Former FBI Director James Comey indicted on 2 counts

FORMER CIA DIRECTOR JOHN BRENNAN IS FACING INDICTMENT

On Thursday, October 15, 2026, Brennan is due at the federal courthouse on South U.S. Highway 1 in Fort Pierce, Florida, where a grand jury is hearing the case the prosecutors call the Grand Conspiracy. He will go into a room that has no judge in it, no press and no camera. It has a prosecutor, a stenographer, and up to twenty-three citizens from five Florida counties who have sworn to say nothing. Brennan has answered questions about the summer of 2016 before, on television and in front of congressional committees, with a five-minute clock on each questioner. He has never answered them like this.

My book, The Grand Conspiracy http://grandconspiracybook.com went to press on September 27, 2026, with Brennan's grand jury date in its last pages. What follows is what the documents show him doing, laid down in order.

Brennan was Obama's Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from March 2013 to January 2017. Before that he had spent four years down the hall from the Oval Office as the President's counterterrorism adviser, running the kill lists from a windowless basement room next to the office of McDonough, the chief of staff. Obama's people called him the President's kindred spirit. Brennan is the son of an Irish blacksmith from New Jersey, and built like one. The Jesuits at Fordham had schooled him, and for seven and a half years he was the officer who brought Obama what nobody else was cleared to bring. By the last winter of the administration his hair had gone white. He stood in the Oval Office in his shirtsleeves with his hands clasped at his waist, as though the room were his. He stared when he spoke, and under a hard question his eyes went down and to the side before the answer came. Brennan ran the Agency as the President's man. In December 2016 he overruled his own CIA Russia officers twice in ten days to give the President precisely the report Obama ordered.

Brennan had done it before. In 2014 the Agency searched the computers of the Senate committee that oversaw it, on a network the Agency itself had built for the committee's inquiry into its torture program. Brennan denied the search in public: "Nothing could be further from the truth." His own Inspector General confirmed it in July 2014. Brennan apologized in private and kept his job. An administration that surveilled the Senate that oversaw it did not hesitate, two years later, to surveil the Trump campaign that opposed it.

In the last days of July 2016 Brennan had on his desk at Langley what the record now calls the Clinton Plan intelligence. On July 26, 2016, Hillary Clinton had approved a proposal "to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services," to distract the public from her private email server. The Plan had two stages. The newspapers would make the scandal, and "later the FBI will put more oil into the fire." On the afternoon of Thursday, July 28, 2016, Brennan carried it into the Oval Office. The meeting left no schedule entry at the White House and no memorandum. The one note of it, a CIA officer's brief-back dated that day, has never been released. By Brennan's account to Durham's investigators four years afterward, the President was very interested.

Brennan has never denied the meeting. He admitted it to Durham's investigators in August 2020, with a memory that failed him on everything else about it, and ten days later he wrote it up himself in the Washington Post: on the afternoon of July 28, 2016, in a hurriedly scheduled meeting, he had informed the President that Putin had authorized his services to hurt Clinton and help Trump, with people in the Trump campaign "caught up, wittingly or unwittingly, in the Russian scheme." He wrote, too, that he had kept the intelligence to eight people in Congress so that Democrats could not use it against the Trump campaign. That is his account. The brief-back of July 28 and his own notes of the week are the record, and what he carried into the room that day was Clinton's plan. The eight he briefed, he briefed by mouth, three Democrats first, and Harry Reid's letter to Comey demanding an investigation came two days after his briefing.

After the meeting Brennan set up a sealed task force at Langley, the Fusion Cell, fifteen officers walled off from the rest of the Agency. Brennan told Durham's people, four years later, why so few were let in: "Obama just wanted the right people involved." On the morning of Friday, July 29, 2016, Brennan telephoned Comey at the FBI. On Sunday, July 31, 2016, Strzok opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. On Wednesday, August 3, 2016, in the Situation Room, with Obama at the head of the table and Biden, Clapper, Rice, McDonough and Comey down its sides, Brennan stood and briefed from a pad of ruled paper. The pad survives, in his hand. It records the intelligence itself, the approval of July 26 and the words "vilify Donald Trump," and the aim of tying him to Russian intelligence. In the margin it records who spoke: POTUS, and beside it JC, Denis, Susan: Comey, McDonough, Rice. One line of the President's has been let out from under the black bars: "Any evidence of collaboration between Trump campaign + Russia."

The President had been told for a second time, by his CIA Director, that the coming Russia scandal was the Clinton campaign's invention, approved by the candidate herself, and Obama's recorded response was a request for evidence against its target. Obama asked nobody to look at the Clinton campaign that had invented it. Comey's answer sits under his initials as four bullets the country has still not been allowed to read. Within thirteen days the Bureau had opened four files on four of Trump's advisers, the last of them, on August 16, 2016, on Michael Flynn. Comey had the fourth name from Brennan before his own agents had heard a word against Flynn.

Obama took the decision on July 28, 2016, in a room where the White House wrote nothing down. The Bureau acted on July 31. On August 3 Brennan wrote the briefing down, so that the file would show a President informed of an investigation and never a President who had in fact asked for one.

The day after the Situation Room, August 4, 2016, Brennan took a scheduled call on Syria with Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB. He told Congress in May 2017 that he had warned Bortnikov on that call about Russian interference, and that what he had raised was "the published media reports." There is only his word for the call. The choice of words gives him away. A Director who holds intelligence that Putin has authorized an operation does not cite the newspapers to the man running it; he cites the newspapers when the newspapers are all he has. By his own account, the morning after he briefed the President from his pad, what the Director of the CIA put to the head of the FSB was the press, and the press that month was printing the first stage of Clinton's plan. He warned the Russians with the scandal the Clinton campaign had written, because there was no intelligence to warn them with.

Brennan has told his own story of how the Bureau's case began. He told the House in May 2017 that the intelligence he had encountered was the basis of the Bureau's investigation, and that he had made sure it reached the Bureau; the newspapers, briefed from his side, supplied the rest, intelligence from allied services, the British first among them, passed by Brennan to Comey. The documents put a name on it. It was Halper's. Stefan Halper, whom the Bureau's paperwork called Mitch, was the Agency's man of long standing, based in Britain, a professor at Cambridge who ran the intelligence seminar there with Richard Dearlove, the former chief of MI6. Dearlove had been Christopher Steele's boss, and would vouch for Steele to the Bureau in November 2016 and in print the following spring. What Halper supplied was two inventions. The first was the Kremlin itself: the line in Steele's first memorandum that Putin was directing an operation to put Trump in the White House rested on a source Steele split in two, and the source was Vyacheslav Trubnikov, the former head of Russian foreign intelligence, who had sat on Halper's platform at Cambridge in May 2015 and said no such thing on any record. The second was Trump's advisers: Page in Moscow with men he never met, Papadopoulos, and Flynn at a Cambridge dinner with a Russian spy, told to the Bureau by Halper in August 2016 and sold to the newspapers by Steele in the same months, the same product under two names. The Bureau had carried Halper on its own books since the 1990s and paid him, by its own forms, $596,906.60 by the first weeks of 2017. The Agency's charter forbids it operations against Americans at home. Halper worked for the Agency and for the Bureau at once, and the Bureau's paperwork on him was there so that an Agency operation against Americans would look like a Bureau case. It was a plain violation of the law. A file in a second building did not change that.

Between August 11 and September 6, 2016, Brennan briefed the eight congressional leaders cleared for the government's most sensitive intelligence, one at a time: Nancy Pelosi on August 11; Adam Schiff on August 17; Harry Reid on August 25; Mitch McConnell, Richard Burr, Dianne Feinstein, Devin Nunes and Paul Ryan on September 6. August 11 was the day Stefan Halper, the Bureau's paid informant, began telling two agents at his farm at Great Falls, Virginia, that Flynn had left a Cambridge dinner in February 2014 with a Russian-born woman. The woman was me. I had gone home with my husband, and the form that carried Halper's fabrication was dated August 15, 2016. Brennan left no paper in any of the rooms. He later testified that each briefing was the same and "entirely consistent" with an assessment that would not be written for months. The House's investigators, reading the file in 2020, wrote that with no written product nobody could know whether he had told each of them the same thing, and that a Director who briefs by mouth can tailor the message to the listener. Reid's letter to Comey demanding an investigation is dated August 27, 2016.

The settled story has always been that what Brennan carried that August was the dossier. The dates say otherwise. Christopher Steele's memoranda, the dossier Hillary Clinton's lawyers were paying for, were not an Agency product, and inside the Bureau they had got no further than an attaché in Rome and a supervisor in New York. What ran through Brennan's task force in August 2016, and reached Harry Reid under the Agency's seal, was Halper's product, fresh from the debriefings of August 11 and 12. The fake intelligence Brennan carried to the President and to Congress was the informant's, and the informant was the Agency's.

Brennan gave the Bureau the product, the story that Russia was working for Trump and that Trump's advisers were in it, and held back the Plan that said where the story had come from. The Agency did not refer the Clinton Plan intelligence to the Bureau until September 7, 2016, when the case was five weeks old.

The referral was addressed to Comey and to Strzok by name, opened "Per FBI verbal request," and named in its first sentence the sealed cell at Langley that had gathered what followed, "the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell." Brennan's cell carried the Bureau's case name. Had the referral arrived before the case opened, the Bureau would have had to act on it or be seen to refuse it. Arriving afterward, it could be filed, and it was. Comey told the Senate in September 2020 that it did not ring any bells. The referral itself was found nine years later in a locked room on the ninth floor of the Hoover Building. Beside it lay a sheet of Comey's own letterhead, dated September 26, 2016, that reads "HRC plan to tie Trump."

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On November 6, 2016, two days before the election, the fifteen officers of Brennan's cell finished their last memorandum on the 'Russian operation', and Brennan gave it four readers: the White House, Clapper, Admiral Michael Rogers at Fort Meade, and Comey. It said that Putin expected Hillary Clinton to win and had been working to weaken her. Of Donald Trump it said one thing, on the word of a close associate of the Russian President: Putin did not care who won. Seven weeks later Brennan's paper would say that Putin had aspired to help Trump.

Obama ordered the ICA on December 6, 2016, with a date on it, and Brennan built it. The record of how he built it comes from the Agency's reviewers, from Brennan's own emails, and from the House Intelligence Committee's staff, who spent three years in a vault at Langley reading the raw reporting. Their report then sat in a safe for five more.

Brennan chose five CIA analysts to write it, and one of them did most of the drafting. He left the DIA and the State Department's intelligence bureau out of the room and out of the paper. On Friday, December 16, 2016, he wrote to the Agency's workforce that he had met Comey and Clapper and that there was "strong consensus" among the three of them on the scope, nature and intent of the Russian effort. He wrote that one working day before the only coordination meeting, before the analysts had seen the report the paper would rest on, before the drafting was done. The Agency's reviewers called the note a risk of "stifling analytic debate." A Director who announces the conclusion before the analysts have met has no need to press anyone. He has told them what the paper is for.

The report the paper rested on had been collected in early July 2016 and held inside Brennan's cell for five months, kept out of print so that it could be briefed by mouth. On December 20, 2016, the Agency's own Russia officers, whose job is to decide what raw reporting is fit to publish, published it and left out one fragment, the line in which Putin was "counting on" Donald Trump. They judged it too unclear to print. Nobody knew how the sub-source had come by it, "counting on" might mean preferred or merely expected, and nobody could go back and ask. On December 28, 2016, Brennan overruled them. The House committee's sentence is the plainest in the record: "DCIA countermanded their decision, however, and ordered that the fragment be included so that it could be cited in the ICA." Two of the Agency's senior Russia officers, one from operations and one from analysis, put it to him to his face: "We don't have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected." The judgment should come out, they said, or the paper should change. Brennan left it in.

On the morning of December 29, 2016, the Deputy Director for Analysis warned Brennan in writing that putting Steele's memoranda into the paper at all would risk "the credibility of the entire paper." The Bureau had fired Steele as a source on November 1, 2016, for cause. The Washington Post, the New York Times and the New Yorker had all declined the memoranda in October 2016. Brennan's answer is preserved: "my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report." The compromise was a two-page annex, Annex A, with a disclaimer that it had not been used to reach the conclusions, and a reference to that annex in the body of the paper as the fourth bullet under the judgment that Putin had aspired to help Donald Trump win. One person present when the two Russia officers walked Brennan through the memoranda's flaws recorded his reply: "Yes, but doesn't it ring true?"

On December 30, 2016, the two officers wrote to him one last time. The judgment was weakly supported and unnecessary, and to include it would "open up a line of very politicized inquiry." Brennan did not take it out. The paper was finished that day, with the fragment restored, the annex attached, the fourth bullet in place, and the National Security Agency's confidence one notch below the others'. Rogers had written to Brennan on December 22, 2016 that his analysts were "not fully comfortable," and Clapper had answered him, in an email that sat in a classified file for eight years: "That's OUR story, and we're stickin' to it."

All three reports behind the judgment that Putin preferred Trump were published after the election, on the Director's order, over officers who called them "unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased, implausible," or, in one senior officer's word, "odd." A reliable report the paper quoted four times on other points said, in the line the paper left out, that Putin "did not care who won the election." By finishing before the inauguration, the House investigators found, Brennan "retained total control over who could see the raw intelligence cited, who was allowed to review the draft, and what comments would be accepted or rejected." The Agency's review of the paper, released by John Ratcliffe on July 2, 2025, names him: the memoranda went into the annex and the supporting bullet at the insistence of the Director, over the objection of the Agency's own Russia analysts, and their presence "implicitly elevated" them. In plain words, the Clinton-manufactured dirt was given the standing of intelligence by the man who ran the building.

On January 5, 2017, Brennan briefed Obama in the Oval Office. On January 6, 2017, he flew to New York with Clapper, Comey and Rogers and briefed it to the President-elect in Trump Tower, with NSA Michael Flynn in the room. Brennan's name is on the list, declassified in May 2020, of thirty-nine officials who asked the National Security Agency between November 30, 2016 and January 12, 2017 to unmask Flynn's name.

On Tuesday, May 23, 2017, four months out of Langley, Brennan sat down in room 1100 of the Longworth Building before the House Intelligence Committee. He told it that he had "encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign," that what he encountered "served as the basis for the FBI investigation," and that people who go along "a treasonous path" often do not realize it until it is too late. Greg Miller of Wash Po, the Agency's reporter of choice, wrote that the remark was about Flynn, and the path Brennan described was blackmail: a man the Russians had compromised who did not yet know it. The man he meant had been named by Halper to the Bureau nine months earlier, on the form with my name on it. Gowdy asked him whether he had seen evidence of collusion. "I don't do evidence," Brennan said. He did intelligence. Under oath the same day he told the committee that the dossier "was not in any way used as a basis" for the assessment. The fourth bullet says otherwise, and so, eight years later, does his own Agency. Nobody on the committee asked him what the intelligence was.

In February 2018 Brennan joined NBC as a contributor. That May, after Halper was named in the newspapers as the Bureau's informant, a producer from NBC's investigative unit wrote to me, passionate about righting a wrong, and we spoke for hours. Her questions began as fact-checking and turned into an interrogation. On a later call, from her mobile, she told me her colleagues were pressing her, and that a colleague with twenty-five years in intelligence had laughed and told her that everyone at the CIA knew Flynn had had an affair with Lokhova. The sentence was the informant's. It sat on a Bureau form written in August 2016, when Brennan was CIA, a form the producer had never seen, and now it was in the mouth of a man her network employed. NBC did not run the interview. Two months later, on the afternoon of July 16, 2018, Brennan wrote that the President's press conference in Helsinki was "nothing short of treasonous." He had carried Hillary Clinton's plan into the Oval Office in July 2016 and ordered the fragment restored in December 2016, and now he was on television calling the President a traitor for doubting the paper he had built.

Durham's investigators interviewed Brennan on Friday, August 21, 2020. He remembered the meeting of July 28, 2016. He remembered the Fusion Cell that came out of it. He could not recall when he had first seen the Clinton Plan intelligence, and he did not think he had it when he telephoned Comey on July 29, 2016. Durham had the answer on paper: Brennan had "personally received a copy," and it was still among the papers of his own office. Brennan offered one thing nobody had asked him. "There was no effort at the CIA to restrict information because it was potentially embarrassing for Hillary Clinton. Obama just wanted the right people involved." On every other point his memory was good. Ten days later, on August 31, 2020, he published his account in the Washington Post. The column records the chief of staff's first question, "What are you planning to do on the congressional front?" It records Mitch McConnell insinuating to his face that the Agency was working with the administration to stop Trump being elected. From its first line to its last it does not mention the Clinton Plan.

On October 6, 2020, Ratcliffe, then DNI, declassified the pad and the referral. Brennan said on television within the day that his notes were from briefing the President on what the Russians were up to, that the intelligence was Russian and might have been exaggerated or fabricated, and that if Hillary Clinton had been trying to highlight connections between Trump and the Russians there was nothing at all illegal about that. Ratcliffe wrote back that it was not disinformation and had never been assessed as such. Thirteen days later, on October 19, 2020, Brennan signed the letter of fifty-one former intelligence officers that said the Hunter Biden laptop story bore the earmarks of a Russian information operation. Morell later told the House that the letter was set in motion by Antony Blinken of the Biden campaign on October 17, 2020, so that the candidate would have a sentence for the debate. The candidate used it. Brennan had signed the assessment in January 2017 and he signed the letter in October 2020, and each turned a question about a Democrat into a question about Russia in the week it mattered. In November 2021 a grand jury indicted Igor Danchenko, Steele's main source, for lying to the Bureau about where the memoranda had come from, and Brennan went on MSNBC and said the prosecutor had found no conspiracy.

Then the documents started to come out. In April 2025 the Bureau's burn bags gave up the form with my name on it and the referral Brennan had signed. In July 2025 Ratcliffe's review named him, and Tulsi Gabbard referred what the December 2016 paper showed to the Justice Department as a treasonous conspiracy. Brennan's lawyers wrote that year to the chief judge of the Southern District of Florida to complain of irregular prosecutorial conduct, which, in my reading, is what lawyers write when they expect their client to be charged in that court. In November 2025 the first subpoena reached him. On July 1, 2026, he sued, in Washington, naming the Attorney General, the Department, the lead prosecutor, the Director of the Bureau, the President, the chief of staff and the Director of the Agency, and asked a judge to make the government keep every document about its investigation of him.

In the first days of September 2026 a second subpoena arrived, signed by Joseph diGenova, with the date of October 15 on it. On September 10, 2026, diGenova resigned without saying why, and the next day Brennan's lawyer, Kenneth Wainstein, telephoned the Department to ask what that meant. A prosecutor named Kurt Olsen told him. There was a far-reaching investigation at Fort Pierce, covering Mar-a-Lago and beyond, into whether the President had had his civil rights violated, and Brennan was a subject of it. There was a narrower one in Washington, about his statements to Congress, and Brennan was a target of it, which in the Department's vocabulary means a man against whom the prosecutor holds substantial evidence of a crime. The conduct in the narrower case, Olsen said, might figure in the larger one as overt acts, the acts a member of a conspiracy does in furtherance of it. Wainstein wrote it down and filed it in court on September 14, 2026, and the filing set out in public, for the first time, what the government was investigating him for: a subject in Florida and a target in Washington.

On Thursday Brennan will be asked, under oath, about the week of July 28, 2016. In ten years the only thing Brennan has lost is the security clearance President Trump took from him. The pad is his. The line against POTUS is in his hand. He has said, in front of cameras, that he did not do evidence. In Fort Pierce the evidence is on the table, most of it in the handwriting of the people who worked for Obama. Of the people who sat at the table on August 3, 2016, he is the first with a date to answer for it. It has taken ten years and ten weeks.

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