Federal prosecutors in Florida are barreling ahead with a sprawling investigation of several of President Donald Trump’s political foes, despite the abrupt resignation last week of the latest Justice Department lawyer overseeing the probe, a lawyer for one of the potential targets said.
Kenneth Wainstein, an attorney for former CIA director John O. Brennan, said his client received a subpoena Thursday seeking his testimony next month before a grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida.
That summons came the same day that Joseph diGenova, the Trump loyalist appointed in April to oversee what members of the president’s inner circle refer to as the “grand conspiracy” investigation, quit in a dispute with Justice Department officials over the pace of his inquiry.
In a court filing Monday, Wainstein said he spoke with the remaining prosecutors on the team Friday, and was told that there are multiple “viable” grand jury investigations ongoing and that Brennan, who has denied wrongdoing, remains a target of at least one of them.
“The threat of prosecution remains quite real and quite tangible,” Wainstein said Monday. He accused the Justice Department of “blatantly trying to frame [Brennan] for a crime that is complete fiction.”
The “grand conspiracy” probe, being run out of the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, is among the most ambitious and legally complicated of the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute Trump’s political enemies.
The theory, as officials have described it, is that Brennan and other officials from the Obama and Biden administrations engaged in a decades-long, “deep state” conspiracy to violate Trump’s civil rights.
Those efforts, investigators contend, include the FBI and intelligence community investigations of potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign, as well as the push under special counsel Jack Smith to prosecute Trump after his first term for allegedly mishandling classified documents.
Prosecutors have also been examining testimony Brennan gave to Congress in 2023 about intelligence reports he oversaw as the CIA director during the Obama administration that concluded Russia was attempting to assist Trump’s campaign in 2016. Trump has denied any collusion with Russia.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, referred Brennan to the Justice Department for potential prosecution on charges he lied during that testimony.
Brennan, through his attorneys, repeatedly characterized the efforts to prosecute him as an improper attempt at harassment and intimidation by the Trump administration.
Though those broad investigations have been underway for most of the year, a flurry of subpoenas issued in recent weeks — including to several intelligence community officials and investigators tied to the 2022 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida — indicate that the probe was heating up.
DiGenova’s abrupt resignation last week, however, threw its current status into doubt.
A former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia who represented the president during his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, diGenova had been one of the most ardent advocates for the “grand conspiracy” legal theory before he was appointed this spring to oversee it.
He publicly lobbied for the job and had previously claimed that the slow pace of the probe was one factor in Trump’s decision to fire then-Attorney General Pam Bondi in April.
DiGenova declined to discuss the reasons for his departure during a brief interview with The Washington Post last week. He said in a text message that he still believed in the strength of the case his team was building, but that “time was needed to build those cases” and “people differ on how long that should take.”
Attorney General Todd Blanche also sidestepped questions about diGenova’s departure, saying only that he had “worked very hard for the administration.”
“We have great prosecutors [in Florida] working on not only this case but other cases as well,” Blanche told Newsmax last week. “People leave all the time for all kinds of reasons.”
DiGenova was the second prosecutor overseeing the investigation to depart midstream. Maria Medetis Long, a veteran national security prosecutor in Miami, stepped aside from the investigation in April after expressing discomfort with its direction.
The Justice Department has not said who is now leading the investigation. But Wainstein, Brennan’s attorney, said Monday that he had been briefed Friday on the status of the investigation by Kurt Olsen, a former White House official who joined the “grand conspiracy” investigative team this year.
Olsen was among a group of lawyers who unsuccessfully pushed the Justice Department in 2020 to endorse Trump’s false claims that that year’s presidential election had been stolen. Before his current role, he served as the White House’s election security czar.
Wainstein said Olsen informed him last week that Brennan remained a target in the probe of his statements to Congress and, for now, was a potential witness in the broader conspiracy case.
But Brennan’s legal team argued, during a related court hearing Monday in D.C., that the rapid changeover in the investigation’s leadership was cause for alarm.
“There have been several prosecutors moved aside because they had the temerity to express that they did not want to move forward with this case,” Wainstein said. “The ‘grand conspiracy’ is a fiction. You can’t think of another case like this ‘grand conspiracy’ to deny President Trump his civil rights because there’s never been any case like it.”
Wainstein’s remarks came during a hearing on a suit Brennan filed this summer, seeking a court order that would require Justice Department officials to preserve their communications about the investigation.
Brennan’s legal team has said they intend to use those communications, if a grand jury ultimately indicts him, to argue that the case should be dismissed as an improper and vindictive prosecution.
But during Monday’s proceedings U.S. District Judge Jia M. Cobb appeared skeptical that she could issue such an order before Brennan was charged with a crime, and with no direct evidence that prosecutors were seeking to destroy or hide communications that they are already required to preserve. She did not issue a ruling Monday, saying she would do so at a later date.
Justice Department attorney Jeremy Newman called Brennan’s request improper and premature.
“There is no constitutional right for someone who is not a criminal defendant to have documents preserved for a hypothetical future case,” he said.
Salvador Rizzo and Perry Stein contributed to this report.
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