John Brennan’s War on Trump: The Graphic Novel

How Brennan Built the Machine That Targeted a President

Based on The Illustrated Spygate.

In the autumn of 2015, a troubling set of events occurred in the shadowy corridors of American intelligence. What began as routine monitoring of foreign adversaries slowly — then all of a sudden — transformed into something terrifying: the full weight of the U.S. intel community trained not against foreign threats, but inward, toward a presidential candidate and then a sitting president: Donald J. Trump. At the center of the storm stood one man — John Owen Brennan, Director of the CIA — whose actions between 2015 and 2017 appear to have wandered into the territory of sedition.

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WHISPERS FROM ABROAD - Late 2015 – Mid 2016

By late 2015, foreign intelligence services had begun feeding Washington fragments of a disturbing picture: Russian operatives appeared to be making contact with individuals in the orbit of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. These early intercepts — from Britain’s GCHQ, Estonia’s foreign intelligence service, and Australia’s diplomatic channels — appeared to be a concerted effort to tarnish Trump. Who made that call?

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THE FUSION CELL - Late July 2016

In late July 2016, Brennan took the extraordinary step of establishing a joint intelligence fusion cell — pulling analysts from the CIA, FBI, and NSA into a single classified working group under his oversight. The stated purpose was to assess the scope of Russian interference in the upcoming presidential election. But the structure itself was bizarre: rather than following established inter-agency protocols, the cell reported directly to Brennan and produced materials for the Obama White House. This consolidation of intelligence authority in the hands of one political appointee would later be flagged by the 2025 CIA review as a key departure from norms — the moment the investigation stopped being business-as-usual and became something much more ominous.

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THE WARNING CALL - August 4, 2016

On August 4, 2016, Brennan picked up the phone and called the head of Russia’s FSB — a rare direct conversation between intelligence chiefs of adversaries. He warned Alexander Bortnikov that Russian interference in the American election would carry severe consequences for U.S.-Russia relations. Brennan also appears to have warned Bortnikov that Russian communications had been hacked - because after this call, all intercepts through that channel ended.

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THE GANG OF EIGHT - Late August – September 2016

In a series of classified briefings, Brennan personally presented intelligence about Russian “interference” to the “Gang of Eight” — the bipartisan congressional leadership with the highest security clearances. He relayed intelligence from allied nations suggesting Russian efforts to aid Trump’s candidacy, which he knew were overblown at best. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid subsequently wrote to FBI Director Comey urging a formal investigation. The fuse had been lit.

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THE PUBLIC ACCUSATION - October 7, 2016

On October 7, 2016, just a month before the election, the Obama administration went public. A joint statement from DHS and the ODNI formally accused Russia of orchestrating the hacking of Democratic Party organizations. But the statement was carefully calibrated. Brennan’s fingerprints were all over the intelligence behind the statement, but he remained deliberately offstage. The timing was significant: it came the same day the Access Hollywood tape was released, burying the Russia story in the news cycle. Whether by coincidence or design, the most important public intelligence finding of the election cycle was drowned out within hours.

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THE DIRECTIVE - December 6, 2016

With Trump’s election victory a month old, President Obama issued a directive that would shape the political landscape for years to come: he ordered a comprehensive Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian election interference, and placed John Brennan in charge of producing it. Brennan was given authority to handpick analysts from the CIA, FBI, and NSA — notably excluding most of the other fourteen intelligence community agencies. The timeline was aggressive: the assessment would need to be completed before Obama left office on January 20. The 2025 CIA review would later describe this arrangement as “markedly unconventional,” noting that concentrating authority in Brennan’s hands — while excluding the broader intelligence community — created conditions ripe for abuse.

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THE DOSSIER - December 9–22, 2016

The two weeks of ICA drafting in December 2016 would become the most contested episode in modern intelligence history. Working under an impossibly compressed timeline, Brennan’s handpicked team produced a document meant to represent the consensus of America’s intelligence community. But it was during this process that Brennan made his most consequential decision: he insisted on including the Steele dossier as an annex to the assessment, overriding explicit objections from CIA analysts who called it unverified, unreliable, and a threat to the ICA’s credibility. The FBI, for its part, reportedly made its full participation contingent on the dossier’s inclusion. Meanwhile, leaks to the Washington Post and other outlets during the drafting process created what the 2025 review called “anchoring bias” — the public narrative was being set before the assessment was even finished. The conclusion was being written before the analysis was complete. And the Dossier, as now know, was garbage. The entire ICA process was a scam.

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THE BRIEFING - January 6, 2017

On January 6, 2017, the most extraordinary intelligence briefing in American history took place in the gilded conference rooms of Trump Tower. Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and Rogers presented the president-elect with their completed Intelligence Community Assessment, which concluded with “high confidence” that Vladimir Putin had ordered an influence campaign designed to harm Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump. The meeting was tense and adversarial — Trump viewed the assessment — correctly — as a political attack dressed in the language of intelligence. After the group briefing, Comey remained behind to privately inform Trump about the Steele dossier’s existence — a moment that would later become central to obstruction allegations. It was a trap. Within days, BuzzFeed published the full dossier, and the political war between Trump and the intelligence community became open and irreversible. The ICA was now public. The battle lines were drawn.

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THE TESTIMONY - May 23, 2017

Five months after leaving office, Brennan sat before Congress and delivered testimony that crystallized the contradictions at the heart of the sordid affair. He confirmed that he had seen intel showing contacts between Russian officials and people associated with Trump — contacts he found sufficiently alarming to trigger an FBI investigation. But in the same breath, he acknowledged that he had no evidence of actual collusion. This distinction — between alarming contacts and proven conspiracy — would define the next two years of American politics, through the Mueller investigation and beyond. Brennan’s testimony was masterful in its ambiguity: it sustained the narrative of a compromised president without providing proof, keeping the investigation alive while maintaining personal deniability. He had lit the fire, testified that the smoke was real, and then denied being the arson.

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THE TRANSFORMATION - 2017–2018

The transformation of John Brennan from CIA Director to cable news pundit was perhaps the most telling chapter of the entire saga. Freed from the constraints of office and classification, Brennan became Trump’s most relentless public critic, using his former title and intel credentials as a weapon on MSNBC. He called Trump’s behavior “treasonous,” accused him of being in Putin’s pocket, and suggested the president was a compromised asset — claims that had no connection to any realistic intel assessment. Trump responded by revoking Brennan’s security clearance in August 2018, an unprecedented action against a former CIA director. But the revocation only amplified Brennan’s platform. He had completed his metamorphosis: the man who once operated in absolute secrecy was now waging his war in the most public arena possible, and the line between IC assessment and political advocacy had been permanently erased.

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THE RECKONING - March 2019 – July 2025

The final reckoning arrived not with a single verdict but with a slow accumulation of revelations. The Mueller Report in March 2019 “confirmed” that Russia had interfered in the election but found no evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow — the central predicate of the narrative Brennan had done more than anyone to construct. Then, in July 2025, a CIA “lessons-learned” review commissioned under Director John Ratcliffe delivered a damning assessment of the ICA process itself:

• the handpicked analysts,

• the overridden objections,

• the forced inclusion of the 100% bullsh** Steele dossier

• the compressed timeline that precluded genuine debate

The review concluded that Brennan’s leadership had been “markedly unconventional” (i.e., corrupt) and had compromised fundamental intelligence processes. The documented facts remain: the most powerful intelligence apparatus in human history was directed at a political target, the key assessment was produced under conditions that violated established norms, and the man who orchestrated it all transitioned seamlessly from intel operative to cable news combatant without ever being held accountable. Whatever one’s politics, the precedent is chilling.

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A dramatization of real events. This is Part I. The entire book is online - and available on Kindle and in paperback!

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