Federal prosecutors investigating the alleged weaponization of intelligence against President Donald Trump have sent a formal request to the U.S. Senate for evidence tied to former CIA Director John Brennan. The request, described as secret and rare, seeks documents, transcripts, and testimony related to Brennan's statements about efforts to link Trump's 2016 campaign to Russian collusion.
The written request was sent last Friday by the team of U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones, who operates out of Miami and was assigned by Attorney General Pam Bondi to review evidence for possible crimes and conspiracy. Overtures between his team and the Senate began over the last month, and negotiations are now underway for the transfer of evidence, including a possible visit by prosecutors to Washington.
Meanwhile, a federal grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, has already begun collecting evidence.
Just the News reports that the core of the case against Brennan centers on what he told Congress versus what the record actually shows. In 2017, Brennan testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the now-discredited Steele Dossier played no role in the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election. His words were unequivocal:
"[The dossier] was not used in any way as far as the judgments in the ICA were concerned."
He also told senators that top CIA officials were "very concerned about polluting the ICA with this material." The picture he painted was clear: the CIA resisted the dossier, and the dossier stayed out of the assessment.
That picture has since collapsed under the weight of declassified documents.
A declassified House Intelligence Committee report found the opposite of what Brennan claimed:
"[C]ontradicting 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."
That same report revealed that two senior CIA officers, one from Russia operations and the other from Russia analysis, argued directly with Brennan that the dossier should be excluded because it failed to meet basic tradecraft standards. Brennan overruled them. When one officer raised concerns, Brennan reportedly responded: "Yes, but doesn't it ring true?"
Analytical soundness, apparently, was optional if the narrative fit.
The story of how the Steele Dossier ended up inside a presidential intelligence assessment is a case study in institutional corruption dressed up as an interagency process.
In December 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe pushed to include the dossier, compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who had been hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS, in turn, was being paid by Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias. The dossier was, from its inception, a political product. It was later used by the FBI to obtain FISA warrants against a Trump campaign official.
Comey testified before the Senate in June 2017 about his role in getting the material included:
"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's own written position, as cited in a CIA review memo, stated that he believed "the information warrants inclusion in the report." This directly contradicts his testimony that the CIA opposed its inclusion.
On December 29, 2016, the CIA's own Deputy Director for Analysis emailed Brennan warning that including the dossier in any form risked "the credibility of the entire paper." Brennan proceeded anyway.
The result: the dossier was referenced as the fourth supporting bullet for the ICA's judgment that Putin "aspired" to help Trump win. A CIA review later concluded that this placement:
"[I]mplicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment."
That same review found Brennan "showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness." In plain English: he wanted a story, not the truth.
Adding another layer of institutional failure, the Senate Intelligence Committee itself issued reports in 2020 that appeared to provide cover for Brennan's claims. The committee's April 2020 report stated 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." Its August 2020 fifth volume echoed that the "dossier material was not used in the ICA and did not contribute to its findings."
These findings have since been contradicted by declassified documents showing the dossier was, in fact, referenced in the ICA's main body text and detailed in a two-page annex. A host of top Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats, attempted to point to the 2020 Senate report to push back against evidence declassified by DNI Tulsi Gabbard.
The committee's own records are now the subject of the prosecution's request. That irony needs no commentary.
The scope of this investigation extends well beyond a single instance of alleged false testimony. FBI Director Kash Patel drafted a memo last year recommending that the full chain of actions against Trump and his allies, stretching from the Crossfire Hurricane probe through Special Counsel Jack Smith's now-dismissed indictments, be viewed as "an ongoing criminal conspiracy to deprive American citizens of their civil rights." That legal framework would allow prosecutors to charge crimes outside the standard five-year statute of limitations as overt acts of a continuing conspiracy.
This matters because Brennan's last known testimony contacts with the Senate occurred on June 23, 2017, and May 16, 2018, both well outside a standalone five-year window. His May 2023 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee falls within range, but the conspiracy framework opens a much broader field.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said last October that Brennan made "numerous willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact," contradicted by the record established by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the CIA itself. The committee formally referred Brennan for prosecution last year.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe followed with his own criminal referral to the FBI after conducting a "lessons-learned" review of the ICA. DNI Gabbard sent declassified evidence to the Justice Department in July, describing the matter as a "treasonous conspiracy" involving top intelligence officials during the Obama administration who allegedly politicized intelligence related to Russia and the 2016 election.
For years, the phrase "walls closing in" was a punchline, the breathless prediction of cable news anchors who were certain that Trump, not the people who surveilled his campaign, would face legal consequences. The irony is that the phrase may finally apply to the right target.
Brennan, now a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, did not respond to a request for comment sent through his lawyer. His post-government career as a cable news commentator has been spent reinforcing the very narrative his own agency's analysts warned him was analytically unsound.
The declassified House report put the matter bluntly:
"[B]y 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."
An intelligence assessment written at the direction of a sitting president, based partly on opposition research funded by the opposing candidate's campaign, was used to justify surveillance of American citizens and to cast a cloud over an incoming administration. The people who built that cloud are now the ones under investigation.
The grand jury in Fort Pierce is collecting evidence. The Senate is negotiating the transfer of documents spanning nearly a decade. And John Brennan, the man who told Congress the dossier wasn't part of the assessment while his own written communications show he pushed to put it there, sits in silence.
The record speaks loudly enough.
