Ex-CIA chief accused of orchestrating 'Russia hoax' sues Trump admin for 'vindictive prosecution'
· Fox News
Former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan is suing the Trump administration and demanding a court order to require officials to preserve records of the criminal investigations against him.
Brennan served as CIA director under former President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017. In a court filing reviewed by Fox News Digital, Brennan asks the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to issue preliminary injunctive relief to "protect his constitutional rights as the current target of two federal investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice."
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Attorneys for Brennan assert that the DOJ has launched its investigations "at the direct urging of President Trump" and that the investigations amount to searching for "phantom criminal conduct."
The filing states that "regrettably, some in the current DOJ and Federal Bureau of Investigation leadership have acceded to that direction, and are converting the Justice Department into a tool of retribution against Director Brennan and the President’s other perceived adversaries."
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Fox News Digital reported this May that the FBI had begun questioning current and former CIA officials as part of a Justice Department probe into Brennan and his role in the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Brennan has previously denied wrongdoing related to the Russia investigation and has defended the intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election.
According to sources familiar with the matter, as of May, agents had interviewed roughly a dozen officials involved in drafting the assessment, with investigators focusing on how its conclusions were reached and whether Brennan may have misled Congress during his 2023 testimony.
At the center of the probe is whether the intelligence assessment, which concluded Russia sought to boost Trump’s candidacy, was influenced by the controversial Steele dossier, a collection of largely unsubstantiated allegations about Trump’s supposed ties to Russia that was funded by political opponents.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has tapped former Trump attorney Joseph diGenova to spearhead the probe, putting a former Trump attorney in a key role in the high-profile probe.
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Brennan has previously said the CIA opposed including the dossier in the assessment, though a summary was ultimately attached to a classified version of the report.
In his filing, attorneys for Brennan accuse the administration of "overreaching actions" that "have violated Director Brennan’s constitutional rights and will serve as the basis for challenges to any resulting charges, including motions to dismiss any indictment on the grounds that it is the result of selective and vindictive prosecution."
Brennan argues that during the course of these "presidentially-driven investigations," certain DOJ officials have "taken steps that clearly violate well-established norms and limitations on prosecutorial conduct."
According to the filing, these include "issuing pronouncements that evince a pre-conceived belief in Director Brennan’s guilt; making statements that disclose matters relating to open grand jury investigations, in violation of Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e); removing or sidelining career prosecutors who have balked at using the criminal process to promote the President’s retribution agenda; engaging in forum-shopping by moving the investigations from federal district to federal district in an effort to find a sufficiently pliant United States Attorney; and engaging in judge-shopping."
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Brennan's filing also accuses the Trump administration of having a "disdain for records preservation" and administration officials of "routinely flout[ing] their preservation obligations."
In light of this accusation, he asked the court to issue an order requiring the Trump administration to preserve "any and all materials and communications that are potentially relevant to the consideration of Director Brennan’s legal and constitutional challenges to any future criminal charges."
The motion was filed by Brennan's attorneys on Wednesday. It names Blanche as the defendant.
Fox News Digital reached out to the DOJ and White House for comment.
Fox News' Jake Gibson and Fox News Digital's Bradford Betz, Robert McGreevy and Amanda Macias contributed to this report.