WASHINGTON — Current and former CIA employees are being interviewed as part of a FBI probe into ex-agency director John Brennan’s handling of a 2016 investigation of purported collusion between then-GOP candidate Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, The Post has learned.
Agents from the bureau’s Miami field office sat down with the workers at the CIA’s headquarters in McLean, Va., last week, with more interviews expected in the next few weeks, Justice Department sources said.
Several of the CIA employees had worked on a controversial intelligence report produced under Brennan that assessed Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump, the sources added. Reuters first reported on the sitdowns.
South Florida US Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones has been overseeing a sprawling investigation into Brennan and other officials in the Obama administration who were involved in the 2017 intelligence assessment, as well as investigating alleged collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
Both Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) made criminal referrals to the DOJ last year regarding Brennan’s role in the investigation.
Gabbard released more than 100 internal government documents showing Obama ordered the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment after having heard from national security officials that Moscow and other foreign adversaries’ cyberattacks didn’t alter the presidential contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton.
The criminal referrals cited evidence that Brennan falsely testified to Congress in 2023 that the CIA was “very much opposed” to using information from a now-discredited dossier, authored by ex-MI6 spy Christopher Steele, in the assessment.
In fact,veteran CIA officials warned Brennan about the risks of releasing a “substandard” intelligence product, but Brennan pushed back in a December 2016 email exchange to the agency’s deputy director of analysis, saying of the Steele dossier: “I believe that the information warrants inclusion.”
Asked about the dossier’s failure to meet “basic tradecraft standards,” a House Intelligence Committee investigation found, Brennan responded, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”
The ex-CIA director told the House Judiciary Committee on May 11, 2023, that “the CIA was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment.”
That statement falls within the five-year statute of limitations should prosecutors charge Brennan with lying to Congress while under oath.
The Obama-ordered ICA determined that “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability” and that Putin had a “clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
A 2020 House Intelligence Committee report contradicted this, noting that Putin’s “principal motivations in these operations were to undermine faith in the US democratic process.”
The Russian president also expected Clinton to win in 2016 and held back on “some compromising material for post-election use against the expected Clinton administration,” the House report stated.
President Trump has railed against Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, ex-DNI James Clapper and others for perpetrating a “hoax” on the American people by pushing the 2017 intelligence assessment.
As of July 2025, Brennan claimed that the FBI hadn’t contacted him or his lawyers about the investigation.
His defense lawyers, in a December letter to South Florida US District Chief Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga, confirmed that Brennan was a target of a probe into “the circumstances surrounding the production of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment about Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election in the United States.”
Brennan’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The FBI declined to comment. Reps for the DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.