At Last: John Brennan and James Comey Under Criminal Investigation for Russiagate
"The beginning of the end" just took on new meaning
What a roller-coaster the last week has been.
On the heels of the devastating, embarrassing announcement by Donald Trump’s Justice Department that there would be no new document releases in the Jeffrey Epstein case, there is real — if confusing — progress in an equally explosive investigation. In a story first broken by Fox News, reported further by Margot Cleveland at The Federalist, Miranda Devine at the New York Post, and Paul Sperry at RealClear Investigations, and bolstered now by our own sources at Racket, it’s confirmed: FBI Director Kash Patel has opened criminal investigations into former CIA chief John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, for offenses related to the Trump-Russia scandal colloquially known as “Russiagate.”
The opening of criminal probes into two of the most powerful enforcement chiefs of the Trump era marks the first steps toward consequences for the elaborate and historically unprecedented intelligence fraud that for years consumed American politics. The Bureau will look at possible perjury and conspiracy offenses for both, focusing initially on how Brennan’s CIA and Comey’s FBI worked to produce the infamous “Intelligence Community Assessment” of January 6th, 2017.
The public portion of that report included a summary that said that the agencies assessed that “[Vladimir] Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.” This narrative — that Russia not only “influenced” the 2016 election but “aspired” to help Donald Trump at Hillary Clinton’s expense — quickly became conventional wisdom in media, then snowballed into a political scandal and a Special Counsel investigation that for some time seemed destined to topple the first Trump presidency:
As ambitious as that caper was, the scope of the new Brennan-Comey probes appears limited to process issues raised in an 8-page report on Russiagate’s origins released by CIA director John Ratcliffe. This has been a source of concern to some who were hoping for a heavier wallop. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) chair Rick Crawford, for instance, sent Trump an angry letter last week expressing disappointment that Ratcliffe’s CIA was “permitted to whitewash” the Intelligence Community’s role in manufacturing Russiagate.
Crawford’s letter reflected intramural GOP strife about the investigations into Brennan and Comey. While the predicate for the new FBI probes technically is a criminal referral from Ratcliffe and the CIA, most of the actual digging into the origins of what Crawford calls the “Russia collusion hoax” was performed across an exhaustive, 3,000-hour investigation conducted by teams working under former HPSCI chief Devin Nunes in the 115th congress, in 2017 and 2018. Racket and Public reported on the details of that investigation last February. Those HPSCI investigators were led by current FBI chief Kash Patel and split into two teams, one of which worked out of a “small office in Langley.” That team working at CIA headquarters had wide access to raw intelligence surrounding the Trump-Russia investigation, including dissenting analyses and emails from officials questioning the 2017 ICA.
Unsurprisingly, that final HPSCI report was “significantly worse” and described far more corruption than Ratcliffe’s 8-page brief, as The Federalist’s Cleveland put it. We described some of what was “worse” in Racket and Public last February:
Brennan and the ICA authors “embellished” their conclusion by upgrading unreliable sources to reliable. Investigators found “3-4 instances” in which they couldn’t find a “credible historic reporting line” for sources in the ICA report, and found the “source rating” had been changed. Dissent, even within Brennan’s group of 24 “hand-picked” analysts — not from 17 agencies but just three — was overruled… The HPSCI investigators “looked at the report and the sourcing they used to evaluate the sourcing… When we dug further to look at the data available to them that they didn’t use, and it overwhelmingly contradicted their conclusions that Russia supported Trump.”
The HPSCI report has remained classified and “in a vault at the CIA” for seven long years. This followed the same pattern as the WMD episode, where the CIA did not release its full 93-page National Intelligence Estimate* on Iraq until 2015, thirteen years after a redacted version was released to the public to sell the invasion. The full document, hidden from the American public before the war, determined there was no operational tie between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
HPSCI investigators who hoped the new Trump administration would aggressively pursue the leads Kash Patel’s team dug up in 2017 and 2018 were both puzzled by the release of Ratcliffe’s relatively tamer report last week, and upset that their more hard-hitting work remained locked up. After Crawford sent his letter, however, Trump interceded and Ratcliffe returned the original HPSCI report to Crawford on the Hill. The HPSCI material remains classified, but at least it’s no longer being “held hostage” at Langley, as Crawford put it, in a public note of thanks tweeted last Thursday.
The news that the FBI is now opening criminal investigations into Brennan and Comey seems to have mollified some of those close to the original HPSCI investigation. “I don’t know how the fuck they got here, but I’m happy they did,” laughed one source familiar with the full HPSCI report.
The same source was not disappointed that the FBI is “only” looking at charges like perjury or conspiracy. “You have to understand, there’s no statute that really fits what these people did,” the source said. “But there is one against lying to Congress, and given that that’s what they have to work with, the Ratcliffe report makes more sense to me now.”
Although some had concerns about statutes of limitations (for perjury, six years) and others worried about the prospects of obtaining convictions against prominent, blue-leaning politicians in the District of Columbia, sources I spoke with believe the evidence for perjury is compelling in the cases of both Brennan and Comey. To wit:
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