A “far-reaching” federal investigation into the officials who once investigated President Donald Trump now stretches to Mar-a-Lago and beyond, a new court filing says.
The account comes from a sworn declaration filed Monday in Washington federal court by Kenneth Wainstein, a lawyer for former CIA Director John Brennan, who is suing Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Wainstein wrote that prosecutors laid out the investigation during a Sept. 11 conference call, one day after the prosecutor who had been leading it, Joseph diGenova, abruptly resigned.
Justice Department attorney Kurt Olsen, one of four prosecutors on the call, said several grand jury investigations remain “viable,” according to the declaration.
The largest is based in Fort Pierce, Florida, and examines whether Trump’s own civil rights were violated by the criminal cases he faced after leaving office. Olsen described it as “far-reaching” and said it covers “issues at Mar-a-Lago and beyond,” Wainstein wrote.
Trump’s allies have long urged the Justice Department to use civil rights charges against his adversaries, the same law former special counsel Jack Smith used in accusing Trump of trying to disenfranchise voters, Politico reported.
Brennan is a “target” of a separate, narrower investigation in Washington into his statements to Congress and a “subject” of what Olsen called the “more wide-ranging conspiracy,” the filing says. Prosecutors use “target” for someone they may charge and “subject” for someone still under review.
The narrower case is “still viable,” Olsen said, and its allegations could be used as overt acts in the larger conspiracy case, meaning individual steps prosecutors would cite as part of a single scheme, according to the declaration. Olsen reports to Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for South Florida, and from there to the deputy attorney general and to Blanche.
The subpoena diGenova signed on Sept. 9 orders Brennan to appear before a grand jury in Fort Pierce on Oct. 15, and Wainstein accepted service the following day, according to the filing.
Wainstein and his co-counsel texted diGenova that morning to set up a conversation, and he replied that he would “arrange counsel” to speak with them, the declaration says. News outlets reported his resignation later the same day.
“If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” diGenova told the Associated Press, the filing notes.
His departure reportedly followed tension over whether to file charges quickly, perhaps before the midterm elections.
“Whatever the facts show, they show. However long that takes to do it properly, it takes,” diGenova told Politico. “Sometimes it takes longer than some people want, and they want things done faster, and that’s just not possible sometimes.”
The New York Times said that diGenova quit after pressure from his superiors and that Trump has repeatedly pushed prosecutors to charge his opponents while complaining about the slow pace of the investigations, according to the declaration.
Sources told the New York Post that diGenova had lost the support of Justice Department leaders and the White House, with one source saying the 81-year-old was “slow-rolling” indictments.
Brennan has denied misleading Congress, Politico reported. A judge was set to hear arguments Monday afternoon in his lawsuit, which seeks to force agencies to preserve evidence for his defense.
“He worked very hard for the administration,” Blanche said of diGenova in a Newsmax interview last week. “He resigned and I’m not going to get to the reasons why. Those are his to talk about. But there’s an ongoing case in Florida.”
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