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Former CIA Director John Brennan sued the Justice Department and top Trump administration officials Wednesday, seeking a court order to force the preservation of records in the ongoing federal investigations targeting him.
The lawsuit represents an unusual step for Brennan, a longtime political opponent of President Trump who has been the focus of two Justice Department criminal probes since the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second administration.
One is centered on allegations that Brennan lied to Congress in 2023 about the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The second is a sprawling “grand conspiracy” probe examining whether Obama- and Biden-era officials were part of a long-running conspiracy to keep Mr. Trump out of political office.
“This Administration has adopted a policy of using criminal process and prosecution to punish the President’s perceived adversaries,” Brennan’s legal team wrote in a 46-page complaint filed Wednesday in federal court in Washington. “It is against this backdrop that former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John O. Brennan, is being vindictively singled out for investigation and prosecution.”
Brennan’s legal team argues that any “eventual indictment” against him will be challenged in court as “unconstitutionally vindictive and selective,” and the loss of any relevant records would “impair, perhaps fatally, the ability of the court reviewing Director Brennan’s challenges to do so on the full record of contemporaneous communications and materials that is needed to divine the true intentions behind the prosecutors’ decisions and actions.”
Brennan is asking a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to order Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Justice Department, as well as the White House, ODNI and CIA, to “preserve materials and communications potentially relevant to Director Brennan’s legal and constitutional challenges to any future criminal charges.”
Brennan’s case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, a Biden nominee.
The complaint also singles out the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida, Jason Reding Quiñones, and Joseph DiGenova, a counselor to the acting attorney general who was tapped to lead one ongoing DOJ criminal investigation into Brennan after the career prosecutor overseeing the probe was removed from the case.
CBS News previously reported that law enforcement veterans are expressing deep concerns that the Trump Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Brennan is being systematically stacked with politically motivated personnel who are intent on a partisan indictment.
Also involved in the investigation is Kurt Olsen, who most recently served as President Trump’s director of election security and integrity, as well as John Yoo, the former senior Justice Department official who authored the controversial “torture memos” in the War on Terror during President George W. Bush’s presidency, according to sources with direct knowledge of the hires.
Olsen was the person who made the Fulton County election case referral to the FBI, prompting agents to execute a search warrant earlier this year where they seized dozens of boxes of ballots and other materials from the 2020 election.
DiGenova told CBS News that Yoo will be on hand to advise investigators on constitutional legal questions and assist with motions and appellate issues.
A Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement, “While we cannot comment on the existence, or lack thereof, of an investigation, it is certainly rich that John Brennan is accusing anyone of a ‘retribution campaign.'”
Brennan’s filing echoes other moves by lawyers representing targets of recent Justice Department investigations who have had some success in arguing the department was acting unlawfully.
Last week, a federal judge in Minnesota quashed six grand jury subpoenas the Trump administration served against Minnesota state and local government offices — including Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey — ruling the subpoenas were retaliatory and unlawful.
In March, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. quashed a pair of grand jury subpoenas sent to the Federal Reserve Board as part of a since-closed criminal probe, ruling they were merely a pretext to pressure Chairman Jerome Powell into voting for lower interest rates or resigning.
And last year, former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James argued the indictments against them should be dismissed on the grounds of a “vindictive and selective” prosecutions. Instead, the cases were dismissed because a judge found that the interim U.S. attorney who had secured the indictments had been unlawfully appointed to the role.
