Thursday’s piece on John Brennan and the Fort Pierce grand jury drew a comment from a reader named Makiara that I’ve been thinking about since. Her argument, in short: Brennan lied to Congress. He lied about torture. He had his people spy on the very Senate committee that oversees the CIA, got caught, lied about that too, and the laws didn’t apply to him because he was Obama’s guy. Then she closed with a challenge: “name one CIA director that’s not a piece of shit neck deep in illegality.”
That’s the question you keep losing the argument over, because the person making it has most of the facts and you don’t have the dates. So here are the dates.
The Senate spying happened, and the denial was public
In January 2014, CIA personnel went into the computer network the agency had set up for Senate Intelligence Committee staff to review millions of pages of torture-program documents. The committee had gotten hold of an internal CIA review that contradicted what the agency was telling them, and the agency wanted to know how. According to McClatchy’s reporting at the time, Brennan ordered the initial look himself.
On March 11, 2014, Dianne Feinstein took the Senate floor and said the CIA had searched the committee’s computers and may have violated the Constitution’s separation of powers. That same morning Brennan was at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he was asked about it. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “We wouldn’t do that.” He added that it was “beyond the scope of reason.”
On July 31, 2014, the CIA’s own inspector general, David Buckley, reported that five agency employees, two lawyers and three IT staff, had improperly accessed the committee’s side of the network, read the emails of Senate staffers, and that the CIA had then filed a criminal referral against those same staffers with the Justice Department based on inaccurate information. Brennan apologized to Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss. In private.
Then nothing. The Justice Department had already declined, on July 10, to investigate either the CIA’s search or the CIA’s referral against Senate staff. Brennan convened an accountability board under former senator Evan Bayh. In January 2015 it found the five employees had acted “reasonably” and recommended no discipline. Feinstein said she was disappointed that nobody would answer for it. She was right to be.
Here’s the one correction to Makiara’s account. Feinstein did not call for Brennan’s resignation. Mark Udall of Colorado did, on the day the IG report came out. Udall lost his seat three months later. Ron Wyden asked for a public apology and never got one. Feinstein, who had the most reason of anyone to demand his head, took the private apology and kept working with him.
So on the spying: documented, by the CIA itself. The public denial was false. The private apology was the only consequence. That’s where the record stands, and Makiara has it right.