The House Judiciary Committee has referred former CIA Director John Brennan to the Department of Justice after he made false statements during his interview before the Committee in 2023.
In his letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) wrote 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 (HPSCI) and the CIA.”
“Making false statements before Congress,” Jordan wrote, “is a crime that undermines the integrity of the Committee’s constitutional duty to conduct oversight.”
Among the issues presented in the letter, Jordan said Brennan “falsely denied that the CIA relied on the discredited Steele dossier in drafting the post-election Intelligence Community Assessment,” “falsely testified when he told the Committee that the CIA opposed including the Steele dossier in the ICA,” and “provided false testimony during a HPSCI hearing in 2017.”
In July, the Trump administration declassified materials showing that the Intelligence Community Assessment’s (ICA) “main findings were false and that the Obama Administration knowingly fabricated the findings for the purpose of undermining the Trump Administration,” Jordan wrote.
Furthermore, the former CIA director “eagerly wanted to include information from the Steele dossier in the ICA,” the lawmaker declared, adding that Brennan’s testimony is “also contradicted by the ICA itself, which references the dossier in the main body of the assessment and summarizes material from the dossier in an annex.”
In July, CIA Director John Ratcliffe released a review of the intelligence community’s analysis of Russian influence during the 2016 election, condemning Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan for opening a “very politicized inquiry” against the agency’s standards.
According to the review, the decision by CIA heads to “include the Steele Dossier in the ICA ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment.”
