By Roger L Simon
BREAKING yesterday afternoon, October 21: “House Judiciary committee refers former CIA Director John Brennan to Justice Department for prosecution”.
My first reaction was, “What took them so long”? My second: “finally.” My third (already worried): “Will it hold”?
All this was within seconds, but I have been wishing Brennan would “get his” for some time. For me, he is the epitome of political evil in this country.
From Fox’s reporting: “In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi Tuesday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, referred former CIA Director John Brennan to the Justice Department for allegedly making false statements to Congress.
“Jordan accused Brennan of lying in his 2023 Judiciary Committee testimony by denying that the CIA used the Steele dossier in prepping the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian election interference, and falsely claiming the CIA opposed including the dossier.”
From the foregoing, it should be obvious I am no fan of Brennan. It was always a mystery to me how such a person became director of the CIA, indeed, how, with his background, he could even be a member of our intelligence community.
My concern—call it that— goes back a long time. In some small way, Brennan and I are brothers. We were both schoolboy leftists. But we were brothers from another mother. I was a pretend semi-leftist of the typical Hollywood ilk. He was a serious leftist for real, as real as you can get, Stalin real.
How do I know? I had lots of friends on the so-called left in the late sixties and seventies. We were mainly devotees of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its leader, Tom Hayden, author of the Port Huron Statement, which abjured Stalinism and advocated “democratic socialism” (sound familiar?).
Thinking back on those days, it was pretty embarrassing. We would hang out at Hayden/Fonda’s small cottage in Santa Monica, listening to Tom pontificate. At the same time, Jane walked about with a laundry basket ostentatiously showing off her working-class bona fides. Just a few years later, she was living with Ted Turner in one of the country’s largest mansions, with a staff the size of a small army. Hypocrisy was always a large part of being a Hollywood leftist.
Brennan was different. He was the only person I ever heard of who actually voted for the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) candidate for president at the time, Gus Hall. Hall was an ultra neo-Stalinist hardliner who despised the Hayden/Fonda SDS types as softies. He frequently traveled to Moscow to receive the likes of the Brezhnev Prize from the Soviet dictator himself and went so far as to support the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. No action was too totalitarian, too fascist, for Hall, as long as it adhered to what he regarded as strict communist principles.
Not too many people knew about him even then, but Brennan clearly did. He says he backed Hall through youthful ignorance —an excuse hard to accept unless, of course, you are Barack Obama, who later made Brennan the CIA chief and had his own version of Hall in Frank Marshall Davis.
Years later, it was said that Brennan, who spent a good deal of time in the Middle East, had converted to Islam, but it was never proven.
What we do know is that Brennan was one of the 51 current and past intelligence agents who signed the infamous letter claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was likely Russian disinformation. Nearly a hundred percent of the signatories of that letter must have known they were lying at the time, unless they were blithering idiots.
The House Judiciary Committee and Jim Jordan may have the goods on Brennan, lying—making “false statements,” in the parlance— to the committee regarding the even more infamous Steele dossier. Brennan asserted he never supported the dossier as evidence.
Documents apparently declassified in July 2025 assert just the opposite and show the former CIA director insisting the agency use the blatant fabrication as evidence—anything to get Trump and his allies.
The question remains, however, whether the Department of Justice will be able to secure a conviction against this highly slippery character, who has been lawyered up on this and other matters for some time. It’s easy to be skeptical, but in this case, especially, it would be delightful to be proven wrong.
Lastly, why do I see Brennan as the “epitome of evil”? It’s something in my gut. But it also makes me reflect on that famous warning by Chuck Schumer just as Trump was entering the presidency for the first time: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
That warning curdled my blood then, and it does now. When I first visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the very size of the institution made me suspicious. Was this an intelligence agency or something different, an alternative nation of some sort? Whatever it was, it was a truly immense bureaucracy of the kind for which self-preservation is often the greatest motivation. Will they find “six ways to Sunday” to save Brennan, or will justice prevail?
No case before the DOJ will be more important.
First posted in American Refugees
