John Brennan Hit With Criminal Referral Over Steele Dossier Lies

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan on Tuesday referred former CIA director John Brennan to the Justice Department for prosecution, alleging that Brennan made false statements to Congress about how the 2017 intelligence assessment on Russian election interference handled material from the so-called Steele dossier.

In a five-page referral letter dated today, Jordan argues that Brennan’s sworn May 11, 2023 testimony conflicted with declassified records the committee says now show the dossier was not only reviewed by the CIA but also included – via an annex – in the intelligence community’s assessment. The letter invokes 18 U.S.C. § 1001, which makes it a crime to “knowingly and willfully” make materially false statements to Congress.

To wit – Brennan told lawmakers that “the CIA was not involved at all with the dossier” and that the agency was “very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment.” But Jordan’s letter points to what it calls “Annex A” of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which it describes as a “two-page annex summarizing the Steele reporting” and drafted “in coordination with the [FBI]” under a joint decision by the CIA and FBI.

The broader context brings into focus the 2017 ICA, released Jan. 6 under the auspices of the Director of National Intelligence, concluding that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and developed a preference for Donald Trump. Earlier reviews by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department’s inspector general found that the dossier was included in a classified annex to the ICA – not in its main body – and that while the FBI and CIA debated how to handle it.

Jordan claims that the dossier’s language is contained in the main body of the ICA and that Brennan personally overruled CIA analysts who raised concerns about the dossier’s reliability – quoting an internal exchange attributed to Brennan in which he allegedly asked, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”

According to Brennan: “my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”

The referral calls Brennan’s lies “material” and part of a “pattern of Brennan’s willingness to lie to Congress” – pointing to Brennan’s earlier 2017 House Intelligence Committee appearance in which he said, “the dossier was not in any way used in the Intelligence Community Assessment” (a statement the letter says lies outside the statute of limitations but is relevant context).

For the Justice Department, the decision whether to open a criminal investigation hinges on determining that Brennan knowingly made false statements, and that the incorrect information was material – i.e., it could have affected the committee’s or government’s decision-making. 

For his part, Brennan has consistently defended the ICA’s core conclusion – that Moscow intervened in 2016 - and has maintained the CIA did not use unverified intelligence from the Steele reporting as the foundation for the assessment’s judgments. Yet, according to Jordan’s letter, “Ultimately, according to documents declassified by the Trump Administration, the decision to incorporate information from the Steele dossier in the ICA “was jointly made by the Directors of CIA and FBI.“