respond to the network's request for comment.

Brennan told Reuters that he "knows nothing" about the DOJ investigation, and added that the episode is "unfortunately a very sad and tragic example of the continued politicization of the intelligence community."

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

Brennan calls Trump's denial "hogwash" but backtracks behind closed doors

It is unclear what exactly 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 team has not been made public. It is apparent from statements made by Brennan's spokesman and his lawyer that the ICA and Steele dossier came up during Brennan’s interview with Durham, despite quotes from that portion of Brennan’s interview not making it into the Durham report. Brennan’s testimony could be key in Bondi’s decision making.

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 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 public 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.”

Jim Jordan, others, seek access to Brennan transcript

Republicans in Congress continue to seek access to classified information on the Trump-Russia saga — including material related to Durham’s inquiry.

Last month, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court quietly approved a Justice Department request to review information tied to the FISA warrants that targeted Carter Page as FBI Director Kash Patel seeks to hand over more Russiagate evidence to Congress.

The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Patel earlier this year asking him to provide a host of information tied to Russiagate and special counsel John Durham’s inquiry.

The letter by Rep. Jim ​​Jordan, R-Ohio, also asked for any and all documents and transcripts in possession of the FBI which were cited or used by Durham’s inquiry and all transcripts of interviews which Durham’s team conducted — which would include the Brennan interview.

Jordan told Just the News last Monday night he believes a Justice Department review of Brennan's testimony is possible. "It looks like he may have said something that wasn't accurate … when we deposed him in 2023," Jordan said.

"We want to take a look at this, and we'll see what else Mr. Ratcliffe may do, or what, if anything, the Department of Justice may do, what Attorney General Bondi may do with this information as well," he added.

Brennan’s lawyer doubled down to Durham in 2022

Brennan’s lawyer, Kenneth Wainstein, doubled down on Brennan’s claims in a lengthy 2022 letter sent on behalf of his client to Durham — information which could be of value to Bondi. The letter was first reported by The Atlantic this week, and Wainstein confirmed to Just the News that “yes, that is the letter I submitted to John Durham in 2022.”

Wainstein had personally represented Brennan for years, and went on to be confirmed as the Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis at Biden’s Department of Homeland Security later in 2022. The lawyer had been a partner at the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell when he sent the letter to Durham, but he is now at the Mayer Brown law firm. 

Wainstein told Durham at the time that his client had done an “eight-hour interview” with Durham in August 2020. Wainstein also noted he had represented former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and an unnamed “CIA Supervisor” as well, both of whom were also interviewed by Durham, according to the letter.

Wainstein told Durham that “the Intelligence Community's work on the 2016 election interference threat became the target of factual distortions and baseless accusations from many pundits, political operatives, and even government leaders who sought to demonize the Intelligence Community and discredit its analytical assessments about the Russian interference.”

Lawyer: Brennan had "minimal" involvement, but admits pushing Steele Dossier 

Brennan’s lawyer claimed that his client’s “involvement in the production of the ICA was minimal” and that “prior to the publication of the ICA, Director Brennan met with the participating CIA analysts on one occasion, for approximately an hour and a half, to discuss the ICA draft. During that meeting, Director Brennan discussed the analysts' findings and some of the specific intelligence they relied upon, but made no changes to their analysis or findings.”

Brennan “did actively engage in the preparation of the report in one aspect — in response to the FBI's desire that the ICA include a discussion of the Steele Dossier,” his lawyer told Durham.

“In the years since this episode, the Steele Dossier has taken on an almost mythic significance in the minds of those who believe that the Intelligence Community was intent on using the ICA process to undermine Donald Trump's reputation and presidency,” Brennan’s lawyer wrote. "That conspiracy theory is inconsistent with the facts, and the irony is that” Brennan and Clapper “prevented the Steele dossier from playing any role in the ICA analysis.”

Wainstein claimed that Brennan “objected to including the Steele dossier in the ICA, citing the absence of corroboration for the information it contained” and that he and his staff “expressed the concern that combining the dossier's unvetted information with the rest of the vetted intelligence would undermine the legitimacy of the report and compromise the credibility of its findings.”

“This situation resulted in a brief interagency standoff,” Brennan’s lawyer wrote. “The directors and their staffs reached a compromise by which they agreed to include a brief summary of the dossier in an appendix to the ICA — physically and formally distinct from the analytical work product — and to attach that appendix only to the highest classification version of the report, ensuring that it would only be seen by a relatively small number of highly cleared government officials. There was no mention of it in the report, and none of the report's text or its over 400 footnotes relied in any way on information from the Steele Dossier.”

Wainstein said that “the CIA and ODNI opposed the FBI request to include the Steele Dossier in the ICA. They recognized that it was unvetted and therefore not appropriate for an Intelligence Community product like the ICA. They successfully held that line, excluding the substance of the Steele Dossier from the analysis contained in the ICA and relegating it to a brief summary that was attached as an appendix to only the most highly classified version of the ICA to avoid its public disclosure.”

The lawyer said that Brennan and Clapper “could have easily agreed to the FBI's request and allowed the dossier to be included or referenced in the body of the ICA, thereby publicly highlighting its contents, which were highly critical of Trump” but that their “refusal to do so is a credit to their professionalism and evidence of their politically evenhanded approach.”

Brennan — among the 51 “Spies Who Lied” — spoke to House about ICA

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, Brennan was also forced to talk about the ICA and the Steele Dossier. That testimony is likely to be scrutinized by Bondi’s team, and fall inside the reach of criminal law's limitation period.

Brennan signed onto the October 2020 letter attempting to discredit New York Post stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, with the ex-spies baselessly arguing that the Russians were involved with the laptop. 

It was later revealed by the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee that former acting CIA Director Michael Morell wrote the laptop letter after being “prompted” by future Secretary of State Antony Blinken to put the letter together, and that the debunked laptop letter was written to give Joe Biden a “talking point” in his debate with Trump ahead of the November 2020 election.

Brennan had claimed to Congress 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.”

Durham testifies about his report

Durham appeared before the House Judiciary Committee in June 2023 to testify about his report — and at no point was he asked about Brennan’s role with the ICA, nor about the Steele dossier’s inclusion in that 2016 assessment.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, brought up the Clinton Plan intelligence, with Durham agreeing that Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to tie Trump to Russia, that the intelligence was important enough for Brennan to brief a host of top Obama administration officials including Comey, and that the CIA eventually sent a referral memo to the FBI about it. Durham said he did not believe Comey had shared the information in the referral memo with the FISA Court, with the lawyers preparing FISA applications, nor with agents on the Crossfire Hurricane team.

“We interviewed the first supervisor of the Crossfire investigation — the operational person. We showed him the intelligence information. He indicated he’d never seen it before. He immediately became emotional, got up and left the room with his lawyer, spent some time in the hallway, came back and—” Durham said, and Jordan asked if the FBI supervisor was “ticked off.” Durham said he was, because “the information was kept from him.”

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, asked the special counsel if it was correct that “the FISA application relied, according to your report, at least in part on the Clinton Plan intelligence.” Durham said “yes.”

Senate Intel vs. House Intel on the ICA

The Durham report’s only direct mention of the ICA was to praise prior “careful examinations” such as the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2020 report on Russia, which included examining the 2016 ICA.

The Senate committee released a bipartisan report in 2020 defending the 2016 ICA. The panel said congressional investigators found no evidence of political pressure and determined the assessment “presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference” and the Senate committee “did not discover any significant analytic tradecraft issues in the preparation or final presentation of the ICA.” The Senate committee also said it “found that the information provided by Christopher Steele to the FBI was not used in the body of the ICA or to support any of its analytic judgments.”

The Senate committee's findings clashed with a 2018 report from the House Intelligence Committee, led at the time by former Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., which concluded that “the majority of the Intelligence Community Assessment judgments on Russia’s election activities employed proper analytic tradecraft” but the “judgments on Putin’s strategic intentions did not.” 

The House report said it “identified significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments regarding Putin’s strategic objectives.” That report was not bipartisan – and many of its findings remain classified.

Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., the current chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sent Trump a letter last week telling him that a still-classified 2018 report by the committee “exposes the truth about the politically driven Obama-era assessment.” 

Crawford urged Trump to read the classified report and argued in his letter that “public interest declassification is merited.”

The Clinton Plan intelligence

Most of the 2023 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."

Durham’s report said that the still-classified appendix to it “provides further information” about the Clinton Plan intelligence, “facts that heightened the potential relevance of this intelligence” to his special counsel investigation, and the Durham team’s “efforts to verify or refute the key claims found in this intelligence.”

Durham’s report pointed to a double standard in how the FBI handled baseless allegations of Trump-Russia collusion as compared to how the FBI handled alleged foreign influence efforts aimed at the Clinton campaign.

“These examples are also markedly different from the FBI's actions with respect to other highly significant intelligence it received from a trusted foreign source pointing to a Clinton campaign plan to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin so as to divert attention from her own concerns relating to her use of a private email server,” Durham wrote. 

The CIA referral memo sent to the FBI — which Durham said was completed on September 7, 2016 — was addressed to Comey and later-disgraced FBI special agent Peter Strzok, according to Durham, and stated in part: “Per FBI verbal request, CIA provides the below examples of information the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell has gleaned to date [Source revealing information redacted]: … An exchange ... discussing U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's approval of a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

Brennan’s lawyer, Kenneth Wainstein, had told Durham in 2022 that “Director Brennan became aware of intelligence that Hillary Clinton had allegedly approved a plan to generate a narrative associating Donald Trump with Russian security services' efforts to interfere with the election. Director Brennan shared this information at a National Security Council meeting, and the CIA shared it with the FBI via a transmittal memo.”

CIA review blasts Brennan

The largely declassified CIA review released this month 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.”

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 [Steele] 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.”

Durham's prosecutions skipped Brennan

Durham carried out three prosecutions — but Brennan dodged all three criminal law actions.

FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who worked on both the FBI’s Hillary Clinton email investigation and on the Trump-Russia collusion inquiry, pleaded guilty to falsifying a document during the bureau’s efforts to renew FISA authority to wiretap Carter Page. The ex-FBI lawyer confessed in August 2020 that he had manipulated a CIA email in 2017 to state that Carter Page was “not a source” for the CIA when that agency had actually told the bureau on multiple occasions that Page was in fact an “operational contact” for the CIA.

FBI notes of a January 2017 interview with Steele Dossier source Igor Danchenko showed he told the bureau he “did not know the origins” of some Steele claims and “did not recall” other dossier information. Danchenko also noted much of what he gave to Steele was “word of mouth and hearsay,” some of which stemmed from a “conversation that [he] had with friends over beers,” and the most salacious allegations may have been made in “jest.”

Danchenko was on the FBI’s payroll as a confidential human source from March 2017 to October 2020 before he was charged in November 2021 with five counts of making false statements to the bureau. The FBI agent assigned to be the handler for Danchenko testified that he sought to have the bureau pay Danchenko more than $500,000. 

According to Durham, Danchenko had anonymously sourced a fabricated claim about Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to Hillary Clinton ally Chuck Dolan, who spent years, including 2016, doing work for Russian businesses and the Russian government. Danchenko denied this, and the judge tossed that charge out before the jury could decide on it. He was acquitted of all remaining charges.

Marc Elias, a former Perkins Coie lawyer who served as general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, played a key role in the funding and spreading Steele’s discredited anti-Trump dossier. That work resulted in the Federal Elections Commission fining both the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign for not properly disclosing the more than $1 million  they spent on pushing the Steele Dossier.

Durham filed charges against Elias’s former Perkins Coie law partner, Michael Sussmann, with whom Elias worked closely in 2016. Sussmann had pushed debunked allegations to the FBI claiming there was a secret back channel between Russia’s Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization. Durham charged Sussmann, and he was also found not guilty.

It remains to be seen if the Justice Department — undergoing its own drama about Jeffrey Epstein  — will launch what could be a sprawling criminal conspiracy investigation related to the 2016 election and beyond. Brennan may find himself at the very center of that investigation.