John Brennan

His Irish father, a blacksmith, emigrated from County Roscommon, Republic of Ireland, to New Jersey in 1948.

He attended the Immaculate Heart of Mary Elementary School and graduated from Saint Joseph of the Palisades High School in West New York, New Jersey.

John Owen Brennan (born September 22, 1955) is a former American intelligence officer who served as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from March 2013 to January 2017.

He served as chief counterterrorism advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama, with the title Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and Assistant to the President.

While a college student, in 1976, he voted for the Communist Party USA candidate for president, Gus Hall.

He has later described his vote as a way of "signaling my unhappiness with the system", specifically the partisanship of the Watergate era.

Brennan attended Fordham University, graduating with a B.A. in political science in 1977.

After Fordham, Brennan attended the University of Texas at Austin, receiving a Master of Arts in government with a concentration in Middle East studies in 1980.

He speaks Arabic fluently.

His studies included a junior year abroad learning Arabic and taking courses at the American University in Cairo.

While riding a bus to class at Fordham, he saw an ad in The New York Times that said that the CIA was recruiting.

He decided that a CIA career would be a good match for his "wanderlust" and his desire for public service.

He applied to the CIA in 1980.

During his application he admitted during a lie-detector test that he had voted for the Communist Party candidate four years earlier.

To his surprise, he was still accepted; he later said that he finds it heartening that the CIA valued freedom of speech.

Brennan began his CIA career as an analyst and spent 25 years with the agency.

He was a daily intelligence briefer for President Bill Clinton.

In 1996, he was CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, when the Khobar Towers bombing killed 19 U.S. servicemen.

In 1999, he was appointed chief of staff to George Tenet, then-Director of the CIA.

Brennan became deputy executive director of the CIA in March 2001.

He was director of the newly created Terrorist Threat Integration Center from 2003 to 2004, an office that sifted through and compiled information for President Bush's daily top secret intelligence briefings and employed the services of analysts from a dozen U.S. agencies and entities.

Brennan then left government service for a few years, becoming Chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) and the CEO of The Analysis Corporation (TAC).

After leaving government service in 2005, Brennan became CEO of The Analysis Corporation, a security consulting business, and served as chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, an association of intelligence professionals.

Previously, he advised Obama on foreign policy and intelligence issues during the 2008 election campaign and presidential transition.

Brennan withdrew his name from consideration for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the first Obama administration over concerns about his support for torture, after defending on TV the transferring of terror suspects to countries where they might be tortured while serving under President George W. Bush.

Instead, Brennan was appointed Deputy National Security Advisor, a position which did not require Senate confirmation.

Brennan's 25 years with the CIA included work as a Near East and South Asia analyst, as station chief in Saudi Arabia, and as director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Brennan served in the White House as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security between 2009 and 2013.

He continued to lead TAC after its acquisition by Global Strategies Group in 2007 and its growth as the Global Intelligence Solutions division of Global's North American technology business GTEC, before returning to government service with the Obama administration as Homeland Security Advisor on January 20, 2009.

Obama nominated Brennan as his next director of the CIA on January 7, 2013.

The ACLU called for the Senate not to proceed with the appointment until they confirmed that "all of his conduct was within the law" at the CIA and White House.

Brennan was approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 5, 2013, to succeed David Petraeus as the Director of the CIA by a vote of 12 to 3.

On January 7, 2013, President Obama nominated Brennan to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

On January 20, 2017, Brennan's CIA appointment ended, and he was replaced by President Trump's nominee Mike Pompeo on January 23, 2017.

In September 2017, Brennan was named a Distinguished Non-Resident Scholar at The University of Texas at Austin, where he also acts as a senior advisor to the University's Intelligence Studies Project.

On August 15, 2018, President Donald Trump announced that he had revoked Brennan's security clearance, although the White House reportedly did not follow through with the revocation process.

Brennan had harshly criticized Trump several times since his election and responded to the revocation by stating "My principles are worth far more than clearances. I will not relent."

Brennan serves as a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.

His inaugural appearance was on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd on Sunday, February 4, 2018.

Brennan was born in North Bergen, New Jersey, the son of Owen and Dorothy (Dunn) Brennan.