John Brennan, James Comey Perjured Themselves, New CIA Memo Appears To Show

Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey may have perjured themselves while insisting under oath that the discredited Steele Dossier was not the basis for their 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), a new CIA memo revealed.

Brennan and Comey repeatedly insisted the 2017 ICA, which concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered with the 2016 election with “a clear preference” for President Donald Trump, was not based on assertions from the infamous Steele Dossier.

This claim appears to be directly refuted by new evidence revealed in the CIA’s June review of the ICA.

The review, commissioned by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, concluded that Brennan pushed to include the Steele Dossier in the ICA.

The dossier was compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele on behalf of Fusion GPS — a research firm indirectly hired by Hilary Clinton’s campaign through the law firm Perkins Coie, the Associated Press reported.

The Steele Dossier has been widely discredited, including by legacy media organizations like the New York Times (NYT).

“CIA’s Deputy Director for Analysis (DDA) warned in an email to Brennan on 29 December that including it in any form ‘risked the entire credibility of the paper,’” the CIA’s memo wrote.

This appears to directly refute multiple testimonies Brennan made, including one under penalty of perjury. (RELATED: Turley Explains Why Comey’s Testimony Might Just ‘Trip The Wire’ Into Perjury)

“And the CIA was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment,” Brennan testified to the House Judiciary Committee in May 2023.

This was a double down from his sworn 2017 testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Then-Republican South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy asked him, “Do you know if the Bureau ever relied on the Steele Dossier as part of any court filings, applications, petitions, pleadings?”

“I have no awareness,” Brennan responded.

“Did the CIA rely on it?” Gowdy asked.

“No,” Brennan responded.

“Why not?” Gowdy asked.

“Because we didn’t. It wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done. It was not,” Brennan answered.

Brennan also told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in 2017 that he had not even read the document.

Other high-ranking intelligence officials in the Obama administration echoed Brennan’s assurances.

“The IC has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions,” former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper said in a 2017 statement.

The basis of the Obama spies’ denials center around their claim that the Steele Dossier was not included in the main body of the ICA, but rather in Appendix A.

“We decided to enclose a one-and-a-half-page summary of it, but not as a formal part of the Intelligence Community assessment, in the highly classified version of it,” Clapper told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in a 2017 interview.

“It was significant enough and consistent enough with other intelligence that it ought to be included, but it wasn’t sufficiently corroborated to be in the body of the Intelligence Community Assessment,” Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a 2020 hearing, according to Real Clear Investigations.

Despite insistences that it was only included in the appendix of the ultimate ICA, a reference directly from the Steele Dossier appeared “in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting bullet for the judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win,” the CIA memo stated.

Two high-level CIA officials pushed back against including the uncorroborated Steele Dossier, arguing it failed to meet “the most basic tradecraft standards.” Brennan allegedly ignored these objections, according to the CIA memo.

The document claimed Brennan “appeared more swayed by the Dossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns.”

The backlash to these revelations have included former subordinates to leaders like Brennan and Comey to call for their imprisonment.(RELATED: Gregg Jarrett Explains Why A DC Jury Handling Comey Or Brennan Case Might Be ‘A Fool’s Errand’)

“These men deserve to rot in prison, along with anyone in the Obama White House or Clinton campaign who colluded with them,” former CIA officer Bryan Dean Wright wrote of Comey and Brennan in a scathing Fox News op-ed.

Comey and Brennan are now the subjects of a federal criminal investigation after Ratcliffe referred alleged evidence of wrongdoing by Brennan to FBI Director Kash Patel, Fox News reported Tuesday.