FILE – Former CIA Director John Brennan testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 23, 2017, before the House Intelligence Committee Russia Investigation Task Force.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
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Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
WASHINGTON — Former CIA Director John Brennan has been subpoenaed to testify before a Florida grand jury in a Justice Department investigation into whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired against President Donald Trump, and is the target of a separate inquiry into whether he made false statements before Congress, one of his lawyers said Monday.
Ken Wainstein, an attorney for Brennan, disclosed the existence of the subpoena as he argued for a court order requiring the Justice Department to preserve all records from the investigations. He said those documents would be a “fertile source” of information about the government’s determination to indict Brennan, an outspoken Trump critic, and would be needed for the defense to challenge any potential prosecution of the ex-CIA chief as unconstitutionally vindictive and selective.
“The reality is there’s no precedent for this situation,” Wainstein said in acknowledging the extraordinarily unusual nature of his preservation request. “I’ve spent decades in and around the Justice Department. I’ve never even conceived of a situation like this” in which the Justice Department is “blatantly trying to frame somebody for a crime that is complete fiction.”
In pressing his case to U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, he cited what he said was “judge-shopping” by the Justice Department, directives by Trump to pursue perceived adversaries like Brennan and the replacement or resignations of prosecutors said to have raised internal doubts or concerns.
“There’s a lot of really underhanded stuff going on” in these investigations, Wainstein said.
The subpoena is related to a “far-reaching’ investigation
The subpoena was presented last Thursday and requires Brennan to appear Oct. 15 before a grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida. That’s the home court of a Trump-appointed judge named Aileen Cannon, who in 2024 dismissed a Justice Department prosecution charging Trump with illegally retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Wainstein said he was told that the subpoena relates to a “far-reaching” criminal probe examining a loosely defined theory that the government officials who have investigated Trump over the last decade, including over Russia election interference in 2016 and his more recent retention of top-secret records at Mar-a-Lago, conspired to deprive Trump of his civil rights. The subpoena to Brennan is among a flurry that have been recently issued.
Wainstein said he was informed by a prosecutor that Brennan remains a target in an investigation into whether he lied to Congress about the creation of a U.S. intelligence community assessment detailing Russian interference on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 election. Brennan and his lawyers have called that allegation false. Subpoenas demanding testimony before a grand jury in the false statements probe were issued last spring, then abruptly withdrawn in favor of voluntary interviews.
He said that while he could not easily explain what crime the Justice Department could credibly accuse Brennan of committing, it was hardly a speculative or premature concern to believe his client was at substantial risk of being indicted given the Trump administration’s efforts to target him.
“The message is very clear to the personnel at DOJ about what needs to happen,” he said.
The prosecutor who’d been leading the probe has resigned
The subpoena was delivered on the same day that Joe diGenova, the prosecutor who had been leading what is casually known as the “grand conspiracy” investigation, abruptly resigned amid what a person familiar with the matter has described as frustration from the Justice Department and White House over the pace and management of the probe.
In an interview with The New York Post, diGenova responded to criticism of his management of the investigation by saying, “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.”
When reached by The Associated Press, diGenova said the comments were taken out of context, adding: “There’s plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution. It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others — and you can’t do that.”
The Justice Department has not publicly announced a replacement for diGenova. The member of the investigative team with whom Wainstein spoke was Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who unsuccessfully pushed the Justice Department in 2020 to back Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.
Brennan’s defense team said among the communications they were seeking, and would use in mounting a vindictive prosecution argument, are any messages showing Trump or White House officials directing the Justice Department to pursue their client. They said the preservation order they sought was especially necessary because of what they described as the Trump administration’s pattern of failing to preserve records.
The Justice Department called the request premature and speculative and said Brennan had no right to demand the preservation since he was not a criminal defendant and it was not clear that he would ever be charged.
Cobb, a federal judge in Washington, did not immediately rule on Brennan’s request.
