John O. Brennan is the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, serving under the Obama administration. In KiriPedia’s source corpus, John Kiriakou characterizes Brennan as the principal architect of the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques program and as the individual responsible — through the Espionage Act prosecution that followed Kiriakou’s 2007 public confirmation of CIA waterboarding — for the ruination of Kiriakou’s own life. “He ruined your life. He, I believe, committed crimes, by the way, to ruin your life.”[1] Kiriakou describes Brennan as the public face of the moral case against torture while privately having been “the godfather of the torture program.”[1]
Brennan has been known to Kiriakou for approximately thirty-five years, dating from around 1990. Their mutual antipathy is, per Kiriakou, unbroken across that span: “John and I have always hated each other. I never liked him. I never trusted him. I believe that he is the archetypal sociopath.” Brennan’s institutional advancement, in Kiriakou’s account, was structurally dependent on the patronage of George Tenet — the “rabbi” relationship the agency’s promotion culture turns on: “He had a rabbi in George Tenet. And the next thing you know, he’s at the top of the heap.”[2][3][4]
Early career: the Kesler firing and the Tenet “rabbi”
Kiriakou has given several tellings of the same origin story, each adding detail. In 1990, per the fullest account, Brennan was a GS-14 deputy director of the Arab-Israeli analysis group, working under Martha Kesler — a woman Kiriakou described as one of the great minds and thinkers on Syria. They did not get along; Brennan had been imposed on her.[5] By the mid-1990s (variously dated to late 1993/early 1994 or given as a GS-15 posting), Brennan approached Kesler asking for her blessing to advance to the Senior Intelligence Service (SIS). Her reply, in Kiriakou’s fullest rendering: “Not only will you never be a member of the senior intelligence service, I don’t even want you working for me anymore. You’re fired.” A shorter version of the same exchange has her saying, “Not only are you not ready for the senior service, I don’t even want you to work for me anymore. You’re fired.”[6][7][8][9][10]
CIA firings of this type provide a six-week window to find an alternative position; if none is found, the badge is taken and the officer is actually terminated. Brennan’s six weeks began the week before Christmas — the CIA’s annual job turnover happens in the summer, so almost nothing was open — and he struggled to find a position.[11][8][12] The only position available was on the President’s Daily Brief staff as a morning briefer, assigned to brief the lowest-ranking PDB recipient: George Tenet, then the National Security Council’s Director for Intelligence Programs. The two men — both “alpha dogs, cigar-smoking, hard-drinking” (in one telling, “ugly, pockmark-faced guys”) — “immediately hit it off,” customarily walking after each morning briefing to a kiosk at the corner of 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue adjacent to the White House, where Tenet — who had already had a heart attack and whose wife had forbidden cigars at home — would buy cigars and stand there laughing with him.[13][14][12][15][16]
Firing Kesler in return
When Tenet was promoted to Deputy Director of the CIA, he named Brennan director of the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis — making Brennan his former boss Kesler’s boss. Brennan called Kesler into the office and told her, “Now you’re fired.” She retired.[15][17][18] Kiriakou cited this as illustrative of Brennan’s vindictiveness by temperament: early in his career, a female supervisor had let him go, and years later, once he had accumulated institutional power, he had her fired from the CIA — using authority to settle personal scores rather than serve institutional interests.[19]
Riyadh station chief and the 9/11 visa approvals
The office was subsequently reorganized and Brennan was squeezed out, but Tenet then made him Chief of Station in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — despite Brennan having, in Kiriakou’s words, “not five seconds of operational experience in his life” and having never recruited a spy. “He’s an analyst. He’s never served overseas before. Never recruited a spy ever. It wasn’t his job. Now all of a sudden, he’s the the station chief in one of the most important stations in the world.”[20][21][17][22][23]
During Brennan’s tenure as Riyadh chief, the U.S. embassy under his oversight approved the visa applications of the September 11 hijackers. “It was John Brennan who oversaw the granting of the visas to the 9/11 hijackers, for God’s sake.” Kiriakou has separately said he believes Brennan approved the visas in hopes of recruiting the hijackers as assets.[21][22][24]
Kiriakou also described Brennan as professionally unqualified for the roles the agency kept giving him: an analyst, not a case officer, who never recruited an agent in his career, yet was made station chief in a position that required skills he had never developed.[25]
Executive Director — torture advocacy
Brennan returned from Riyadh and became Executive Director of the CIA — the agency’s number-three ranking official — under Director Tenet and Deputy Director John McLaughlin, present in Kiriakou’s briefings every day of this period. This is the institutional position, per Kiriakou, in which the enhanced interrogation program was designed and implemented, with Brennan pushing for it directly: “John was just torture, torture, torture. We got to torture these guys. We got to do this. We got to do that. We need to start killing more people. We need to get out there and start shooting.”[26][27][28]
The Deputy Director for Operations could not stand Brennan and went to Tenet: “Come on, man. You got to get him out.” Tenet made Brennan head of the TTIC — the Transnational Terrorist Information Center, which later became the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Brennan had been telling everyone he wanted to be Secretary of Defense; the TTIC was not all he had hoped for. He retired a year before George W. Bush finished his second term.[27][29]
Kiriakou notes that Brennan later tried to recast himself, in a 2015 documentary (CIA Spymasters), as someone who believed “the CIA should be above torture” — while having been, in Kiriakou’s assessment, “one of the fathers of the torture program” who was the sole senior former CIA officer to endorse Obama’s 2008 campaign. “I’m like, mala you fuck.”[30][31]
Private-sector interlude (2005)
In 2005, between his CIA service and his appointment as Deputy National Security Adviser, Brennan was appointed CEO of The Analysis Corporation, an Arlington, Virginia private intelligence firm originally configured as an LLC pass-through for retired Senior Intelligence Service analysts. He has also sat on the boards of various Beltway defense contractors, including BAE Systems.[32][33]
The 2007 Obama bet, the kill list, and the CIA directorship
The 2007 wave of senior CIA retirements — roughly 180 officers, per one account — forced a political-affiliation choice among the retirees ahead of the 2008 presidential election. Per Kiriakou, “half of them went to the McCain campaign and half of them went to the Hillary Clinton campaign — and John Brennan was literally the only one who went to the Obama campaign.”[34][29][35] This single choice, in Kiriakou’s account, is what “saved his career.” When Obama won, Brennan wanted the CIA directorship outright, but liberal groups objected, citing his role as an architect of the torture program; his nomination was blocked. Obama instead made him Deputy National Security Adviser for Counterterrorism — a position that required no Senate confirmation — from which he would both run the kill list and shape the prosecution of Kiriakou.[29][36][37]
In that 2009 NSC role, Brennan instituted the Tuesday morning kill list — a weekly meeting at which a written list of targets to be killed in the following week was produced and the assignments distributed. Per Kiriakou, this program was sustained through the Obama administration and is the institutional source of the observation that “nobody dropped more missiles from drones than Obama.” Kiriakou names Brennan as the list’s originator — reported publicly by The Atlantic — and ties the drone program to the deaths of “hundreds and hundreds of children.”[38][39][40][41]
By 2012, Kiriakou said, liberals “forgot or didn’t care or were distracted,” and Obama made Brennan CIA Director after all. Kiriakou’s conclusion: “Then he starts just wreaking vengeance on all of his enemies. John Brennan is a very bad guy. From day one, he was a bad guy.”[42][43]
The Espionage Act prosecution of Kiriakou
Brennan is, in Kiriakou’s account, the individual personally responsible for his Espionage Act prosecution. The Bush administration had closed the case against Kiriakou after his December 2007 ABC News interview confirming CIA waterboarding: “the Bush administration said I had not committed a crime. They closed the case.” On Brennan’s arrival at the National Security Council in 2009 as Deputy National Security Adviser for Counterterrorism, he wrote a memo to Attorney General Eric Holder asking the Department of Justice to reopen the case under espionage charges. Holder declined, telling Brennan, “My people don’t think he committed espionage.” Brennan’s reply, cited by Kiriakou across nearly every telling of this story: “Charge him anyway and make him defend himself.”[44][45][46]
Per Kiriakou, this memo surfaced only when the Justice Department turned over 15,000 pages of classified discovery during his prosecution, in which his lawyers found three memos — the first being Brennan’s demand to Holder that Kiriakou be charged with espionage, and Brennan’s follow-up after Holder’s rejection.[47][48][49] Kiriakou described Brennan as “one enemy in the CIA in particular,” and attributed his selective prosecution to Brennan at a time when CIA Director David Petraeus had himself confirmed the names of ten covert CIA officers to his biographer and girlfriend without being charged.[50] Kiriakou says Brennan made this move to reopen the case at the same moment Kiriakou was in talks with Senator John Kerry about a Senate job, and names Jose Rodriguez — the former Counterterrorism Center director who went on to become CIA deputy director for operations — as his other key detractor pushing the Justice Department toward reopening the case.[51]
The result was a five-count indictment, three counts of espionage among them. The Justice Department waited until Kiriakou had spent roughly $2 million in legal fees and gone bankrupt, then dropped the three espionage counts approximately ten months later; Kiriakou took a plea to a lesser charge and served 23 months in federal prison.[46][47][52][53]
Kiriakou has said he never thought Brennan particularly intelligent — that he rose through his closeness to Tenet — but found him “vicious beyond anything I had ever seen” once the discovery memos surfaced.[54][55] Elsewhere Kiriakou says Brennan personally insisted he be prosecuted and imprisoned, and notes with satisfaction that Brennan now faces prosecution himself.[56] Per Kiriakou, Brennan also gave Kathryn Ruemmler the CIA agency medal, and Kiriakou has described his own first meeting with Brennan.[57][58]
Declassification push — “I dare them to indict me”
Kiriakou has stated publicly that the Brennan-to-Holder memo exists. Asked by a reporter whether disclosing the memo’s existence itself violated the law, his response was, “I dare them to indict me. I dare them to.” That question alone was, he says, enough of a deterrent.[59][60] He has stated he has approached Kash Patel about declassifying the memo, noting there is no statute of limitations because the underlying conduct constitutes an ongoing conspiracy, and that he would sue in a heartbeat if the documents were released.[60]
President Trump has since revoked Brennan’s security clearance — noted by Kiriakou without editorial characterization, as a factual endpoint to Brennan’s post-government intelligence access.[61] Separately, Sean Davis — a co-panelist on the same Megyn Kelly episode that later featured Kiriakou — observed that, as of that broadcast, no indictment had been brought against Brennan.[62]
Disregard for law
Kiriakou characterized Brennan as not merely amoral but actively contemptuous of legal constraints — dangerous specifically because he did not feel bound by rules that constrained others, including rules governing the treatment of whistleblowers and the use of enhanced interrogation.[63]
Senate Intelligence Committee computer hack
Kiriakou says that under Brennan’s directorship, the CIA hacked into the Senate Intelligence Committee’s own computer systems — the first time in American history the CIA had spied on the Senate — in an attempt to see what committee investigators were collecting on the agency’s torture program.[64] Dianne Feinstein, then the committee’s chairman, condemned Brennan by name on the Senate floor and filed a crimes report with the FBI asking the Justice Department to investigate Brennan and the CIA; the Justice Department declined to investigate. Kiriakou notes that Brennan went on to sit on Fordham University’s board and to become an MSNBC commentator.[65]
The 2025–2026 Department of Justice investigation
As of January 2026, Brennan is the subject of an active U.S. Department of Justice investigation under the second Trump administration. The investigation centers on three allegations:
- Coordination of the October 2020 public letter by intelligence-community veterans casting doubt on the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop
- Coordination of the post-2016-election CIA analysis attributing Donald Trump’s electoral victory to Russian interference
- An ongoing conspiracy — under this theory the statute of limitations does not run — to “deny American voters their duly-elected president”[66][67][68]
The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia — the district where the alleged conduct would have occurred — declined to bring charges, was subsequently fired by the Trump administration, and the case was transferred to the Southern District of Florida on the theory that the relevant memos were “read on the MSNBC website” in Miami.[69][70] Kiriakou says Brennan — who, along with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, presented the Steele dossier as credible intelligence during the post-2016 Russiagate period when it was, in Kiriakou’s assessment, “a total fraud” — used it to help build the case against Trump; Kiriakou notes Brennan and Clapper went on to become paid television consultants, appearing on CNN and MSNBC “more than the Kardashians.”[71][72] As of mid-2026, Kiriakou says he remains “cautiously optimistic” Brennan will ultimately be charged over 2016-election-related conduct, reasoning that Brennan’s continued public denial that any effort occurred keeps resetting the statute of limitations by evidencing an ongoing conspiracy.[73]
The 2019 Durham inquiry
Kiriakou has separately noted that Brennan first came under federal investigative scrutiny well before the 2025–2026 Department of Justice probe. By late 2019, John Durham — the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut examining the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation — had confirmed that his inquiry had become a criminal investigation, and Kiriakou said Durham was specifically investigating Brennan, having requested his CIA emails, call logs, and meeting notes.[74] Kiriakou relayed a single-source account, attributed to researcher Larry Johnson, alleging that Brennan created a task force in early 2016 for the purpose of entrapping Trump and generating what became the Russiagate narrative — a claim Kiriakou presented as unconfirmed.[75] Discussing the 2020 documentary film The Report, on which he served as a script consultant, Kiriakou noted with dry approval that the casting director had cast the same actor who played the psychopathic murderer in The Silence of the Lambs to portray Brennan.[76]
Public behavior under pressure
In late 2025 and early 2026 Brennan exhibited public behavior that Kiriakou — who has known him for thirty-five years — characterizes as out of character and indicative of fear. Three incidents:
- At George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, Brennan was publicly challenged by a Republican congressional candidate over his role in the Hunter Biden laptop letter and the 2016 Russia analysis. “Brennan actually pokes the guy in the chest several times. Besides that being assault, that was the first time in the 35 years that I’ve known John Brennan that I ever saw him lose his composure ever.”[2][77]
- On MSNBC the same night, Brennan appeared “exhausted and old beyond his years” and said he did not understand why the Trump administration was investigating him — a denial that “even by MSNBC standards, was not believable or credible.”[78][79]
- A few days later, in a Metro station, Brennan confronted an individual who had shouted a question at him — “went after him, went up to him with his finger and raised voice.”[79][80]
Kiriakou’s assessment of the pattern: “He’s scared.”[80]
Kiriakou’s distinction between Brennan and other senior CIA figures
Kiriakou identifies Brennan as distinct from other senior CIA officers of the post-9/11 period — including George Tenet, John McLaughlin, Michael Morell, Jose Rodriguez, and Rick Pavitt (elsewhere given as Rick Prado) — on the following ground:
There were a lot of crimes that were committed in the name of national security. Brennan’s different. Brennan plotted against an elected president of the United States, and he tried to use the intelligence community and this lawfare against him. And we can’t risk that happening again.[81][82][83]
Kiriakou’s view of the prosecution
Kiriakou’s position on Brennan’s prosecution is bounded by his commitment to the prosecutorial principle articulated by Robert H. Jackson: see “Pick the man, then find the crime”. Kiriakou supports prosecution of Brennan for any crime that can be demonstrated by evidence, including specifically the “ongoing conspiracy” theory advanced by the Justice Department. He opposes a prosecution conducted by “scouring the law books looking for a crime” against a pre-selected defendant — “even a defendant who ruined my life.”[84][85]