There’s poetic justice in watching a man who spent his career turning Washington’s alphabet soup into a weapon against his political enemies finally choking on his own acronyms. John O. Brennan—former CIA Director, MSNBC analyst, Resistance pin-up—now finds himself in the crosshairs of the very “accountability system” he swore existed only for other people.
It took almost a decade, but the rot has come home. The same intelligence and law-enforcement nexus Brennan helped bend toward partisan ends in 2016—the Steele Dossier, the FISA circus, the “Russian-asset” smear campaign—has circled back. In July, Reuters confirmed that the FBI opened criminal inquiries into both Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey for potential misconduct tied to the 2016 Russia-collusion probe. The New York Post followed with a bombshell this week: the House Judiciary Committee has formally referred Brennan to the Justice Department for prosecution.
You could call it karma; you could call it oversight finally waking from a long nap. Either way, it’s rich.
Remember: Brennan wasn’t a bystander to “Crossfire Hurricane.” He was the hurricane. He ran interference for the Clinton campaign’s opposition-research file—the Steele Dossier—trying to shoehorn its fiction into an intelligence product so it could be laundered as “official.” Internal emails later showed Brennan pushing to brief President Obama and the Gang of Eight on “foreign interference” he knew was political opposition research. His prize for that bureaucratic creativity? A CNN contract and a book deal.
For years afterward, Brennan strutted across cable news sets as the self-appointed conscience of the Republic, calling Trump “a traitor,” warning of “fascism,” and assuring viewers that the grown-ups in government—people exactly like him—would protect America from democracy’s voters. Now the mask is gone.
Fox News reports that former CIA officer Bryan Dean Wright, once Brennan’s subordinate, says the ex-director “belongs in prison” for what he turned the agency into: a partisan cudgel disguised as national security. AOL resurfaced Brennan’s demand that the Steele material be jammed into the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment—the same document later used to justify surveillance, leaks, and an endless narrative that Trump was a Kremlin plant.
The bureaucracy Brennan midwifed doesn’t die easily. Its fingerprints are on everything from the Russia hoax to the current efforts to criminalize Trump’s executive power to fire. The Deep State never reforms—it just hires new lawyers. But now, one of its original architects is on the receiving end of the same machine. The “career officials” and “nonpartisan professionals” he once marshaled have discovered that survival sometimes means offering up one of their own.
That’s the quiet horror flick playing out behind this week’s headlines. Brennan’s defenders on MSNBC are suddenly short of adjectives. The “hero of truth” has been recast as “a controversial former official.” No chyrons about moral courage now—just uncomfortable pauses between commercial breaks for erectile-dysfunction medication.
There’s a larger point here: the problem isn’t that Brennan went rogue. It’s that he never had to. The post-9/11 security state gave men like him blank checks and moral absolution. Every administration after Bush’s learned to fear or feed the intel establishment rather than reform it. Brennan merely perfected that culture’s contempt for oversight—and sold it to viewers as patriotism.
If this referral turns into real prosecution, it won’t cleanse the swamp. But it will mark the first time one of its biggest rats is made to swim alone.
Citations
- Reuters – “FBI launches probes into former FBI, CIA directors” (July 9, 2025)
- New York Post – “Ex-CIA Director John Brennan referred to Justice Department for prosecution by House Judiciary Committee” (October 21, 2025)
- Daily Caller – “‘I Am Clueless’: John Brennan Plays Dumb As Feds Zero In” (July 9, 2025)
- Fox News Opinion – “John Brennan … he belongs in prison” (October 2025)
- AOL News – “Ex-Obama intel boss wanted anti-Trump dossier included” (October 2025)