Former CIA Director John Brennan may be exposed to perjury problems after current CIA Director John Ratcliffe released an internal review of the agency’s Russia hoax materials, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.
Last week, Ratcliffe declassified and publicly released an internal CIA review of what is known as the “Intelligence Community Assessment,” or simply ICA, of the claims that Russia tried to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
“[President Donald Trump] has trusted me with helping to end weaponization of US intelligence,” Ratcliffe posted on X when releasing the review. “Today’s report underscores that the 2016 IC Assessment was conducted through an atypical & corrupt process under the politically charged environments of former Dir. Brennan & former FBI Dir. Comey.”
For years, Republicans and Trump allies have claimed that the ICA from 2016—when Brennan led the CIA—was flawed because its findings were based in part on the highly political Christopher Steele Dossier. The Steele Dossier, which was funded by Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign, was filled with blatant misinformation and inaccuracies like the false claims of “pee tapes” about Trump. The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee (DNC) later paid a combined six-figure fine to settle a Federal Election Commission (FEC) investigation into whether or not it properly reported the payments made through Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS to create the Steele Dossier.
Having career intelligence officials at the CIA confirm what Trump and Republicans have long alleged—that the ICA from the CIA under Brennan was deeply flawed—is a huge deal and thanks to Ratcliffe’s actions that has now happened.
“All the world can now see the truth: Brennan, Clapper and Comey manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals — all to get Trump,” Ratcliffe said in a tweet last week. “Thank you to the career CIA officers who conducted this review and exposed the facts.”
While that’s big in and of itself, according to multiple sources who spoke with Breitbart News in the wake of Ratcliffe’s release of this report, there was perhaps an even more significant revelation contained inside: Potential smoking-gun evidence that Brennan may have perjured himself during closed-door testimony before Congress on this matter.
On page 5 of the newly released review, career CIA officers admit that the Steele Dossier was included in the 2016 ICA by Brennan, and that he did it over the objections of career intelligence officials.
“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 report reads in part on that page. “Brennan ultimately formalized his position in writing, stating that ‘my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.’”
In other words, Brennan overrode the career CIA officials who told him to not include the dossier in the formal ICA about Russian interference in the 2016 election. This sentence in the report Ratcliffe released stunned members of Congress and senior staff who recalled in conversations with Breitbart News that Brennan had testified behind closed doors that he did not advocate for the dossier to be included in the ICA. As such, it would appear that despite his testimony to Congress to the contrary, Brennan actually did the opposite of what he testified about.
“John Ratcliffe is a genius,” one congressional source told Breitbart News. “He just got career CIA officers to admit the 2016 ICA was corrupted and to offer up Brennan on a silver platter. I’ve never seen anything like it. The DOJ could have a field day with this.”
A second source familiar with Brennan’s congressional testimony said they were “stunned” to see his declassified comments come to light. “It just shows how lawless Brennan and the entire Obama regime were,” this source told Breitbart News. “He knew the entire time that he was trying to wreck Trump’s presidency before it even started, but still had the nerve to lie to Congress with a straight face. Ratcliffe just brought him closer than he’s ever been to being held accountable, though. I’m guessing the DOJ will have a big interest in this—and a lot more.”
What Brennan said in his testimony is very similar to comments he made publicly to press in early 2017 about the Steele Dossier, per sources familiar with the matter. In comments reported by the Wall Street Journal at the time, Brennan said he had not read the dossier—and did not give it credence.
“To date, [Brennan] hasn’t read the document and gave it no particular credence, he said,” the Wall Street Journal’s Shane Harris wrote in January 2017. Harris’s piece even quotes Brennan himself as dismissing the dossier. “I would have no interest in trying to give that dossier any additional airtime,” Brennan said, per the Journal.
But again, Ratcliffe’s review proves these comments by Brennan as reported by the Wall Street Journal were inaccurate.
Former CIA officer Bryan Dean-Wright, who worked at the CIA under Brennan, pointed to the Wall Street Journal report and the just-released Ratcliffe review to argue that Brennan “should rot in prison.”
Now, with the revelation here that Brennan testified to Congress under oath to this effect in addition to apparently lying to the media, this could open legal doors from Justice Department officials should they choose to pursue the matter.
As Breitbart News has reported many times in the past, Ratcliffe has been aggressive in exposing Brennan over the years. Back in 2020, when Ratcliffe was Director of National Intelligence, Breitbart News reported that he “declassified documents revealing that former CIA Director John Brennan had briefed former President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s plan to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia — as ‘a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.’”
Then, of course, in an exclusive interview this year with Breitbart News—his first as CIA director—Ratcliffe told Breitbart News that Brennan’s tenure as CIA director “was one of the worst things that has ever happened to the Agency.” Ratcliffe detailed in that interview several steps he already had going to undo the politicization of intelligence that Brennan had accelerated.
