Former CIA Director John Brennan has been subpoenaed to testify next month before a federal grand jury in Florida as part of a wide-ranging Justice Department probe into whether the intelligence community conspired to violate President Trump’s civil rights, his lawyer said Monday.
Part of the investigation focuses on whether Mr. Brennan lied to a House committee about the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia sought to aid Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, according to Kenneth Wainstein, a defense attorney for Mr. Brennan.
In a court filing in Washington, Mr. Wainstein said his legal team had a conference call Friday with prosecutors, who confirmed there are “multiple viable grand jury investigations,” including a probe in Fort Pierce, Florida, into whether Mr. Trump had his civil rights violated.
Mr. Wainstein also said that prosecutor Kurt Olsen told him there was “an additional investigation” focused only on Mr. Brennan’s statements before Congress and that the former CIA director was the “target of the narrow investigation.”
The defense lawyer wrote that Mr. Brennan had been subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury in the “more wide-ranging conspiracy” case, but noted that the narrower probe into whether he lied was “still viable” and could also be folded into the larger investigation.
Mr. Brennan and his attorneys have long denied that he lied to Congress during his 2023 testimony. He was CIA director from March 2013 to January 2017, under President Obama.
Mr. Brennan’s subpoena directs him to appear Oct. 15 before a grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida. Subpoenas demanding testimony before a grand jury in the false statements probe were issued in the spring and abruptly withdrawn in favor of voluntary interviews. However, prosecutors have issued a flurry of subpoenas in recent weeks, according to news reports.
The wider conspiracy case is looking into whether the government officials who have investigated Mr. Trump since 2016 conspired to deprive him of his civil rights. It includes the allegations of Russian election interference in 2016 as well as more recent cases such as the probe into the retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Prosecutors issued the subpoena on the same day that Joe diGenova, the prosecutor who had been leading the conspiracy investigation, abruptly resigned. His replacement has not been announced, but Mr. Olsen oversaw the conversations with prosecutors and Mr. Brennan’s lawyers, according to court documents.
Mr. Wainstein said that he received a grand jury subpoena signed by Mr. diGenova and exchanged emails with him hours before his resignation.
Mr. diGenova’s departure caught some of the members of his team off guard and appeared to follow a dispute on whether charges should be filed ahead of the midterm elections.
In an interview with Politico last week, Mr. diGenova suggested that he opposed bringing charges that quickly, saying it could hurt the thoroughness of the investigation.
“I take my time when I bring cases,” he said in the interview. “Whatever the facts show, they show. However long that takes to do it properly, it takes. Sometimes it takes longer than some people want, and they want things done faster, and that’s just not possible sometimes. So, as a result, there are disagreements about timing, and that happens all the time in the Department of Justice.”
The subpoena was disclosed as part of Mr. Brennan’s push for a court order requiring the government to preserve all records from investigations targeting him. Mr. Wainstein said the documents are necessary for Mr. Brennan to challenge any potential indictment on vindictive prosecution grounds.
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