DOJ Eyes Brennan: Is Trump's Next Target in the Crosshairs?

Last week, the House Intelligence Committee voted to turn over to the DOJ two 2017 documents involving Brennan, including a transcript of a meeting with the panel. The release — approved strictly along party lines — comes as House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has called on the Justice Department to charge the former CIA director with lying to Congress. It’s the latest sign a probe out of the Southern District of Florida is chugging along as prosecutors review the 2016 election and the cases brought against Trump.

Jordan said on Fox News that things are "heating up" in Florida and that there might be accountability for Brennan. The committee’s Democrats see this as an attempt to advance a political prosecution, recalling the Trump administration's failed attempts to launch cases against his opponents.

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) criticized the handover of documents, arguing it's an attempt at retribution against those involved in the investigation of alleged collusion with Russia. Himes listed several recent attempts to retaliate against Trump's foes, including efforts to reduce the military rank of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and the failed effort to bring charges against former FBI Director James Comey. He also mentioned how a judge quashed subpoenas into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, with a prosecutor later conceding they weren’t sure they had any evidence indicating Powell committed a crime.

Himes emphasized that these efforts at retribution will continue, even if they prove embarrassing, as in the case of Jeanine Pirro and the chairman of the Federal Reserve. He insisted that these people did not break the law and that attempts to incriminate them will fail.

A source familiar with the matter said one of the transcripts turned over by the committee is from a closed-door session with Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Comey. The other is for a hearing the panel had with just Brennan. Some parts of those discussions were held publicly. Brennan’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment. The former CIA director has been targeted by several Trump allies.

Last July, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard accused Brennan and other Obama-era officials of committing a "treasonous conspiracy" in how they handled Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections. Her 11-page memo detailed internal discussions showing Russia was unable to affect any vote totals. That doesn’t contradict the assessment at the time, as Obama officials said shortly after the election that Russia was unable to hack voting systems.

The documents also do not undercut a conclusion reached by several reviews of the 2016 election: that Russia launched a massive campaign with the hopes of influencing the contest. Shortly thereafter, Brennan and Clapper in a joint op-ed in The New York Times blasted the accusations against them as “patently false” while falsely minimizing Russia’s 2016 efforts. “Every serious review has substantiated the intelligence community’s fundamental conclusion that the Russians conducted an influence campaign intended to help Mr. Trump win the 2016 election,” they wrote.

Nonetheless, the DOJ then announced it would launch a “strike force” to investigate Obama officials over the 2016 election. Also in July, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said he made a criminal referral, arguing Brennan, Clapper and Comey could all face charges in what he called a “hoax against the American people.” Jordan then added to the list with a criminal referral in October, accusing Brennan of lying to Congress during a 2023 appearance about various aspects of the 2016 investigation, including the role the Steele dossier played.

Brennan was informed in February he is the target of a probe. Since then, his attorneys have written to the chief judge for the Southern District of Florida, Cecilia Altonaga, expressing fears that the U.S. attorney there, Jason Reding Quiñones, is “judge-shopping the matter by steering it toward a favored judge — the only judge — in the Fort Pierce Division,” Judge Aileen Cannon. “Were we in a normal time, we might hesitate to question the propriety of the government’s actions in the grand jury process. However, we are no longer in a normal time,” Brennan’s attorney Ken Wainstein wrote in the December letter.

Publicly, Jordan has continued to press the matter. “God bless the attorney general for initiating this conspiracy investigation down there and putting this unit together at the Justice Department to look into all of this,” he said on Fox News. Jordan pressed Attorney General Pam Bondi about the matter in a February hearing. “I can’t confirm nor deny whether there is a pending investigation, but what I will say is no one is above the law,” Bondi said at the time. Quiñones’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this month, his team issued a subpoena to Comey, though the nature of what they were seeking is unclear. The House Intelligence Committee voted to release the records the same day it permitted the DOJ to review transcripts of a discussion with Michael Atkinson, the former inspector general for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, over matters related to Trump’s first impeachment. The committee’s majority defended the release of the other documents as well, noting that they were compiled as part of the House Intelligence Committee GOP’s 2017 report “related to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.”

“The Committee took this action at the request of DOJ and hopes it may advance the accountability process that many Americans are desperate to see unfold,” a committee spokesperson said in a statement after the vote. Himes expressed doubts the Justice Department would be able to bring any credible case against Brennan, as it has struggled to successfully mount other prosecutions. “We’ve seen this over and over and over again, grand juries are throwing these things, the indictments out,” he said. “Name for me the number of Biden administration officials or Federal Reserve officials or FBI people who have been criminally convicted.” “Zero.”