Former CIA Director John Brennan now faces a federal grand jury subpoena in a broad conspiracy investigation examining whether government officials violated President Trump's civil rights, while a separate probe into whether Brennan lied to Congress remains active.
Brennan's own lawyer confirmed the subpoena in a court filing in Washington, where the former spy chief is suing the federal government to preserve records related to investigations targeting him. The filing reveals that government prosecutor Kurt Olsen told Brennan's counsel the Florida-based probe is "far-reaching" and covers "issues at Mar-a-Lago and beyond," Just the News reported.
Olsen identified Brennan as a "subject" of the wider conspiracy investigation and a "target" of a narrower inquiry into alleged false statements to Congress, a distinction that signals prosecutors believe he may have committed a crime in the latter matter. The narrower investigation, Olsen told Brennan's legal team, is "still viable," and its issues "might also be part of the larger investigation, such as being overt acts."
The grand jury sits in Fort Pierce, Florida. Fox News reported that Brennan was ordered to appear on October 15 and that the probe examines whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired to deprive Trump of his civil rights.
Brennan is not the only former official caught in the net. Thirty federal grand jury subpoenas were issued targeting prominent former intelligence figures, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the New York Post reported. U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones is supervising the probe out of the Southern District of Florida.
Prosecutors appear focused on Brennan's central role in constructing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative that consumed American politics for years, and on whether his public and sworn statements held up under scrutiny. The record suggests they did not.
In 2017, Brennan told Congress he had encountered intelligence revealing "contacts and interactions between Russian officials and US persons involved in the Trump campaign." He said the information raised questions about "whether or not the Russians were able to gain the cooperation of those individuals."
But Special Counsel John Durham's final report reached a starkly different conclusion:
"Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation."
Durham found that the FBI opened its Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016 without verified intelligence or evidence. The bureau and the Justice Department, Durham concluded, failed to follow their own standards and allowed the probe to persist on a questionable basis under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Brennan did not limit his claims to closed-door testimony. During the Mueller investigation, he wrote a New York Times op-ed dismissing Trump's "no collusion" assertions as "hogwash" and declaring that "the only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted a criminally liable conspiracy." He went further, asking "how many members of 'Trump Incorporated' attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets."
Robert Mueller's probe found no evidence that Trump or his associates colluded with Russia in the 2016 election.
After that finding, Brennan walked back his certainty on MSNBC. In an interview with host Joe Scarborough, he conceded:
"I don't know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was."
That admission sits uneasily alongside the aggressive public claims he made while the investigation was still underway, claims that shaped media coverage and public perception for years. The gap between what Brennan told Congress, what he told the public, and what the evidence actually showed is now at the center of a federal criminal inquiry.
Durham's investigation uncovered another layer that prosecutors may find relevant. According to Durham, intelligence gathered in July 2016 indicated that Hillary Clinton personally approved a project to manufacture a Russia scandal against her Republican opponent. Brennan briefed President Obama and senior administration officials on Clinton's alleged plan.
Yet Brennan did not disclose that intelligence to congressional investigators, Durham found. Instead, the CIA director joined with anti-Trump elements inside the FBI to push for including the unverified Steele Dossier, compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, in the December 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian interference. That assessment, produced jointly by the CIA, FBI, and NSA, concluded with "high confidence" that Russian President Vladimir Putin "ordered an influence campaign in 2016." The NSA expressed only "moderate confidence" in the finding that Putin aspired to help Trump's election chances.
A CIA "lessons learned" review released in 2025 sharply criticized the decision to include the dossier. The eight-page review stated that "the decision by agency heads to include the Steele Dossier in the ICA ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment." The CIA review also found that Brennan, Clapper, and then-FBI Director James Comey were "excessively involved" in drafting the assessment in what the review called a "chaotic" and "markedly unconventional" process.
An earlier intelligence assessment, conducted roughly three months before the December 2016 ICA, made no mention of Russia's alleged animosity toward Clinton or preference for Trump, raising questions about what changed in the intervening weeks and who drove the shift.
Brennan now faces legal pressure from several directions at once. The House Judiciary Committee formally referred him for prosecution, alleging he gave false testimony in 2023 about his role in bringing the Steele Dossier into the intelligence assessment. CIA Director John Ratcliffe followed with a criminal referral on Brennan to the FBI after the agency's internal review.
FBI Director Kash Patel, shortly after taking the helm at the bureau, launched a separate investigation into matters ranging from the Russia collusion allegations to Jack Smith's prosecution of Trump. That investigation, combined with the Fort Pierce grand jury probe and the congressional referral, means Brennan faces overlapping scrutiny from the FBI, the CIA, Congress, and a federal grand jury simultaneously.
President Trump revoked Brennan's security clearance in January 2025. Brennan, who commands speaking fees of $50,000 to $75,000 per engagement and serves as a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC, has continued to defend his record publicly. He and Clapper co-authored an op-ed defending the 2016 assessment's conclusions, writing that "multiple thorough, years long reviews of the assessment have validated its findings and the rigor of its analysis."
The CIA's own review contradicts that claim directly.
The probe has not been without turbulence. Lead prosecutor Joe diGenova resigned the same day the subpoena was delivered, reportedly over disputes with DOJ officials and the White House about the pace of the investigation. DiGenova told the New York Post bluntly: "If you want indictments where there's no evidence, you have an ethical problem."
That departure created leadership uncertainty within the probe at a critical moment. AP News reported that Brennan's attorney, Ken Wainstein, is seeking a court order to preserve all records from the investigations, arguing the prosecution is unconstitutionally vindictive and selective.
Wainstein did not mince words about his view of the case. "The reality is there's no precedent for this situation," he said. "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."
Brennan's legal team has also argued in court filings that administration officials, from the acting attorney general to the FBI director, have been "publicly declaring Director Brennan a criminal, not only before securing a conviction in court but even before a full investigation and indictment." The Senate's razor-thin confirmation of Attorney General Todd Blanche earlier this year underscored the political stakes surrounding the Justice Department's direction.
Whether prosecutors can convert subpoenas into indictments remains an open question. No charges have been filed. No arrests have been made. The conspiracy framework, treating the alleged criminal acts as part of an ongoing scheme, is designed to overcome statutes of limitations that might otherwise shield decade-old conduct.
Blanche's confirmation itself was a protracted affair, with Republican holdouts demanding the DOJ put anti-weaponization commitments in writing before they would vote. That fight reflected broader concerns about whether the department would use its authority to pursue genuine accountability or settle political scores, concerns that now cut in both directions as the Brennan probe advances.
The core question is straightforward. For years, John Brennan used the authority of his former office, the prestige of his intelligence credentials, and the reach of cable news to tell the American public that Donald Trump colluded with Russia. He said it under oath. He said it in op-eds. He said it on television. When the evidence failed to materialize, he offered a shrug: maybe he "suspected there was more than there actually was."
Durham's report, the CIA's own internal review, and the Mueller investigation all pointed in the same direction, there was no collusion, the probe was opened without evidence, and the intelligence process was compromised by officials who were, in the CIA's own words, "excessively involved." Brennan was at the center of each of those failures.
Now a grand jury in Florida wants to hear from him directly. So does a separate federal investigation into whether he lied to Congress. So does the FBI. So does the CIA's own leadership. Breitbart noted that Brennan's legal team frames the entire effort as vindictive prosecution, a political exercise dressed up as law enforcement.
That argument may eventually prevail in court. But for the millions of Americans who watched their government spend years chasing a collusion theory that its own investigators could not substantiate, the question is simpler: if the people who built that narrative faced no evidence when they started and knew it, what exactly were they doing, and who should answer for it?
Accountability delayed is not accountability denied. A grand jury subpoena is not a conviction, but it is a start, and for a man who spent years declaring guilt without proof, the system he helped weaponize now wants his testimony under oath.
