At that point, Brennan ordered a "pause" in the secret CIA spying.

"At 5:30 pm on January 16, I was asked to come to the Director's office," the memo continues. "He said he appreciated my advice, fully supported all my actions in this matter, and urged me to be proactive in coming to him with future concerns."

Two months later, when legislators were publicly accusing the CIA of secretly monitoring the Senate intelligence committee, Brennan declared, "When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong." But he'd known for months that multiple CIA staffers conspired to probe what documents the Senate intelligence committee possessed and monitor how many times it accessed at least one document. It's hard to see Brennan's comment as anything other than a willful attempt to mislead Congress and the public.

As for the unnamed CIA lawyer who led the effort to spy on the Senate intelligence committee, let's take a step back to reflect on his or her claims in context. Since the 1970s, the Senate intelligence committee has been charged with overseeing the CIA. Its charge is to ensure that it never again engages in historic abuses.

In keeping with these duties, senators and their staffers embarked on a years-long, multi-million dollar effort to study the CIA's interrogation of prisoners after 9/11. Senate staffers working on the torture report were cleared to see classified information. And as it turned out, the CIA possessed classified documents on the torture of prisoners: a review commissioned by former CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Common sense suggested that the Senate ought to see that review.

The principle that the CIA's overseers should be as well-informed as possible about its activities—particularly potentially illegal activities—suggested the same conclusion.

But by the CIA's logic, it wasn't merely justified in trying to keep that review secret and trying to withhold it from its overseers—it was also justified in spying on anyone it suspected of possessing the review and trying to get them criminally charged.

Imagine the following exchange in a federal prison:

"What are you in for?" "Oh, I used to work for the Senate. I was writing a classified report on CIA torture. For my research, the CIA insisted that I come to their headquarters and work on their computers. And while I was there, I came across this torture review they made." "So no one went to jail for CIA torture, but you went to jail for reading a CIA report on the thing you were supposed to be investigating?" "Yes."

The CIA's effort to criminalize oversight is even more extraordinary when one considers how Senate staffers were able to access the so-called Panetta review on interrogations.