A senior federal prosecutor in Miami has withdrawn from an investigation into John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, over concerns about the legal viability of a politically charged case Trump administration officials have tried to fast-track, people familiar with the matter said.
The prosecutor, Maria Medetis Long, is a career official who oversees national security investigations for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida. The top prosecutor there, Jason A. Reding Quiñones, is an ardent Trump loyalist who has been leading a far-ranging inquiry into the president’s perceived political adversaries, including Mr. Brennan.
The exact circumstances of Ms. Medetis Long’s departure from the case were unclear, though she notified lawyers for various people who had received subpoenas or interview requests that she was no longer involved in the inquiry, several of the people said. And Mr. Reding Quiñones has told senior Justice Department officials he plans to take action — possibly asking a grand jury to indict Mr. Brennan — in the next few weeks, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
The investigation into Mr. Brennan has the potential to be a critical early test for the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, whom President Trump elevated to the top of the Justice Department after firing Pam Bondi this month as attorney general. Mr. Trump is said to have been frustrated in part over her failure to to push through more indictments of his perceived foes.
Mr. Blanche has made it clear to senior White House officials that he plans to move more quickly than Ms. Bondi against a handful of Trump targets, according to people in Mr. Blanche’s orbit. Those targets include Mr. Brennan, the Democratic fund-raising group ActBlue and a former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, whom the president has accused of lying about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, according to two officials briefed on the effort.
The Justice Department press office did not deny that Ms. Medetis Long had been removed from the case, but asserted that changing members of legal teams is normal.
The Brennan investigation is not the first inquiry into Mr. Trump’s foes that has been plagued by internal dissent.
In September, Erik S. Siebert, another career prosecutor, was forced out as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after declining to seek indictments against two other people who ran afoul of Mr. Trump: James B. Comey Jr., the former F.B.I. director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general.
After ousting Mr. Siebert, Mr. Trump installed an inexperienced loyalist, Lindsey Halligan, in his place. And while Ms. Halligan secured charges against Mr. Comey and Ms. James, both cases were later thrown out by a judge who found that she had put into her job improperly. Several other senior prosecutors in the office were also fired over the cases.
As the lead prosecutor in the Brennan inquiry, Ms. Medetis Long oversaw the issuance of a flurry of grand jury subpoenas to Mr. Brennan and other former federal officials who took part in an intelligence community assessment of Russia’s attempt to manipulate the 2016 presidential campaign. The assessment included a judgment that Moscow aspired to help Mr. Trump’s chances of winning, which has long rankled Mr. Trump and his allies.
The departure of Ms. Medetis Long from the matter was earlier reported by CNN.
The subpoenas demanded information in particular about the intelligence community assessment. The report, issued in January 2017, concluded that Moscow sought not just to sow chaos and damage Hillary Clinton’s presumed presidency, but also to improve Mr. Trump’s standing in the race.
Trump allies have explored the possibility of trying to charge Mr. Brennan with making a false statement to Congress in 2023. In a deposition that year, he testified before lawmakers about the relationship between the assessment and the Steele dossier, a compendium of later-discredited political opposition research making various claims about Mr. Trump and Russia.
The F.B.I. wanted to include information from the dossier in the intelligence community assessment, but C.I.A. analysts balked over its sourcing, which was then unknown. Mr. Brennan referred to that dispute in his deposition, saying that “the C.I.A. was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the intelligence community assessment.”
Ultimately, as a compromise, a summary of the dossier was attached to the assessment as an appendix, as Mr. Brennan and others had long said. Documents the Trump administration declassified last year complicated that account by showing that a sentence in the main body of the assessment alerted readers to the existence of the appendix.
The files also showed that a header on the appendix told readers that its information did not contribute to the main body’s judgment. But they indicated that when C.I.A. analysts had objected to including information from the dossier as an appendix, Mr. Brennan had pushed back in support of the compromise with the F.B.I.
In October, Representative Jim Jordan, a Trump ally and Ohio Republican, made a criminal referral, saying Mr. Brennan’s statement about the C.I.A.’s opposition amounted to a false statement. Mr. Brennan’s lawyer, Kenneth Wainstein, has said it did not.
It is not clear whether Mr. Reding Quiñones’s inquiry has uncovered additional evidence that could provide a more solid basis for a perjury charge, or whether Ms. Medetis Long objected because the subpoenaed files and interviews failed to turn up anything substantive.
Mr. Reding Quiñones and his top deputy, Yara Klukas, have met on several occasions with top Justice Department officials in Washington in recent weeks, according to a person familiar with the matter. They appear to be pursuing what some supporters of the president have referred to a “grand conspiracy” case that goes beyond Mr. Brennan.
The idea is to portray all the criminal investigations involving Mr. Trump over the years as part of a singular conspiracy by national security officials to violate his constitutional rights. Such a notion would overcome the five-year-statute of limitations and could put a venue for charges in Florida because the 2022 search of Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents was there.
In apparent pursuit of that idea, Mr. Reding Quiñones’s office earlier this year also sent subpoenas to former F.B.I. officials involved in the counterintelligence inquiry that scrutinized the Trump campaign’s links to Russia, which grew into an investigation led by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
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