John Brennan served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from March 2013 to January 2017 under President Obama, and previously as Obama's Homeland Security Advisor from 2009 to 2013. He spent 25 years as a CIA officer before moving into executive branch roles, including as station chief in Saudi Arabia. Brennan appears on the DOJ's February 2026 list of approximately 305 "politically exposed persons" whose names appear somewhere in the 3.5 million pages of Epstein-related documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
The DOJ noted that some individuals on the list had direct email contact with Epstein or Maxwell, while others appear only in news articles or other documents within the files. The specific document or context in which Brennan's name appears has not been separately identified in public reporting. Separately, the January 2026 document release confirmed that Epstein's defense attorneys in 2011 filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA seeking records that would reflect an "open affiliation" between Epstein and the agency between 1999 and 2011.
The CIA responded that it could neither confirm nor deny the existence of any classified relationship. This FOIA request does not implicate Brennan personally, as it predates his directorship. As of March 2026, the DOJ was also facing public pressure to pursue a separate criminal referral alleging Brennan committed perjury in congressional testimony related to the Russia investigation, a matter unconnected to the Epstein files but overlapping with the same political environment.