Justice Department’s brewing case against former CIA chief tests its efforts to prosecute Trump foes

By Katelyn Polantz, Hannah Rabinowitz, Evan Perez, CNN

(CNN) — Justice Department prosecutors leading an investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan are facing increasing pressure from top Justice officials to bring criminal charges against him after the department has flailed in trying to punish President Donald Trump’s perceived enemies, people briefed on the matter told CNN in recent days.

Prosecutors in the Miami US attorney’s office have been leading the Brennan probe, which relates to testimony the ex-intelligence chief gave to Congress in 2023 and the Russia investigation years earlier, issuing two rounds of subpoenas to several witnesses.

Yet the push for charges has run into career prosecutors raising concerns in southern Florida, with some viewing the potential case as relatively weak.

Brennan’s lawyers have been bracing for a possible indictment for months now, which has not materialized.

Justice officials and US Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones made a push in January to bring a case against him, according to two people briefed on the matter, but some career prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida resisted the pressure.

Those career prosecutors are facing a new wave of pressure now, one of the sources said, and are struggling to delay bringing the case to a grand jury.

At first, the prosecutors gathered documents late last year from Brennan and other former intelligence officials. The subpoenas specifically sought information about a 2017 intelligence report on Russian meddling in the election that Brennan worked on, and which he spoke about in his 2023 congressional testimony.

A second round of subpoenas went in January to several former government officials and sought years of documents, including government records on the 2016 Russia investigation the people would no longer have access to, two people familiar with the investigation told CNN recently. At least one former intelligence community official has been interviewed in the probe, one source said.

Though Brennan could still face grand jury activity, the investigation also could fall apart.

His lawyers have said accusations of perjury, for instance, are without any merit.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment for this story, saying it does not comment on ongoing investigations.

Hanging over their heads

Several of the probes launched into the actions of the president’s political foes have failed when presented to a grand jury over the last year. Other investigations have been opened but have yet to result in criminal charges — hanging for months over the heads of their targets.

But even cases that never materialize can be disruptive to subjects’ lives, as people who believe they are being investigated by prosecutors and a grand jury are fearful of harm to their public reputations.

Lawyers’ fees add up, though some people in Trump’s most politically charged criminal cases are receiving low- or no-cost legal help or financial backing from others, according to several sources in the legal industry in DC.

While that’s true in any administration, the Trump Justice Department has more aggressively pursued Democratic political figures or individuals Trump and other top administration officials have said publicly they’d like to charge.

Trump in November called Brennan, Former FBI Director Comey and several others part of “Obama’s Russia HOAX Treason Club”, in a social media post shortly after Comey was indicted.

And FBI Director Kash Patel has co-opted a similar public message.

“We’re going to continue to make people like Comey and Brennan and Clapper and Page and Strzok and so many others answer for what I believe are their acts of criminal conduct,” Patel said on a recent podcast, naming a group who are not facing any charges at this time, but yet whom Trump has publicly attacked repeatedly. (Former FBI agent Peter Strzok, lawyer Lisa Page and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were key figures in the investigations into Trump’s 2016 campaign.)

In a handful of districts with politically charged cases, well-respected career investigators and prosecutors have been fired en masse and replaced with more willing but less experienced line investigators.

Closing lingering cases or probes that Trump wants to succeed has its own set of consequences for prosecutors or other Justice Department lawyers.

Many criminal probes

Federal prosecutors in Virginia attempted to bring criminal charges twice against Comey and three times against New York Attorney General Letitia James, and those charges have either been tossed by judges or rejected by grand juries.

A grand jury refusing an indictment is historically a highly unusual outcome — though it’s happening more frequently in politically charged cases Trump wants to pursue.

A grand jury in Washington, DC, recently denied the Justice Department’s attempt to criminally charge Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly and five other members of Congress because of a video they taped reminding military and intelligence officers they are allowed to refuse orders they believe go against the law.

“It was a grand jury of anonymous American citizens who upheld the rule of law and determined this case should not proceed,” said Rep. Elissa Slotkin, another member whom the Justice Department tried and failed to charge. “Whether or not (US Attorney Jeanine) Pirro succeeded is not the point. It’s that President Trump continues to weaponize our justice system against his perceived enemies.”

Several other Trump political foes have been the subject of investigative inquiries that haven’t materialized into charges.

In recent weeks, federal law enforcement has been revisiting the work of former prosecutors whose work ultimately became part of the cases against Trump under special counsel Jack Smith, according to several people and a critical public statement from Patel.

CNN has previously confirmed investigative activity by the Justice Department around the financial papers of Rep. Adam Schiff and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, and into Senate testimony by Federal Reserve by Chair Jerome Powell.

And Republicans on Capitol Hill have added to who the Justice Department may consider investigating next, by referring a former special counsel’s office prosecutor of Trump and a former star witness after January 6 for possible criminal charges.

None of those people have been charged.

“This unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure,” Powell said in a video statement after receiving a criminal subpoena, pointing out Trump’s unhappiness with the Fed-controlled loan interest rates.

“This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings,” he added. “Those are pretexts.”

Naming and shaming

The Fed chair’s public messaging in response to an open criminal investigation has become part of the playbook in Washington to publicize a grand jury inquisition.

In past administrations, Justice Department and administration officials have been less willing to comment on uncharged matters or people who could be subject to an investigation. Cases could linger quietly for years.

That is not the case now. Trump himself has posted names on social media repeatedly of people he’d like to see his Justice Department indict, and the attorney general and other senior leaders of the Justice Department have repeatedly commented on ongoing investigations.

In January, Trump hosted US attorneys at the White House, where he complained about the slow pace of investigations into a number of people, including officials from previous administrations as well as Democratic officials who he said unfairly targeted him, CNN has previously reported. Shortly after, Powell made public that prosecutors’ subpoenas went to the Federal Reserve.

In another recent example, a senior Justice Department official told CNN that prosecutors are probing whether former aides in the White House may have used an autopen for actions not authorized by then-President Joe Biden. The message came less than a day after the New York Times said an investigation into Biden’s use of autopen was likely over.

Biden is not under investigation himself, the official said, as presidents have broad protections for the actions they take while in office following a Supreme Court decision in 2024 broadening presidential immunity.

One particularly politically motivated Justice official, Ed Martin, has pushed for several of the recent investigations against political foes, including one over autopen use.

Martin has specified he believes subjects should be named and shamed, even if they are never charged with a crime.

“There are some really bad actors, some people that did some really bad things to the American people. And if they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them,” Martin said last year. “And in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are shamed.”

Some of those investigations that officials like Martin once championed have appeared to fall apart. A renewed perjury charge against Comey, for instance, faces an even more difficult future.

“Putting on evidence and a trial is messy. It’s just easier to announce an investigation … It’s easier to use the integrity of the department to slime people,” Aaron Zelinsky, a former prosecutor who has been a past whistleblower about Trump and received an inquiry from Martin last year, recently told CNN. “The process is the punishment.”

The lingering open investigations are also fueling defense strategies.

“Taking a page from Trump’s own unsavory and unethical style, his DOJ has become a willing political weapon eager to name and shame the president’s foes and targets before any evidence is gathered, or even charges filed,” Abbe Lowell, a prominent defense lawyer who has collected high-profile clients who could face politically charged cases under Trump.

Lowell currently represents several high-profile people this Trump Justice Department has investigated, charged or attempted to charge. They include: James in New York; the Federal Reserve’s Cook; Rep. Jason Crow, who was among the members of Congress a grand jury declined to charge; journalist Don Lemon; and John Bolton, the national security adviser in Trump’s first term in office.

Lowell, too, has taken a more aggressive and public approach defending clients he has who believe they may be investigated.

He’s also regularly teased the possibility of asking for criminal charges to be dismissed because he alleges the Justice Department has unfairly singled out people to charge. Those types of attempts to have a case dismissed are exceedingly difficult to win in court, but have gotten more traction in front of some judges in recent months.

Action in Florida

The push to charge Brennan, the former CIA director, for his official work in 2016, is part of a broader effort by Quiñones, the US attorney in the Southern District of Florida who has sought to establish himself as a Trump loyalist since taking office last year.

Brennan’s attorneys just before Christmas made the unusual move of writing to the chief judge in Miami with their accusations of unfair grand jury activity. The lawyers said they believed Quiñones was attempting to investigate Brennan through a Fort Pierce, Florida-based grand jury, under the direction of Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon. Cannon in Ft. Pierce previously dismissed the criminal case against Trump.

Yet if Brennan were to be charged, it may be in Washington, DC, according to people briefed on the matter. There, prosecutors would face a grand jury that may be much less willing to indict a former administration official that Trump publicly criticizes.

Prosecutors have focused on allegations from congressional Republicans that Brennan made false statements in testimony to Congress in 2017 and 2023 about the Intelligence Community Assessment.

Brennan testified that the CIA was not involved with the now-discredited Steele dossier — which alleged that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin to win the 2016 election — and its inclusion in the Intelligence Community Assessment. Republican lawmakers have claimed that Brennan was in fact aware of the dossier’s inclusion in the report.

Brennan has denied any wrongdoing.

“Not surprisingly, this unrelenting presidential pressure to pursue political targets without regard to the law or facts has resulted in an unprecedented spike in the incidence of irregular prosecutorial conduct, especially in relation to grand jury investigations and charging decisions relating to matters of political interest to the President,” Brennan’s attorneys wrote in the December letter to Southern District of Florida Chief Judge Cecilia Altonaga.

CNN’s Paula Reid contributed to this report.

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