You may have never heard of Thomas Speciale before. I know I haven’t, but he did a couple of things on Thursday night, Oct. 30, at George Mason University, where former CIA director John Brennan was one of the guest speakers at an event that will merit your attention.
After the conference on Thursday I confronted former CIA Director Brennan directly regarding his signing the 51 Intelligence Officers Memo knowing that the Hunter Biden laptop was real and not Russian disinformation. Watch his response. pic.twitter.com/blg86oBLRb
— Thomas A. Speciale II (@Speciale4VA) November 1, 2025
First off, who is Speciale? He’s described as a “national security consultant and former senior advisor to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.” In 2020, he ran and lost in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Virginia.
On his website he describes himself this way:
Since 1987, I have served on Active Duty or in the Army Reserves at tactical, operational, strategic and the national level and continue to serve today in the Army Reserves as a Chief Warrant Officer (CW3). I served in Afghanistan alongside U.S. Special Forces and am well-known as a bulldog when it comes to fighting injustice, training and taking care of my Soldiers and never ever quitting.
Since 2005, I have served in the military or the intelligence community as a subject matter expert on intelligence, terrorism and Middle Eastern conflict issues. I am intimately familiar with the mosaic of threats we face across around the world.
I recently served as the Senior Advisor on counterintelligence and security issues for the Director of National Intelligence.
So what happened on Thursday night?
Speciale literally confronted Brennan, not once but twice, on Brennan’s role in co-signing a letter from 51 intelligence officials. The Trump administration alleges that Brennan and others “coordinated with the Biden campaign to issue a letter discrediting the reporting that President Joseph R. Biden’s son had abandoned his laptop at a computer repair business. Signatories of the letter falsely suggested that the news story (in the New York Post) was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.”
The letter signed by all of those intelligence community officials came just prior to the 2020 election and was part of an effort to discredit the New York Post’s story. If you remember, all of the social media platforms banned discussion of the story. Were they pressured on this?
What made Speciale’s confrontation special was the fact that we rarely get to see people like Brennan confronted at all, let alone by someone so well-versed in the subject matter as Speciale — and who isn’t about to back down when Brennan invades his personal space and puts a finger to his chest. (I’m not sure if it physically touched Speciale; as with any intelligence operative, Brennan is very self-aware.)
The other instance where Speciale confronted Brennan is extremely telling in the way the former spook reacted, both nonverbally and verbally. He was clearly agitated by the fact that Speciale was even allowed to step up to the mic and ask him the questions he asked. He fiddled with his water, took a drink, nervously screwed the cap back onto the bottle, and fidgeted in his seat. You don’t even need to watch this with the sound on to see that Brennan was clearly uneasy.
Guilty https://t.co/eli7NOIDu2
— Champagne Joshi (@JoshWalkos) November 2, 2025
In this second instance (which actually came before that cocktail session exchange), Speciale pointedly asked Brennan why he included the Steele dossier when drafting a 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) about Trump and Russia.
He asked Brennan about documents that shed light on how former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper urged former National Security Agency (NSA) Director Mike Rogers to sign on with the team in a 2016 email about the drafting of the ICA on Russian election interference. According to reports, the specific line was, “This is one project that has to be a team sport.”
Instead of answering the question, Brennan quickly became indignant, while the moderator (another former CIA director, Michael Hayden) forcefully called to move on to the next questioner. It’s worth noting that Clapper was sitting on the same stage at the time.
More often than not, Brennan only tends to participate in interviews and forums where he can trust the questioners will only throw softball questions at him. It’s always interesting to see how unprepared leftists are when faced with actual questions.
The context for all of this, of course, is that House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, on Oct. 21, referred Brennan to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for criminal prosecution on allegations that he lied under oath to Congress about an ICA. In announcing the referral, Jordan said that Brennan falsely denied “that the CIA relied on the discredited Steele dossier in drafting the post-2016 election Intelligence Community Assessment.” Jordan then added that Brennan falsely testified “when he told the Committee that the CIA opposed including the Steele dossier in the ICA.”
Jordan said there is evidence, declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, that demonstrates Brennan made the final decision — in collaboration with former FBI Director James Comey — to incorporate content from the dossier in the ICA.
In the post-event cocktail session on Thursday, in reference to the intelligence community letter about Hunter Biden’s emails, Speciale asked Brennan directly, “Why sign that?”
That’s when Brennan, in a clear effort to intimidate, gets in Speciale’s face and points directly at his chest repeatedly.
Brennan’s actual words fell into that default bureaucrat-speak, which was at odds with both the optics and the physicality of his communication: “We never said it was disinformation. We said it was Russian influence operations, which is what they do. There’s a big difference.”
Speciale claimed that all of this served a counterintelligence initiative targeting Donald Trump prior to the election.
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