Former CIA Director John Brennan will head to court Monday afternoon, urging a federal judge to order the Trump administration to preserve all records related to its inquiry of the former intelligence chief.
Brennan filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in July, alleging selective and vindictive prosecution. He says the investigative records will be critical to his defense should those inquiries yield an indictment.
“Director Brennan will challenge and move to dismiss the indictment as the product of an unconstitutionally vindictive and selective prosecution,” lawyers for Brennan wrote in a court filing. “To assess that challenge, the court presiding over Director Brennan’s case would review internal materials and communications among the prosecutors and others to determine the true motivations behind the prosecution.”
He highlights the administration’s apparently spotty history of preserving records, specifically pointing to top officials’ use of automatically deleting Signal messages. “There is ample evidence in the public record that many in the Administration, and in the Justice Department, specifically, are failing to observe their legal obligations to maintain such records,” his lawyers allege.
The Obama-era CIA director is asking Judge Jia Cobb to order President Trump, White House chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Todd Blanche, other top prosecutors investigating him, and intelligence chiefs to preserve all records related to their investigations of Brennan and any alleged co-conspirators.
Brennan, an MS NOW contributor, is the subject of two Justice Department investigations. The first is the so-called “grand conspiracy” inquiry premised on the idea that intelligence officials orchestrated the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election and other Trump-related investigations as part of a conspiracy to deprive the president of his civil rights.
The second investigation centers on allegedly false statements Brennan made to Congress in 2023.
Brennan has maintained he has done nothing wrong and is now going on the offensive to protect his reputation. “I don’t want to sit on our hands because if he gets away with me, he’s going to do this against others — individuals, professionals who have given their lives and sacrificed so much for this country, believing that a president and administration is going to do the right thing, as opposed to the wrong thing and corrupt thing,” he told MS NOW in an interview shortly after he filed the lawsuit.
The Trump administration has slammed Brennan’s allegations, claiming they’re merely hypothetical. “John Brennan asks this Court to take the unprecedented step of managing potential discovery in a hypothetical future criminal case in Florida,” the DOJ wrote in a court filing.
“Plaintiff cannot cite a single example of a court ever directing the government to preserve documents because someone who is not a criminal defendant might need them if he is indicted in the future,” the DOJ continued. “His request for that extraordinary relief fails at every step.”
Lawyers for Brennan responded, writing, “there is no question that the government is obligated to prospectively retain those records, both by the statutory requirements in the Federal Records Act and the Presidential Records Act and by the constitutional requirement that the government preserve information that may be relevant to a defendant’s challenge to an eventual prosecution (which is the basis for this action).”
Monday’s hearing comes just days after the “grand conspiracy” inquiry hit a snag, with its top investigator resigning. Joe diGenova — the former Trump campaign lawyer who was tapped to oversee the investigation in April — stepped down last week.
His resignation reportedly came amid mounting frustration from the Justice Department and White House over the pace and management of the inquiry, which has yet to yield a single indictment.
“If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” diGenova told The New York Post shortly after he stepped down.
He later told the Associated Press those comments were taken out of context, saying, “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 post Former CIA Director John Brennan in court over records related to investigations — in which he is the target appeared first on MS NOW.
