CNN
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The FBI is investigating former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey for possible false statements to Congress following a referral from the current CIA Director John Ratcliffe, according to a person briefed on the matter.
The referral came after Ratcliffe last week released a review that criticized the 2016 US intelligence community assessment, long criticized by President Donald Trump and his allies, that found Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to intervene in the election on Trump’s behalf. In a post on X, Ratcliffe said the new review found that the original assessment “was conducted through an atypical & corrupt process under the politically charged environments of former Dir. Brennan & former FBI Dir. Comey.”
The Ratcliffe review did not dispute the intelligence community’s core judgment that Putin preferred Trump to then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton but argued that agency leadership rushed the process and then Brennan “risked stifling analytic debate” by “signaling that agency heads had already reached consensus before the ICA was even coordinated.” The review made no mention of Comey.
It’s not clear whether the FBI probe, first reported by Fox News, has moved beyond a preliminary stage.
“We do not comment on ongoing investigations,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.
“Nobody from the FBI or Department of Justice or CIA has reached out to me at all, so I am just waiting to hear more about what this might be,” Brennan said Wednesday on MSNBC, where he is a contributor.
“I am clueless about what it is exactly that they may be investigating me for,” Brennan added.
The CIA and Comey declined to comment.
On Wednesday, Trump told reporters at the White House he wasn’t aware of the reported investigation of Brennan and Comey but repeated his accusation that they are “very dishonest people.”
At the center of the dispute are statements by both men to Congress about the 2016 investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election, and the decision to examine claims in a dossier from former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, funded by the Clinton campaign, which alleged coordination between the Russian government and people associated with the Trump campaign.
Last month’s CIA report also argued that Brennan restricted access to key intelligence and “showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness” when faced with internal objections including information from the dossier.
Brennan, in his memoir, said he opposed including information from the Steele dossier in a briefing document provided to President Barack Obama. Officials decided instead to append a summary of the dossier’s allegations to the briefing document.
Comey tells CNN how interview with Secret Service went amid social media controversy
The FBI’s criminal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia began in 2016 and stretched into the first Trump administration. It became the subject of investigations by the Justice Department’s inspector general and by special counsel John Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr to also examine the handling of intelligence that led to the Trump-Russia probe. The Durham probe ended with no finding of wrongdoing in the handling of the intelligence, but it did end with the indictment of three people, including a former FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to falsifying information in a surveillance warrant request targeting a Trump campaign aide.
Comey has been a focus of the administration before and was brought in for an interview with the Secret Service in May after posting a political message on social media.
The former FBI director was interviewed by agents investigating a photo he posted to social media Thursday showing shells in the sand on a beach spelling out “86 47,” which has become a popular social media code for removing Trump from the presidency.
After Comey posted the photo online, Secret Service agents used cell phone surveillance to track Comey and went to his home in Virginia to wait for him to return before taking the former director in for questioning, two sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.
The service was able to use an administrative subpoena – which expedites their ability to investigate people by circumventing the need for certain officials to approve the subpoena – to access Comey’s cell data, a tool it has come to rely on more and more agents navigate an increased threat environment in the US.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
CNN’s Casey Gannon, Holmes Lybrand and Kristen Holmes contributed to this report.
