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]
Rise through the agency
The Kesler firing
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]
The Tenet “rabbi”
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][19] 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.[20]
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.”[21][22][17][23][24] Kiriakou has made the same point as a general charge: 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]
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.[22][23][26]
Executive Director and the torture program
”Torture, torture, torture”
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.”[27][28][29]
Pushed out to the TTIC
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.[28][30]
The 2015 recasting
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.”[31][32]
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.[33][34]
The Obama years
The 2007 bet on Obama
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.”[35][30][36] 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.[30][37][38]
The Tuesday morning kill list
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.”[39][40][41][42]
The directorship
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.”[43][44]
Spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee
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.[45] 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.[46]
The award to Ruemmler
Per Kiriakou, Brennan gave Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler the CIA agency medal.[47] The occasion for his fuller account was an email in the released Epstein documents from Ruemmler to Jeffrey Epstein, reporting that Brennan had given her the CIA’s highest honour. Kiriakou, who spent fifteen years at the agency, says he knows which honour that is, and that it is reserved for CIA officers killed in the line of duty — “the organization’s greatest heroes.” His question is what a Justice Department lawyer with no intelligence experience could have done to warrant it.[48][49]
His answer is a theory rather than a finding: that Ruemmler was probably responsible for White House approval of the assassinations decided at Brennan’s Tuesday morning kill list meetings, and that this is precisely the kind of service that cannot be acknowledged publicly. “You can’t go to the Washington Post if you’re John Brennan and say, hey, shout out to Katherine Remler, she helps me kill so many people.” So the award was classified — and, Kiriakou notes, she immediately blew the classification by emailing Epstein about it.[50]
The Espionage Act prosecution of Kiriakou
”Charge him anyway and make him defend himself”
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.”[51][52][53]
What the discovery showed
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.[54][55][56] 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.[57] 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.[58]
The cost
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.[53][54][59][60]
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.[61][62]
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.[63][64] 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.[64]
Investigations of Brennan
The 2019 Durham inquiry
Kiriakou has 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.[65] 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.[66] 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.[67]
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”[68][69][70]
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.[71][72] 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.”[73][74] 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.[75]
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.[76] 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.[77]
The 2026 DiGenova subpoena rescission
Kiriakou told the PBD Podcast in April 2026 that he was “deeply worried” the Justice Department had quietly abandoned the criminal investigation. Just at the start of that week, he said, the veteran U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova — “a giant” — had been named the lead investigator in the Brennan case in South Florida. Then, without explanation, the subpoenas were rescinded.[78][79]
Kiriakou said he had been told the alleged conduct fell into the category of “process crimes” — lying to Congress, for example — which grand juries are typically reluctant to indict on. He argued the Department should instead pursue a conspiracy charge: the conspiracy to deny Donald Trump the presidency, he said, was ongoing so long as the cover-up continued, which meant the statute of limitations “resets literally every single day” and the exposure — ten or twenty years in federal prison — was more than commensurate with the conduct.[80][81][82]
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.”[83][84]
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][85]
- 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.”[86][87]
- 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.”[87][88]
Kiriakou’s assessment of the pattern: “He’s scared.”[88]
The Secretary of Defense he never became
The earliest recorded version of the claim dates to August 2018, days after Trump revoked Brennan’s security clearance, and states it as the direct explanation for the television campaign rather than as background: “John makes it crystal clear to anyone who will listen in Washington that the reason he is so out there against Donald Trump is that he desperately wants to be Secretary of Defense in the next Democratic administration.” The mechanism Kiriakou gives is a shortage of alternatives — “John’s not a lawyer, he’s not a lobbyist, and so he has to remain relevant” — and the method is airtime: going on CNN and MSNBC and making “outrageous accusations just so that he continually gets press coverage.” He attached a forecast to it: “that’s what he’s done, and it’s going to backfire.”[89][90]
On Consortium News Live in February 2023, Kiriakou said Brennan used to tell colleagues openly that he intended to be Secretary of Defense under the next Democratic president: “John used to tell everybody who would listen.” Kiriakou treats the subsequent television career as a rational tradeoff Brennan calculated in his sixties: “why would you want to make $200,000 as Secretary of Defense — which would then put you into your seventies — when you can spend those years at MSNBC making ten times what you would have made at the Pentagon?”[91][92][93]
Kiriakou’s assessment
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.[94]
The consummate overachiever, and the four lies
The most measured of the assessments is also the earliest, given in August 2018 and opening with the length of the acquaintance: “John and I go back almost 30 years. I worked for him several different times while I was at the CIA.” The judgement that follows is about trajectory rather than character — “John really is the consummate overachiever. He made a couple of really smart, perhaps lucky political moves, and so he has succeeded beyond even his own wildest dreams.”[95]
The argument he builds on it is narrower than the later denunciations and, on its own terms, harder to answer. Asked to weigh Brennan’s Russia allegations against Trump, Kiriakou declined to weigh them at all and instead offered a record: Brennan “told us that there was no torture program — he lied about that. John Brennan told us that there was no extraordinary rendition program — he lied about that. He told us there was no system of secret prisons — that was a lie. He told us that he hadn’t ordered CIA officers to hack into the Senate intelligence committee’s computers — that was a lie.” The conclusion is a question: “but on this he’s telling us to take his word for it. Why in the world would we take his word for it, if everything else that the man has said has been a lie?”[96][89]
Asked separately about Brennan walking the treason charge back to “nothing short of treasonous” under questioning from Rachel Maddow, Kiriakou put it down to temperament rather than calculation: “John’s an alpha dog. He’s always been like that. He’s always been the first one to pick a fight, or the first one to raise his voice. He even told Rachel Maddow in that interview that his Irish was up — and so he may have said things that he didn’t actually mean.”[97]
The personal characterizations
The hostility is documented across the corpus in a series of increasingly terse formulations. On Gonzalo Lira’s Roundtable in September 2022, prefacing it with a self-description — “I’m politically conservative and very conservative” — Kiriakou said Brennan “looks like a shyster, drug dealer almost — I would trust him as far as I could throw him, to tell you the truth.”[98][99] In March 2026, describing what he called a particular interest in Brennan, he noted that the two have known each other for thirty-six years and restated the assessment: “John Brennan, it was always my belief, was a murderous sociopath.”[100] In April 2026 he called Brennan “a malevolent figure in modern American politics and government” who “really did attempt to carry out a coup, not with tanks in the streets” but “through rumour and innuendo” to deny Trump the 51 percent of the American electorate that chose him.[101][102] Asked in a rapid-fire round in July 2026 to sum up Brennan in a phrase, he answered: “The worst of all of the criminals. He deserves to be in prison for a very long time. And if all goes well, that’s exactly where he’ll end his life.”[103] In the same round he called Gina Haspel “Bloody Gina Haspel, a war criminal.”[103] Kiriakou has also described his own first meeting with Brennan.[104]
The distinction from 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.[105][106][107]
Insistence on imprisonment
Kiriakou states directly that it was Brennan who insisted he be sent to prison, and pairs the claim with the observation that it was the Obama administration which prosecuted him.[108][109] He uses both facts to explain the reception of the letters from Loretto among what he calls the pretend progressive media — naming MSNBC and Rachel Maddow — which treated him as a troublemaker, in contrast to the transparency advocates and opponents of the Espionage Act, who supported him without reservation.[108] He notes with satisfaction that Brennan now faces prosecution himself.[109]
How he became Obama’s man
Kiriakou met Brennan in 1990 and says the dislike was mutual and immediate, but that for years each stayed on his own side of the room.[110] What changed the balance was a wave of retirements in 2006 and 2007, as officers thirty and thirty-five years in concluded that the war on terror would drag on without them. Of the hundreds who left, roughly half went to work for the John McCain campaign and roughly half for Hillary Clinton’s. Brennan was, in Kiriakou’s account, literally the only one who went to Barack Obama’s — which is how he became Obama’s man.[111]
Obama initially named him CIA director, withdrew the nomination when liberals objected to his association with the interrogation programme, and made him deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism instead — a post that requires no Senate confirmation. Four years later, the objections forgotten, he got the directorship. In the intervening period Kiriakou describes him as the most powerful national security figure in the administration.[112][113]
”He’s scared”
In November 2025 one of Kiriakou’s attorneys sent him two videos from the same day: Brennan being confronted at George Mason University and poking a congressional candidate in the chest, and then, three or four hours later, arguing with a heckler on the subway platform at the Virginia Square Metro station. Asked what he made of them, Kiriakou watched both several times and wrote back a two-word diagnosis — “He’s scared” — adding that he had known Brennan for thirty-five years and had never seen him lose his cool, and that the anger was the form the fear was taking.[114][115]
On the substance of the case against him, Kiriakou rates it stronger than the parallel one against James Comey: the accusation is that Brennan attempted to initiate a coup and to deny the voters of 2016 their choice of president, charged on the theory that the conspiracy remained ongoing until he was charged, so that no statute of limitations bars a trial.[116][117] He states his own position on Brennan without hedging: “I know John Brennan to be a criminal."[118]
"Either that, or he had to be brain dead”
Asked in January 2013, at the point of Brennan”s nomination to run the agency, what Brennan had known about the torture program, Kiriakou answered from the organisation chart rather than from personal knowledge. “Obviously I can”t read John Brennan”s mind, but I can tell you that at the time the torture techniques were being implemented, John Brennan was President Bush”s director of the National Counterterrorism Center.” Before that, he said, Brennan had been the CIA”s deputy executive director and then executive director — “that”s the number three ranking position in the CIA. So he would have had to have been intimately involved, not necessarily in carrying out the torture techniques, but in the policy, the torture policy. Either that, or he had to be brain dead — because you can”t be in positions like that … without knowing what the CIA”s torture policies are.”[119][120][121]
He added a personal register to the assessment: “I”ve known John Brennan since 1990. I worked directly for John Brennan twice,” in the period when Brennan was “an analytic manager — it was before he really hit the big time under George Tenet.” His verdict on the nomination was that the agency needed “to move beyond the ugliness of the post-September 11th regime” and “someone who is going to respect the Constitution and to not be bogged down by a legacy of torture.” He also recorded his surprise at the silence around the second nomination: there had been “a great hue and cry” in 2009 when Brennan”s name was first floated and he withdrew it, and Kiriakou said he was “not sure why there”s a difference between four years ago and now. John Brennan certainly hasn”t changed.”[122][123][121]
Who reopened the case
Kiriakou”s account of the origin of his prosecution assigns it to the second administration rather than the first, and to a named individual. “I blew the whistle on the George W. Bush torture program, and the Bush Justice Department investigated me for a year — from December of ”07 to December of ”08 — and decided in the end that I had not committed a crime, and they dropped the case. It was the Obama administration, specifically John Brennan, who personally asked Eric Holder to reopen the case against me, secretly. It was the Obama administration that prosecuted me.”[124]
He places his own case within a count: “and not just me — eight national security whistleblowers, which is almost three times the number of all previous presidents combined.” The general charge he draws from it is that the agency “was weaponised during the Obama administration especially, to go after the CIA”s enemies or the DNC”s enemies” — and that while the agency”s mandate is to break laws overseas, “I think that they”re breaking laws in the United States.”[125][124]
’We’ve always hated each other’
Asked why the Obama administration reopened a case the Bush administration had closed, Kiriakou put Brennan first among the reasons. “I had a real and dangerous enemy in John Brennan. At the time, Brennan was the deputy national security adviser. Of course, he went on to be the CIA director.”[126]
The relationship is long and, by his account, uniformly bad: “Brennan and I, we’ve known each other for 35 years. We’ve always hated each other.” And the motive he ascribes is institutional as well as personal: “Brennan was one of the godfathers of the torture program, so he had it out for me for going public. He said that I had aired the CIA’s dirty laundry in public.”[126][127]
The charge he thinks fits Brennan
Asked in December 2025 why Brennan had not been charged with anything, Kiriakou called the omission “deeply disturbing” and named the offence he thinks is available: “it seems to me like it would be actually rather easy to charge John Brennan, at least with conspiracy — maybe even seditious conspiracy, which is a very grave crime.”[128]
The conduct he has in mind is Brennan’s role in 2016: “John Brennan tried to deny the American people their choice for president of the United States in 2016. And he did it by pointing the finger at Russia. He did it by loudly proclaiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian disinformation operation. It was not. It was Hunter Biden’s laptop. He said so himself.”[128][129]
His argument for indicting anyway is Brennan’s own. Noting the old line that “a grand jury would indict a bologna sandwich,” Kiriakou said: “okay, let the indictments come, then let him defend himself. Indeed, that’s what he said about me.”[129][130] He then retold the exchange with Eric Holder — Brennan asking for an espionage charge, Holder replying that his people did not think Kiriakou had committed espionage, Brennan writing back “charge him anyway and make him defend himself” — and added the ending he does not always give: “on the day that I declared bankruptcy, they dropped the espionage charges.”[130][131]
Asked whether he would sue Brennan alongside the president, his answer was two words repeated: “I’m trying. Believe me, believe me.”[131]
Reopening the case
Kiriakou places Brennan at the origin of his prosecution. Four weeks after the FBI’s declination letter, Barack Obama took office and Brennan became deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism, later CIA director. “Well, John Brennan asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me.”[132][133]
What he stresses is that the reopening was secret. “I had no idea that for the next … three years, from January of 2009 to January of 2012, that my phones were being tapped, that my emails were being monitored, and that teams of FBI agents had surveillance on me.”[133]
He frames the point partisanly and deliberately — this was the Obama–Biden administration, and Brennan is now “the guy who shows up on MSNBC all the time” — and says the question he would like put to him is simply why: the FBI had not thought he had done anything wrong, and neither had the Bush Justice Department.[132][134] He contrasts the treatment with David Petraeus, who gave his classified briefing books to his biographer and “got a slap on the wrist”, served no time and kept his pension.[135]
Who sets foreign policy
When Brennan and others accused Donald Trump of treason in 2018 for publicly disputing an intelligence assessment, Kiriakou’s answer turned on the CIA’s constitutional position rather than on the merits of the dispute. The intelligence community does not represent the United States and is not elected; the agency exists as policy support, and its whole raison d’être is to give policymakers what they need in order to formulate policy. Deciding what the foreign policy is to be belongs to the White House and the State Department, and not to the CIA or to Brennan.[136]
On the accusation itself Kiriakou is blunter, placing Brennan — “who seems to know everything about everything” — among the people making charges of treason without having read the constitutional definition of it, and who in his view make themselves look foolish by doing so.[137]
The memo in the discovery
Kiriakou dates his understanding of Brennan’s role to the arrival of discovery from the Justice Department — “15,000 pages of classified documents” — and to one memo inside it, from Brennan to Attorney General Eric Holder. He reconstructs the exchange as three lines.[138]
“There was a memo from Brennan to Attorney General Eric Holder about me. And it said, ‘Charge him with espionage.’ And then Holder wrote back and said, ‘My people don’t think he committed espionage.’ And then Brennan wrote back and said, ‘Charge him anyway and make him defend himself.’ And so they did. And then they waited until I went bankrupt and then they dropped the espionage charges.”
He is explicit that the relationship long predates the case and was never hostile so much as dismissive: “I’ve known John Brennan for 30, 32, 33 years. And never really liked him. I thought he was in over his head intellectually at the CIA, but he was a political player. He rose through the ranks.” Until the memo, his working assumption had been mutual indifference — “John Brennan, I don’t really have anything to do with him. He doesn’t have anything to do with me.”[138]
On what followed, he gives a figure: Brennan became “a talking head on MSNBC, getting at least 100,000 just to be on call for that.”[139]
The egging on
Kiriakou has two independently-sourced versions of how Obama’s attitude to leaks was described to him, and this is the earlier and more specific. Friends working at the White House and at the CIA told him of “knock down drag out fights taking place in the National Security Council” over the issue: “Obama was furious about leaks. The way it was described to me was that Obama had a Nixonian obsession with leaks, and he was being egged on by John Brennan, who at the time was the deputy national security advisor and then became director of the CIA.”[140][141]
What that gave Brennan, on Kiriakou’s reading, was licence rather than direction: “this was music to Brennan’s ears. This allowed Brennan to go after anybody he wanted. And so in those eight short years, eight of us were arrested and charged under the Espionage Act.”[141][142]
The same account places Brennan at the origin of the plan against Julian Assange: the first proposal for a covert action programme to kidnap or kill him came, Kiriakou says, from Brennan “in the last two years of the Obama administration,” before Mike Pompeo revived it.[143]
The agency he wanted to found
Kiriakou introduces the TTIC episode as an illustration of a rule taught to him in his first week at the agency: “in order to make yourself as important as you possibly can, you have to constantly work at expanding your realm. You’ve got to be the king of as many people as possible.” Managers did it inside the building; at the top it necessarily ran into other agencies.[144][145]
In 2002 Brennan, a former deputy executive director, was feuding with Jim Pavitt, the deputy director for operations — and Kiriakou’s own boss. The new organisation was created and Brennan given it. “He wanted the TTIC to break off from the CIA and to become its own agency, so he could be the first head of this new intelligence agency. Not for any other reason — not because it would have streamlined the information, not because the analysis would have been any better — just because he wanted to be in charge of his own little fiefdom. And Pavitt blocked that.”[145][146]
The payoff came six years later, and Kiriakou treats it as the same instinct rewarded: Brennan was the only person from the CIA to join the 2008 Obama campaign, “everybody else either went to Hillary or to McCain,” and when Obama won “Brennan was able to call his own shot. He became the deputy national security advisor and then the CIA director.”[147]
The ambition did not stop there. “Until the Biden campaign, he was telling everybody in Washington who would listen that he wanted to be the Secretary of Defense. The only reason he didn’t become Secretary of Defense was because Biden was committed to elevating women and minorities into these senior positions.” Kiriakou’s summary of the whole arc: “it’s all about power. It’s all about individual authority. It’s all about being as important as you can possibly be in Washington. And the American people be damned this whole time.”[148][148]
Syria
In the same conversation he attributes the alliance with the Syrian jihadists to Brennan personally: “we can’t forget that it was John Brennan who decided to ally the CIA with al-Qaeda, which just changed its name to Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria. We were actually fighting on the side of al-Qaeda, if you can imagine such a thing.”[149]
What Durham was collecting
Kiriakou’s interest in a Brennan prosecution predates the 2026 statements by years. Speaking in December 2019, he described the discrepancy at the centre of it: “If the New York Times is to be believed, John Brennan was saying one thing on Capitol Hill and MSNBC — where he is a paid talking head — and another thing internally to his own people and Jim Comey, who was FBI director at the time.”[150]
He treated the documents John Durham had obtained as the measure of the exposure: Brennan’s call logs, his emails from the period he was CIA director, and “contemporaneous notes that Brennan took when he was meeting with these other leaders.” What that material would support, in his reading, was not a case about the underlying intelligence but about the accounts given of it afterwards — “process crimes: making a false statement, perjury, which seems to be what John Durham is picking up.” He noted that Durham had corrected the record on the nature of the exercise: “his investigation is not an inquiry. It’s an investigation, and it’s a criminal one."[150][151]
"I hate John Brennan”
Asked in 2026 what he would get off his chest over dinner with Brennan, John Kiriakou declined the premise. He had been discussing the subject the day before, he said, and had told the person he was talking to: “I can literally count on one hand the number of people in my life whom I hate. And I said, I hate John Brennan.”[152]
The refusal was total: “I wouldn’t have that meal with Brennan. I wouldn’t shake his hand.”[152] He then went further, and stopped himself: “frankly, I’ll say this and I won’t say any more. I am working very hard right now to see that he spends much of the rest of his life in prison.”[153]
Asked what he would say to him if he could say anything, the answer was three phrases: “Shame on you. Monster. Ruiner of families and lives.”[153]