The FBI has begun interviewing current and former CIA officials as part of a Justice Department investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan, focusing on his role in the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment that concluded Russia sought to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election.
Agents have spoken with roughly a dozen officials who helped draft the assessment, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. Investigators are examining how the assessment’s conclusions were reached and whether Brennan misled Congress during testimony he gave in 2023.
Brennan’s attorney confirmed his client has been identified as a subject of the investigation.
Central to the probe is whether the intelligence assessment was tainted by the Steele dossier, a collection of largely unverified allegations about Trump’s ties to Russia that was funded by political opponents. Brennan testified before the House Judiciary Committee that “the CIA was not involved at all with the dossier.” Investigators are now examining whether that statement was truthful.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan referred Brennan to the Justice Department last year, alleging he made false statements to Congress about the CIA’s handling of the dossier.
“This claim is contradicted by multiple sources that reveal Brennan’s support for including the dossier in the ICA,” Jordan wrote in his referral letter to the DOJ.
Jordan cited a CIA memorandum declassified by the Trump administration showing that when two CIA mission center leaders raised concerns about “specific flaws” in the dossier, Brennan dismissed them. According to the memo, Brennan appeared “more swayed by the dossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns.”
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified internal agency communications related to the matter last July, accelerating scrutiny of Brennan’s conduct.
The DOJ recently removed prosecutor Maria Medetis Long from the case and replaced her with Joe diGenova, a Trump ally and longtime critic of the Russia investigation. Brennan told Reuters the Trump administration is “lawyer shopping.”
Brennan has consistently maintained that the CIA’s inclusion of a dossier summary in the classified version of the assessment was not his decision and that the agency’s conclusions stood on their own. Those conclusions were later upheld by multiple government reviews.
Trump has called the Russia investigation a “witch hunt” and a “hoax” and has repeatedly called for accountability against officials who launched it.
