With the confirmation that former CIA Director John Brennan received a subpoena to testify in the ongoing “grand conspiracy” weaponization probe based in Florida, prosecutors appear to be zeroing in on how the ex-spy was at the beginning, middle, and aftermath of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. 

Brennan is currently a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC, and according to one speakers' bureau, Brennan's speaking fee typically ranges from $50,000 to $75,000. His security clearance was officially revoked by President Trump in January of last year.

The former director’s lawyer confirmed in a court filing in a separate case – Brennan’s lawsuit against the federal government to preserve records related to investigations of him – that Brennan was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida where prosecutors are trying to build a grand conspiracy case arguing President Donald Trump and his allies were deprived of their civil rights in a decades-long saga of weaponized intelligence and law enforcement statements.  

Violation of Trump's civil rights and Brennan's false statements to Congress being probed

According to the filing, government prosecutor Kurt Olsen told Brennan’s counsel the probe is “far-reaching” and includes “issues at Mar-a-Lago and beyond.” It is aimed at assessing whether Trump’s civil rights were violated. The prosecutor reportedly told Brennan’s lawyer he was also the “subject” of a separate investigation for alleged false statements to Congress. 

“Mr. Olsen explained that Director Brennan was a ‘target’ of the narrower investigation, and the investigation for which he was now being subpoenaed was the ‘more wide-ranging conspiracy,’ as to which our client was a ‘subject.’ However, he explained that the narrower investigation was ‘still viable,’ and that the issues in the narrower investigation might also be part of the larger investigation, such as being overt acts,” Brennan’s lawyer wrote. 

You can read the filing below: 

Statutes of Limitations overcome by "ongoing conspiracy"

These revelations about the direction of the grand conspiracy probe provide the most detail about how prosecutors appear to be following an outline the FBI began assembling last summer. Shortly after taking the helm at the FBI, Director Kash Patel quietly launched an investigation into the decade of Democratic Party and deep-state antics ranging from phony allegations of Russia collusion to Jack Smith targeting the president. The conspiracy approach allows prosecutors to tie alleged criminal events currently covered by statutes of limitations to older events by treating them as part of an ongoing conspiracy, Just the News reported at the time. 

John Brennan’s actions at the beginning, middle, and end of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation and narrative is likely to feature prominently in the questions prosecutors will want him to answer in front of the grand jury. 

Brennan’s fingerprints were on the opening of the federal probe that became the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump and his campaign. Brennan previously testified to Congress in 2017 that the U.S. Intelligence Community had gathered evidence of contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russian government by July 2016 to initiate an investigation. It was at that point, he told lawmakers, that the CIA set up a special group with both the FBI and the NSA to probe alleged Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. 

Brennan hid from Congress and the public Hillary Clinton's personal approval to gin up a bogus Russia scandal

"I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and US persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals,” Brennan said. “And it raised questions in my mind again whether or not the Russians were able to gain the cooperation of those individuals.”

What Brennan did not tell congressional investigators at the time was that he was personally made aware of intelligence that same month that then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton personally approved a project to gin up a bogus Russia scandal against her GOP opponent, according to Special Counsel John Durham. Durham had probed the handling of the Trump-Russia investigation. Brennan even briefed President Barack Obama and senior administration officials on Clinton’s plan, but, not only did Obama's team fail to stop it, it allowed the FBI to push the investigation into the same allegations raised by the campaign, Durham noted.

Durham ultimately concluded in his final report that the FBI had no verified intelligence or evidence when it opened the Crossfire Hurricane probe of President Donald Trump's campaign in the summer of 2016. Durham also found the FBI and Justice Department failed to follow their own standards and allowed the probe to persist with a questionable basis under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. 

“Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” Durham wrote. 

Revised and contradicting assessments

The Trump-Russia allegations being probed by the Intelligence Community were later incorporated into the well-known December 2016 assessment from the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA that concluded with “high confidence” that Russian leader Vladimir Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016” and that Russia worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” 

The FBI and CIA also expressed with “high confidence” that Putin had “aspired to help” Trump’s election chances in 2016 by “discrediting” Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.” The NSA had a “moderate confidence” in this. 

These conclusions differed drastically from a similar assessment conducted just about three months earlier, when the Intelligence Community made no mention of Russia’s alleged animosity towards Clinton nor of its supposed preference for Trump, included no discussion of the Kremlin allegedly seeking to sink Clinton’s candidacy and elevate Trump’s chances, and generally attributed Russian efforts to a generalized desire to undermine the legitimacy of the U.S. election or the legitimacy of the next presidential administration. But, after Clinton lost the election to Trump, the tone would shift dramatically in that second assessment. 

In 2025, the CIA released an eight-page “lessons learned” review which concluded that “the decision by agency heads to include the Steele Dossier in the ICA ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment.” The review sharply criticized Brennan for allegedly joining with anti-Trump forces in the FBI in pushing to include the baseless anti-Trump dossier authored by ex-British spy Christopher Steele in the December assessment.

Brennan was referred for prosecution last year

The House Judiciary Committee last year formally referred Brennan for prosecution, alleging he gave false testimony in 2023 about his role in trying to bring the discredited Steele Dossier into the assessment. Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe also sent a criminal referral on Brennan to the FBI following his CIA "lessons-learned" review earlier in July.

After his tenure as CIA director, Brennan continued to stand by the Intelligence Community conclusions over which he presided, even as evidence emerged that called into question the basis for the investigation into the president. 

At the height of Robert Mueller's probe of alleged Russian collusion, for example, he wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in which he said President Trump’s claims of “no collusion” were “hogwash.” The retaliatory screed came after the president revoked Brennan’s security clearance. 

“The only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted a criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of ‘Trump Incorporated’ attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets,” Brennan wrote, arguing Trump’s revocation of his security clearance was designed to silence those who dared to challenge him. 

Brennan's excuse: "He may have received bad information"

Eventually, when Mueller found that there was no evidence Trump or his associates colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, Brennan said he may have received bad information. “I don't know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was,” he said in an interview on MSNBC. But, he told host Joe Scarborough, that he still believed there were inappropriate communications between members of the Trump campaign and Russia. 

Brennan, and his former Obama administration colleague Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, co-authored another op-ed last year defending the conclusions of the 2016 ICA. “While some external critiques have noted that parts of the Russia investigation could have been handled better, multiple thorough, years long reviews of the assessment have validated its findings and the rigor of its analysis,” they wrote. 

Time will tell whether Brennan and Clapper's protestations of innocence pass the straight-face test.