We spent years — literal years — being told we were conspiracy theorists for suggesting that John Brennan used the most powerful intelligence apparatus on the planet to run a political hit job on a duly elected president. We were called crazy. Unhinged. Dangerous to democracy. Every cable news panel in America took turns explaining how Brennan was a “patriot” and a “public servant” who was just doing his job. Well, his job apparently now includes sitting across from a federal grand jury, because the DOJ just dropped subpoenas on Brennan’s old intelligence circle — and some of them are already cooperating.
Let that marinate for a second. The man who sat on television with his perfectly pressed suits and his smug little smirk, calling the sitting President of the United States a traitor on live TV, is now the subject of an active criminal investigation with grand jury subpoenas flying around like confetti at a retirement party nobody wanted to throw. If irony were a fuel source, this man could power the Eastern Seaboard.
Here’s what we know. The Department of Justice investigation into Brennan has officially moved past the “let’s take a preliminary look” stage and into the “we’re presenting evidence to a grand jury” stage. For those of you who don’t speak federal prosecutor, that means they believe they have enough material to potentially secure an indictment. Grand jury subpoenas aren’t party invitations. They’re not suggestions. They’re the legal system’s way of saying “sit down, shut up, and answer the questions.”
And the best part? Former intelligence officials — people who worked alongside Brennan during the years when the CIA and FBI were allegedly cooking up the Russia collusion narrative — are reportedly cooperating with investigators. Cooperating. That’s the word that makes defense attorneys lose sleep. Because cooperating means somebody decided that their loyalty to John Brennan isn’t worth a federal prison sentence.
We’ve been watching this slow-motion reckoning build for years. First it was the Durham investigation, which — while it didn’t deliver the mass perp walks we all wanted — established a factual record that the Russia collusion narrative was built on fabricated opposition research, laundered through intelligence channels, and weaponized against a political campaign. Durham proved the architecture of the scam. Now the DOJ is apparently going after the architect.
Brennan wasn’t some low-level bureaucrat who got swept up in office politics. This is the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency — a man who had access to every surveillance tool, every foreign intelligence partnership, every classified database the United States government maintains. And the allegation isn’t that he merely made bad judgment calls. The allegation is that he deliberately used those tools to manufacture a political narrative designed to destroy a presidency.
Remember when Brennan went on MSNBC in 2018 and said Trump’s press conference with Putin was “nothing short of treasonous”? The sitting CIA Director — excuse me, the *former* CIA Director who still had his security clearance at the time — publicly accused the President of treason on cable television. That wasn’t analysis. That was a campaign. And now we’re finding out what was happening behind the scenes while he was running his mouth in front of the cameras.
The media, predictably, is treating this story like it’s radioactive. The same outlets that ran wall-to-wall coverage of every breathless leak from the Mueller investigation are suddenly very interested in other things. A grand jury investigation into the former CIA Director? Barely a blip. Imagine — just imagine — if this were a Trump-era intelligence official facing grand jury subpoenas. CNN would have a countdown clock, a theme song, and Anderson Cooper would be doing live hits from outside the courthouse in a trench coat.
But we don’t need the media to tell us what this means. We can read. Grand jury subpoenas mean prosecutors are building a case. Cooperating witnesses mean the inner circle is cracking. And John Brennan — the man who spent four years as the deep state’s hall monitor, wagging his finger at anyone who dared question the intelligence community’s sacred honor — is now the one being questioned.
Here’s what we want. We want the same standard applied to John Brennan that was applied to every single person caught up in the Russia investigation on our side. People lost their homes. People went bankrupt paying legal fees. People served prison time for process crimes that wouldn’t have existed if the investigation hadn’t been manufactured in the first place. General Michael Flynn had his life destroyed over a phone call that the FBI admitted wasn’t a crime. So forgive us if we’re not exactly weeping over the fact that John Brennan might finally have to answer for what he did.
The deep state’s hall monitor just got called to the principal’s office. And this time, he can’t classify his way out of it.