Last week, CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred former CIA Director John Brennan to the FBI for a criminal investigation. Some reports claim the referral relates to Brennan potentially having perjured himself before Congress. But on Wednesday, President Donald Trump may have pointed to another direction the FBI probe may take. In an interview with reporter John Solomon, Trump said he would declassify an annex to the May 2023 report filed by John Durham, the special counsel appointed during Trump’s first term to investigate Russiagate.
The annex, according to Solomon, deals with the “Clinton Plan intelligence”—and, says Solomon, “lawmakers and Durham have suggested it would provide damning evidence to any prosecutor.” Trump told Solomon, “I will absolutely declassify it.”
The “Clinton Plan Intelligence” refers to intelligence the CIA received in late July 2016 from a Dutch spy agency. The Dutch had penetrated a Russian intelligence agency that appears to have hacked the emails of Clinton allies and Democratic officials. And it was from these communications that the Russians learned the Clinton campaign had devised a plan to smear Trump as a Russian agent to deflect attention from her use of a private email server.
According to Durham’s final report in May 2023, the U.S. intelligence official “who initially received the information immediately recognized its importance—including its relevance to the U.S. presidential election—and acted quickly to make CIA leadership aware of it.” Brennan himself, the report shows, “personally received a copy of the intelligence.”
According to Brennan’s handwritten notes, in an Aug. 3, 2016, meeting at the White House, he briefed Barack Obama and other U.S. officials, including then Attorney General Loretta Lynch and then FBI Director James Comey, about the Clinton Plan intelligence. The notes claim that he alerted them to the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”
Ratcliffe declassified Brennan’s notes in late September 2020, when Ratcliffe was Trump’s director of national intelligence. He also declassified a second Clinton Plan intelligence document that Durham found during his investigation. This was a CIA memo dated Sept. 7, 2016, addressed to Comey and FBI agent Peter Strzok, that referred the Clinton Plan intelligence for further investigative action.
What’s odd is that virtually no one working on the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, saw the CIA memo. According to Durham’s report, “None of the FBI personnel who agreed to be interviewed could specifically recall receiving this Referral Memo, nor did anyone recall the FBI doing anything in response to the Referral Memo.”
For instance, former FBI general counsel James Baker told Durham “that he had neither seen nor heard of the Clinton Plan intelligence or the resulting Referral Memo prior to his interview” with Durham.
Same with Supervisory Special Agent-1, reportedly an FBI agent named Joe Pientka. According to the report, when Durham showed Pientka the information, he became “visibly upset and emotional, left the interview room with his counsel, and subsequently returned to state emphatically that he had never been apprised of the Clinton Plan intelligence and had never seen the aforementioned Referral Memo. Supervisory Special Agent-1 expressed a sense of betrayal that no one had informed him of the intelligence.”
According to the Durham report, Comey and Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, were briefed on the Clinton Plan intelligence. But there’s no evidence that Brennan, Comey, Clapper, or any other Obama official included the Clinton Plan intelligence in any of their preelection briefings on Russian interference to Senate and House leadership and oversight committees.
Same after the election—none of Obama’s spy chiefs ever mentioned the Clinton Plan intelligence. Obama reportedly told Brennan that he wanted his CIA director to include everything the intelligence community had on Russian interference in the 2016 election for the intelligence community assessment (ICA) that the outgoing president wanted completed before he left office. But there’s nothing about the Clinton Plan intelligence in the ICA. Of course, it would have been a powerful rebuttal to the ICA’s central conclusion that Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election. Or it would have made the assessment entirely invalid.
Brennan neglected to mention the Clinton Plan intelligence during his testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on May 17, 2017, or before the House Intelligence Committee a week later. And, obviously, the former CIA chief never talked about the Clinton Plan intelligence during his many TV appearances on NBC and elsewhere.
It’s clear why the Clinton Plan intelligence was buried and why none of the FBI officials Durham interviewed had seen the CIA referral memo. It exposed Russiagate as a hoax, despite the broad preelection media campaign insisting otherwise, including leaks from U.S. officials falsely alleging Trump’s ties to Russia. After the election, the CIA referral memo posed an even greater threat: It gave evidence of a conspiracy involving the top leadership of the American intelligence community, including at least Brennan, Clapper, and Comey, whose FBI investigated Trump as a Russia spy even though the FBI director was made aware it was a dirty trick.
It’s not clear how Brennan found out that Durham had discovered the CIA referral memo and was asking questions about it. Perhaps it was due to a rumor of Pientka’s rage after Durham showed him the document in a July 22, 2020, interview that got Brennan worried. Only two days before Brennan was scheduled to meet with Durham on Aug. 21, the special counsel had confirmed with a U.S. official that Brennan had personally received a copy of the Clinton Plan intelligence. Why, Durham would want to know, hadn’t the CIA referral gotten to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team?
One theory investigators may be pursuing relates to Brennan’s notes about his Aug. 3 briefing at the White House. Did Brennan doctor his notes after he learned Durham had found the CIA memo? Notes showing he’d briefed Obama, Lynch, and Comey would prove he hadn’t buried the memo or the Clinton Plan intelligence but had in fact read in the principals. It wasn’t his fault the Crossfire Hurricane investigators didn’t get the CIA memo—he told Comey about it, and the attorney general and even the president.
Durham interviewed Brennan for eight hours at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on Aug. 21, 2020. Durham’s ability to bring any charges was limited because he was under the watchful eye of Joe Biden’s attorney general Merrick Garland. But now? If the statute of limitations on the case is five years, FBI Director Kash Patel has a little more than a month. If, however, the onetime congressional investigator who uncovered Russiagate is building a conspiracy case, law enforcement may have much more time to make sure it’s airtight before bringing charges.
In any event, it’s worth noting that the only genuine piece of Russian intelligence U.S. spy services ever received during the Trump-Russia probe was intelligence that Russia knew the Clinton campaign was behind the effort to dirty Trump as a Russian agent. It seems appropriate that Russian intelligence may lead to the prosecution and conviction of Brennan and the intelligence officials responsible for the biggest political scandal in U.S. history. (Lee Smith/Tablet, 7/18/2025) (Archive)