(The Lion) — John Brennan, the Obama CIA director credibly accused of helping alter intelligence to frame President Trump as a darling of Russia in the 2016 presidential election, has been a polarizing figure throughout his career.

The controversy swirling around him has risen to earsplitting levels in recent days, with conservative and liberal media engaged in a shouting match over just who John Brennan really is.

In one of his last acts at CIA, newly declassified documents suggest Brennan was heavily involved in creating politically driven, unsupported claims that Russia helped Trump win the 2016 election.

Those fabricated allegations helped drive continuing investigations about Trump and Russia throughout Trump’s first term, including several probes by Congress and the red-herring $32 million investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

As such, the allegations weighed heavily on Trump’s first term, likely stifling his agenda.

Specifically, Brennan oversaw production of the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that falsely concluded Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump, an assessment which was rushed to completion as Obama’s administration ran out.

The newly declassified documents suggest Brennan’s heavy-handed involvement compromised its objectivity.

The ICA – produced by a small circle of intelligence officials, contrary to protocol – cited Russian cyberattacks and disinformation aimed at damaging Hillary Clinton.

But in fact, Brennan was previously warned as early as July 2016 – and he in turn briefed then-President Obama – that the Clinton campaign intended to produce phony intelligence that tied Trump to Russian attacks against Clinton.

Clinton contrivance

At the time, the Clinton campaign was desperate to divert attention from the mushrooming email controversy, in which she hid government business – including some highly classified, top-secret documents – on a private email server in her home.

This so-called “Clinton Plan” intelligence to attack Trump by using Russia was documented in Brennan’s handwritten notes and shared with the FBI. Yet, those notes were apparently ignored during the development of the dubious ICA and the FBI’s investigation of Trump.

Because Brennan did not disclose the Clinton Plan intelligence, some are arguing it was a deliberate omission to cook the ICA findings and hamstring the Trump administration.

“Obama’s CIA knew that the Russians had blackmail material on Hillary Clinton … buried it … and cooked up intel that Donald Trump was really the one to be worried about. My goodness,” said Bryan Dean Wright, a former CIA operations officer.

“Former CIA Director John Brennan was once my boss,” Wright wrote in an op-ed earlier this month. “Given what we just learned in a shocking new report about his role in the Trump Russia hysteria, he should be in prison.”

Another key point of contention is Brennan’s reported push to have the ICA include the Steele dossier – the Clinton campaign’s discredited collection of defamatory allegations about Trump’s supposed ties to Russia.

Senior intelligence officials pushed back on Brennan, warning him the Steele dossier wasn’t credible. His reported response: “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”

“Brennan expressly ordered its inclusion in the assessment,” notes George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley. “It would appear not just in an annex but in the main body of the assessment.”

Indeed, the dossier was later proven to have been manufactured by a former British secret intelligence employee who was contracted by the Clinton campaign to create the phony report.

Brennan’s words, actions

Brennan could potentially be on the hook for making false statements to Congress, particularly regarding his portrayal of the Steele dossier’s role in the ICA, which he denied at the time.

A 2025 CIA review confirmed senior CIA analysts warned the dossier lacked credibility, but Brennan overrode their objections, favoring what the report called “narrative consistency over analytical rigor.”

A recently declassified House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report from 2017 said Brennan may have fabricated or suppressed other evidence that led to faulty conclusions in the ICA.

Some of those fabrication or omissions included unverified intelligence from a single Russian source not close to Putin at the time; human intelligence and signals intelligence that contradicted the findings of the ICA; and an anonymous email that alleged a Russian plan to infiltrate the Trump campaign.

Although heavily redacted, the House report seems to indicate the email came from Ukrainian foreign service sources, who plainly favored Clinton over Trump, and that information might’ve been deliberately withheld from analysts.

The House report noted intelligence officials complained that Brennan omitted the most important contradictory intelligence, relying on oral briefings rather than records of written briefings, ostensibly to prevent a paper trail that contradicted the politically charged findings.

Those alleged fabrications are likely why the CIA report warned Brennan’s participation compromised the entire ICA.

“While agency heads sometimes review controversial analytic assessments before publication, their direct engagement in the ICA’s development was highly unusual in both scope and intensity,” said the CIA review.

“This exceptional level of senior involvement likely influenced participants, altered normal review processes, and ultimately compromised analytic rigor.”

‘Clearly a political animal’

Brennan testified before Congress later in 2017, stating he had concerns about possible contacts between Trump campaign associates and Russian officials.

Trump CIA Director John Ratcliffe subsequently referred Brennan to the FBI for possible criminal investigation, citing procedural misconduct and potential false statements during congressional testimony.

The declassified CIA review described Brennan’s actions during the ICA process as “highly unusual” and raised concerns about the politicization of intelligence during a critical election period.

The discredited intelligence also aided the Democrats in claiming Trump’s administration was illegitimate and beholden to Russia. It’s a charge Democrats still use today as Trump seeks to broker peace between Ukraine and Russia.

Several of Brennan’s CIA colleagues warn that he was always a figure who ground his own axe at the intel agency, for his own personal gain.

“Brennan clearly was a political animal, both during his climb up the ladder inside the agency, and certainly after achieving the directorship,” former CIA officer D.W. Wilber told The Lion.

His actions, those who know him say, deserve more scrutiny, especially as new information comes to light as to his motivations while at CIA, which appear selfish, if not nefarious.

Nobody, it seems, knows exactly who John Brennan is. And looking at his record, it sometimes seems he himself doesn’t know exactly who he is either.

Brennan’s origins

The spy’s biography paints him at the very least as mercurial, if not an on-the-make opportunist.

Brennan, born Sept. 22, 1955, in North Bergen, New Jersey, is the son of Irish immigrants. He grew up in a blue-collar household, with his father working as a blacksmith.

Brennan has publicly admitted he voted for the Communist Party candidate in the 1976 presidential election, a remarkable action for a future director of the CIA.

In 1976 Brennan also traveled first to Indonesia, then to Egypt, studying Arabic at the American University in Cairo. He earned a B.A. in political science from Fordham University in 1977 and an M.A. in government, focused on Middle Eastern studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980.

In his master’s thesis, Brennan denied the existence of “absolute human rights” and defended torture and government censorship in Egypt.

“Since the press can play such an influential role in determining the perceptions of the masses, I am in favor of some degree of government censorship,” wrote Brennan.

To some extent, that master’s thesis represents the body of work of torture and propaganda some say he later left at CIA.

Brennan joined the agency in 1980, just four years removed from his vote for the Communist Party presidential candidate, Gus Hall, an extraordinary 180-degree turn politically. The newbie spy worked as an intelligence analyst at CIA for about 10 years.

After the apprenticeship, Brennan served in largely political roles at the spy shop, holding daily intelligence briefings for President Bill Clinton and serving as executive assistant for the then-deputy director.

He was the CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in June 1996, when the Khobar Towers were bombed, killing 19 Americans and injuring 498. Intelligence failures were implicated in the bombing of the towers, which housed U.S. military personnel in the kingdom.

“Saudi Arabia offered the great advantage of being almost wholly free of terrorism. Saudi laws were strict and dissent was rare,” noted an Air Force analysis of the attack. “The Gulf states, which generously funded religious causes, were seldom targets for terrorists. The kingdom was considered one of the world’s safest places for US forces.”

And yet, Saudi Hezbollah, with ties to Iran, somehow managed to evade security and blow off the front of the Khobar Towers.

Religious background

While Brennan himself has discussed his Catholic roots, one colleague with knowledge of the matter charged Brennan converted to Islam while he was station chief in Riyadh.

“Mr. Brennan did convert to Islam when he served in an official capacity on behalf of the United States in Saudi Arabia,” said John Guandolo, a former decorated FBI counterterrorism agent. “His conversion to Islam was the culmination of a counterintelligence operation against him to recruit him.”

It’s a charge Brennan has never directly addressed in public, although one might presume he answered it in private during confirmation hearings in March 2013 as he applied for the top spot at CIA.

A Brennan spokesman denied it in a 2019 phone call with the Associated Press.

“I can’t believe either of us are spending time on this nonsense,” the Brennan spokesman also wrote in an email to the Associated Press at the time.

Anti-terrorism fails

Brennan has also been a leading face in a number of controversial anti-terrorism fails of both the Bush and the Obama administrations.

Brennan was deputy executive director of the CIA on Sept. 11, 2001, which has been called the worst intelligence failure in American history since Pearl Harbor.

Brennan also was likely the agency’s leading Arabist at the time, at least among the politicos. His position begs the question of how the CIA missed the growth of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden, a Saudi citizen who helped found al-Qaeda, declared war on the U.S. just two months after the Khobar Towers bombing, even as he perfected plans to attack the American homeland on Sept. 11.

How exactly did Brennan miss looking at bin Laden more carefully, who was also a concern to Saudi Arabian security?

No one really knows.

Later, under President Bush, Brennan was an advocate of enhanced interrogation techniques used to gain valuable intelligence from detainees – including waterboarding. During confirmation hearings for the top job at CIA, Brennan changed his tune, saying he didn’t know if torture provided worthwhile intelligence.

Later, as CIA director, he again zigzagged, claiming torture was O.K.

A former CIA officer who went to prison for blowing the whistle on torture at the agency, said Brennan is lying, that the future CIA chief was one of the top torture advocates at the agency.

CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou said recently about Brennan during the Bush years, “John was ‘Torture, torture, torture. We gotta torture these guys.’”

Kiriakou noted CIA officers retired in droves in 2008 in anticipation of a reckoning at the end of the Bush presidency, particularly about the use of torture at the agency. Many of the political retirees either joined the Clinton or McCain campaigns, believing one of those two would prevail in the next election.

But Brennan used his retirement to volunteer with the little-known presidential campaign of then-Sen. Barack Obama.

‘This is a bad guy’

After the election, Brennan got his second life under Obama, and ended up deputy director of the National Security Council and then later, director of the CIA, despite Democrat objections over his torture track record.

Brennan also was instrumental in the controversial drone strike policy.

The drone policy implemented by the Obama administration targeted terror figures for killing rather than capture. But it caused heavy civilian casualties and was also criticized for killing terrorists who could have provided better intelligence value.

Brennan later claimed the drone strikes caused no civilian casualties, which was later proved to be untrue.

“This is a bad guy,” said Kiriakou. “John Brennan is a very bad guy. From day one, he was a bad guy.”

Whether Brennan is a bad guy or not may be exposed in the coming months as his actions slide under an increasingly powerful microscope.

The heat is sure to get turned up on how intelligence estimates were manufactured at the end of the Obama presidency. Critics say Brennan’s involvement in ginning up a phony narrative against Trump deserves a lot more scrutiny, as do many of his other activities at CIA.

“The agency must remain free of political influence in order to effectively provide good quality intelligence free of personal biases to our nation’s decision-makers,” concluded the former CIA agent Wilber. “Brennan failed miserably in that obligation.”