John Brennan Net Worth

What is John O. Brennan's Net Worth?

John O. Brennan is an American former intelligence officer who has a net worth of $4 million.

John Brennan served as the director of the CIA from 2013 to 2017, and also served as the chief counterterrorism advisor to President Barack Obama. Outside of government, he has served as the CEO of the Analysis Corporation, the chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, and as a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.

Early Life and Education

John Owen Brennan was born on September 22, 1955 in North Bergen, New Jersey to Dorothy and Irish immigrant Owen. He had a sister and a brother. As a youth, Brennan attended Immaculate Heart of Mary Elementary School and Saint Joseph of the Palisades High School. For his higher education, he first went to Fordham University, from which he earned his BA in political science in 1977. During his undergraduate career, Brennan studied abroad at the American University in Cairo, where he became fluent in Arabic. He went on to attend graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, where he received his MA in government in 1980.

CIA Career

In 1980, Brennan answered a CIA recruiting ad he saw in the New York Times and applied to the agency. Despite admitting during a lie-detector test that he had voted for a Communist Party candidate in the 1976 presidential election, he was accepted. Brennan began his career in the CIA as an analyst. In the 1990s, he served as a daily intelligence briefer to President Bill Clinton, and in 1996 he became the CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. At the end of the decade, Brennan became chief of staff to CIA director George Tenet. In 2001, he moved up to deputy executive director of the CIA. From 2003 to 2004, Brennan served as director of the newly established Terrorist Threat Integration Center. After spending some time away from government during the latter years of the Bush presidency, Brennan returned in 2009 to become the homeland security advisor to President Barack Obama. In early 2013, Obama named Brennan the new director of the CIA, a position he held until 2017. His nomination was controversial due to past public statements he had made supporting the use of torture on terrorism suspects.

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Chief Counterterrorism Advisor to President Obama

Having advised Barack Obama on foreign policy and intelligence matters during Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, Brennan became the President's homeland security advisor in 2009. He served as President Obama's chief counterterrorism advisor and was present in the Situation Room when the US military killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. In 2012, Brennan became the first official from the Obama administration to publicly acknowledge the CIA's drone strikes in the Middle East. He was also reported to be the main coordinator of the US's kill lists in the region.

Crossfire Hurricane

In 2016, Brennan helped launch Crossfire Hurricane, an FBI investigation into links between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russian intelligence. The FBI's work was taken over by the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation in 2017. This investigation resulted in the Mueller report, which found that Russia had significantly interfered in the 2016 US presidential election and that there were major links between Trump's campaign and Russian officials.

WikiLeaks Email Hack

In October of 2015, Brennan's personal AOL email account was hacked and its contents were posted on WikiLeaks. The content included sensitive personal information but no classified information. In early 2017, two North Carolina men pleaded guilty in a Virginia federal court to charges related to the hack. The pair were sentenced to federal prison, while co-conspirators in the United Kingdom were also prosecuted.

Other Activities

During his hiatus from government service in the second half of the '00s, Brennan became the chairman of the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance and the CEO of the national security and counterterrorism company the Analysis Corporation. He continued to lead the latter following its acquisition by Global Strategies Group in 2007.

In other activities, Brennan serves as a senior advisor to the Intelligence Studies Project at his alma mater the University of Texas at Austin, and serves as a consultant on world events for the consulting firm Kissinger Associates. Since 2018, he has been a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.

Personal Life

With his wife Kathy, Brennan has three children.

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