Prosecutors zero in on CIA's Brennan with secret request for years-old evidence from U.S. Senate

Federal prosecutors who are probing the weaponization of intelligence and law enforcement against President Donald Trump and his allies have sent a secret and rare request for evidence from the U.S. Senate regarding former CIA Director John Brennan, signaling that they are zeroing in on his questionable testimony going back nearly a decade on his now-debunked efforts to tie Trump's 2016 campaign to collusion with Russia.

The overtures to the U.S. Senate and its intelligence committee from U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones' team in Miami began over the last month and were formalized in a written request for documents, transcripts and testimony last Friday, according to multiple people directly familiar with the conversations.

Senate lawyers and prosecutors are negotiating the best way to transfer the evidence, including a possible visit by the prosecution team to Washington in the coming days.

The efforts are complicated in part because much of what Brennan discussed in briefings dating to 2016 about alleged Russian interference efforts and now-debunked allegations of Trump collusion are classified, stored in secure briefing rooms and include evidence controlled by the nation's chief spy agency, the CIA, the sources said.

False testimony and injecting the bogus "Steele Dossier" into public record

The House Judiciary Committee last year formally referred Brennan, who oversaw the Obama-era CIA, for prosecution, alleging he gave false testimony in 2023 about his role in trying to bring the discredited Steele Dossier into an intelligence assessment that suggested Russia tried to help Trump beat Hillary Clinton. That testimony is still covered by the five-year statute of limitations for prosecuting false testimony to Congress. 

The request to the Senate signals a possible longer-term conspiracy case, seeking contacts with the Senate that stretches back nearly a decade. Brennan's last known testimony contacts with the Senate date to June 23, 2017 and May 16, 2018, two dates that extend outside the usual five-year statute of limitations.

Brennan did not respond to a request for comment sent to him through his lawyer.

Just the News has reported previously that FBI Director Kash Patel drafted a memo last year recommending that a decades-long string of weaponized intelligence and law enforcement statements and alleged intel against Trump and his allies that stretched from the 2016 Russia collusion probe — codenamed "Crossfire Hurricane" — to Special Counsel Jack Smith's indictments against Trump a decade later should be viewed as an ongoing criminal conspiracy to deprive American citizens of their civil rights, allowing prosecutors to charge crimes outside the statute of limitations as overt acts of an ongoing conspiracy.

Attorney General Pam Bondi assigned the task of reviewing the decades' long trail of evidence for possible crimes and conspiracy to Quiñones, whose team began collecting evidence in front of a federal grand jury in Fort Pierce, Fla., the same courthouse where Smith brought his now-dismissed prosecution for mishandling of classified documents against Trump. 

Brennan, the CIA director under President Barack Obama, and now a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, is one of the targets of that probe for his involvement in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) regarding Russia’s influence in the 2016 election. 

That assessment, published in the final days of the Obama administration, concluded that Russia developed a “clear preference” for Trump in that election and that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”  

That same month, CIA Director John Ratcliffe released a scathing review of the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of Russian influence in the 2016 election, criticizing Brennan for joining the FBI in pushing to include disgraced British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s baseless anti-Trump dossier. In particular, Ratcliffe concluded that the ex-Obama CIA chief "showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness."

Ratcliffe also sent a criminal referral on Brennan to the FBI following the CIA "lessons-learned" review earlier in July.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard also sent declassified evidence to the Justice Department in July on what she dubbed a “treasonous conspiracy” related to top U.S. intelligence officials during the Obama administration allegedly politicizing intelligence related to Russia and the 2016 election.

Last October, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said Brennan made "numerous willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact" that were contradicted by the record established by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the CIA.

A host of top Democrats — including President Barack Obama, Senate Democrats, and Brennan himself — attempted to point to a 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report in an effort to defend themselves against Russiagate evidence declassified by Gabbard, but that Senate report was flawed and included a since-discredited claim that the Steele Dossier was not used in and did not inform the 2016 U.S. intelligence community assessment.

The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in its April and August 2020 reports that British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited anti-Trump dossier was not used in the body of the ICA and that the dossier claims were not used to underpin any of the ICA’s findings — a conclusion debunked by a House Intelligence Committee report declassified last year and by a CIA review also released in 2025, and contradicted by a yearsold public House report and other declassified records as well.

The Senate committee’s April 2020 report — which focused on the ICA — also wrongly suggested that Brennan had opposed including the dossier in the ICA, while the recently-declassified House report and last year’s CIA review both include testimonial evidence that Brennan had actually fought to put the dossier info in the assessment over the objections from top CIA analysts.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s fourth volume of its report on alleged Russian meddling and the 2016 election, released in April 2020, “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 fifth volume on Russia, released in August 2020, also asserted that “the dossier material was not used in the ICA and did not contribute to its findings.” This conclusion by the committee is now known to be inaccurate.

The 2016 ICA was written at the direction of then-President Obama and largely overseen by Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and since-fired FBI Director James Comey. It was finished in December 2016, with a publicly declassified version released in early January 2017 and a more extensive classified version declassified and released last year.

Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had pushed in December 2016 to include Steele's debunked dossier in the 2016 ICA on alleged Russian meddling. The dossier was included in an annex to the assessment and was cited in the most highly-classified version of the ICA.

The House report declassified last year and the CIA review released last year sharply criticized Brennan for allegedly joining with these anti-Trump forces in the FBI in pushing to include Steele’s baseless anti-Trump dossier in the ICA.

Steele, a former MI6 agent, had been hired in 2016 by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was being paid by Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias. The dossier was used by the FBI to obtain FISA warrants against a Trump campaign official, and evidence continues to emerge about how it was included in the ICA on Russia and the 2016 election.

Brennan told the Senate committee in 2017 that top CIA officials were "very concerned about polluting the ICA with this material.” Brennan claimed that the dossier "was not used in any way as far as the judgments in the ICA were concerned."

Comey told the committee in June 2017 that “I insisted that we bring it to the party, and I was agnostic as to whether it was footnoted in the document itself, put as an annex. I have some recollection of talking to John Brennan maybe at some point saying: I don’t really care, but I think it is relevant and so ought to be part of the consideration.”

Brennan claimed in 2017 that "as long as it was separated from the ICA's substance and judgments and as long as it was not going to be part of the formal briefing we gave on the ICA, we felt, okay, Jim, you want to do it, okay. We're not going to object.”

Denied including Steele Dossier but still forced it into report

Years after his testimony before the Senate, Brennan testified before the House Judiciary Committee in May 2023, where he was forced to talk about the ICA and the Steele Dossier. He repeatedly said the CIA had "opposed" including the dossier in the ICA.

Contradicting the Senate panel’s conclusions, the recently-declassified House analysis provided further detail on how Brennan ensured the dossier would be included in the ICA, despite pushback from others at the CIA. The report stated that “the DCIA [Brennan] rejected requests from CIA professionals that the dossier be kept out of the ICA.”

The report cited a senior intelligence officer present at a meeting with Brennan where “two senior CIA officers — one from Russia operations and the other from Russia analysis — argued with DCIA that the dossier should not be included at all in the ICA, because it failed to meet basic tradecraft standards.”

The same officer said that Brennan refused to remove the reference to the dossier and, when Brennan was confronted with the dossier's significant problems, said that Brennan reportedly replied, "Yes, but doesn't it ring true?"

The recently-declassified bombshell House Intelligence Committee report revealed that, despite repeated denials, the 2016 ICA on Russian election meddling pointed to the Steele Dossier when attempting to underpin the conclusion that Russian leader Vladimir Putin aspired to help Donald Trump win — with the ICA also allegedly ignoring evidence that the Russian leader may have favored (or at least fully expected) a Hillary Clinton victory instead.

The recently-declassified report includes strong evidence that the ICA directly cited the Steele Dossier when the ICA argued that Putin had aspired to help Trump win.

The recently-declassified analysis stated that “contradicting public claims by the DCIA that the dossier ‘was not in any way’ incorporated into the ICA, the dossier was referenced in the ICA main body text, and further detailed in a two-page CIA annex.”

The House report stated that “by devoting nearly two pages of ICA text to summarizing the dossier in a high-profile assessment intended for the President and President-elect, the ICA misrepresented both the significance and credibility of the dossier reports.”

The CIA’s review memo from last year 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.”

Brennan's preference for narrative consistency over facts

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 bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”

The CIA’s recent review 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 CIA review also said 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.”