Federal prosecutors in Miami have sent a formal request to the U.S. Senate for documents, transcripts, and testimony related to former CIA Director John Brennan, escalating a probe into how American intelligence and law enforcement were turned against Donald Trump and his allies over the course of nearly a decade.
The request, sent last Friday by U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones' team, targets evidence held by the Senate and its intelligence committee. Quiñones was assigned by Attorney General Pam Bondi to review the long trail of evidence for possible crimes and conspiracy. His team has already begun presenting evidence before a federal grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, the same courthouse where Special Counsel Jack Smith's now-dismissed classified documents case against Trump once played out.
The overtures to the Senate began over the last month before being formalized in writing. Brennan, who did not respond to a request for comment sent through his lawyer, now works as a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.
At the center of the probe is a question that has dogged Brennan for years: what role did he play in embedding the Steele Dossier into the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian interference in that year's presidential election?
The ICA, completed in December 2016 and publicly released in early January 2017, concluded that Russia developed a "clear preference" for Trump and that Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign to undermine public faith in the democratic process and harm Hillary Clinton's candidacy. It was overseen by Brennan, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and since-fired FBI Director James Comey. The assessment became the foundational document for years of collusion allegations.
According to Just the News, Brennan told the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017 that he was "very concerned about polluting the ICA with this material" and that the dossier "was not used in any way as far as the judgments in the ICA were concerned." When pressed on the FBI's desire to include it, he framed himself as a reluctant bystander:
"As long as it was separated from the ICA's substance and judgments and as long as it was not going to be part of the formal briefing we gave on the ICA, we felt, okay, Jim, you want to do it, okay. We're not going to object."
That account has not aged well.
A declassified House Intelligence Committee report tells a sharply different story. According to that report, two senior CIA officers, one from Russia operations and the other from Russia analysis, argued directly with Brennan that the dossier should not be included at all because it failed to meet basic tradecraft standards. The report's conclusion was blunt:
"The DCIA rejected requests from CIA professionals that the dossier be kept out of the ICA."
The same report found that, contrary to Brennan's public claims, the dossier was referenced in the ICA's main body text and further detailed in a two-page CIA annex. The dossier reference was placed as the fourth supporting bullet for the judgment that Putin "aspired" to help Trump win. The report concluded that by 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."
A CIA "lessons-learned" review released by CIA Director John Ratcliffe reinforced this picture. That review found that Brennan formalized his position in writing, stating his "bottom line" was that the dossier information "warrants inclusion in the report." This came despite an email from the CIA's own Deputy Director for Analysis, sent to Brennan on December 29, 2016, warning that including the dossier in any form risked "the credibility of the entire paper."
The CIA review did not mince words about what happened next:
"Despite these objections, Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness."
And when two mission center leaders confronted Brennan with specific flaws in the dossier, a senior intelligence officer recounted his response: "Yes, but doesn't it ring true?"
That is not how intelligence analysis is supposed to work.
The CIA review went further, concluding that the decision to include the Steele Dossier "ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment." By placing the dossier reference as a supporting bullet for Putin's alleged aspirations to help Trump, the ICA "implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment."
Meanwhile, Comey testified that the FBI's posture was anything but passive. He told the Senate committee in June 2017:
"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."
Comey recalled telling Brennan he thought the dossier material was "relevant and so ought to be part of the consideration." Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe joined Comey in pushing for the dossier's inclusion. So the FBI demanded the material go in, and the CIA director, over the objections of his own analysts, made sure it did.
The dossier itself was authored by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, hired by Fusion GPS, which was paid by Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias. It was subsequently used by the FBI to obtain FISA warrants against a Trump campaign official. The circular nature of this, opposition research funded by one campaign laundered through intelligence channels to surveil the other, remains one of the most consequential scandals in modern American politics.
Complicating the picture is the Senate Intelligence Committee's own work. In April 2020, the committee released its fourth volume, which "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 similarly stated that "the dossier material was not used in the ICA and did not contribute to its findings."
Those conclusions are now contradicted by the declassified House report and the CIA's own internal review. Former President Obama, Senate Democrats, and Brennan himself have pointed to the Senate committee's findings as vindication. That defense looks increasingly hollow as the underlying classified materials come to light.
This is why the prosecutors' request to the Senate carries particular weight. The Senate committee sat on transcripts and documents that may reveal whether its own conclusions were shaped more by politics than by evidence. Quiñones' team is now asking to see exactly what the committee had, what it heard, and what it chose to characterize the way it did.
Brennan faces criminal exposure on multiple fronts. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said last October that Brennan made "numerous willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact" that were contradicted by the record established by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the CIA. The committee formally referred Brennan for prosecution. His May 2023 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee is the most recent known instance, well within the five-year statute of limitations.
His earlier Senate testimony contacts, from June 2017 and May 2018, would ordinarily fall outside that window. But FBI Director Kash Patel drafted a memo recommending that the full chain of actions, stretching from the Crossfire Hurricane probe through Jack Smith's indictments, be treated as an ongoing criminal conspiracy to deprive American citizens of their civil rights. Under that theory, individual acts that might otherwise be time-barred could be charged as overt acts within a continuing conspiracy.
CIA Director Ratcliffe sent a separate criminal referral on Brennan to the FBI following the CIA review. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard described the broader matter as a "treasonous conspiracy" involving top intelligence officials during the Obama administration who allegedly politicized intelligence related to Russia and the 2016 election. In July, Gabbard sent declassified evidence to the Justice Department.
The facts here are not in serious dispute. Brennan told Congress the dossier was kept out of the ICA. The CIA's own review says he overruled his analysts to put it in. He told the Senate he was concerned about "polluting" the assessment. His own written directive said the material "warrants inclusion." His analysts warned him it would destroy the paper's credibility. He included it anyway, and when confronted with its flaws, asked whether it "rang true."
Not one of these contradictions required a special investigation to identify. They were sitting in transcripts, in emails, in the CIA's own files. What was missing was the political will to act on them.
That will now exist. A grand jury in Fort Pierce is hearing evidence. Prosecutors are reaching into the Senate for records. Criminal referrals are stacking up from the House, the CIA, and the FBI. The institutional machinery that spent years investigating a president based on opposition research is now itself under investigation.
The question is no longer whether intelligence was weaponized. The record answers that plainly. The question is whether anyone will be held accountable for it.
