Former CIA Director John O. Brennan has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging he is being “vindictively singled out” by President Trump for prosecution.
In the complaint, Brennan seeks a court order requiring the preservation of records from ongoing federal investigations. The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, who was appointed by Joe Biden and described in the lawsuit as a “radical leftist.”
The lawsuit marks an unusual step for Brennan, a longtime political opponent of President Trump who has been the subject of two Justice Department criminal probes since the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second administration.
One probe centers on allegations that Brennan lied to Congress in 2023 regarding the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The other is a sprawling “grand conspiracy” investigation examining whether Obama- and Biden-era officials were part of a long-running effort to keep Mr. Trump from entering politics.
Brennan’s legal team wrote in a 46-page complaint filed Wednesday in Washington federal court: “This Administration has adopted a policy of using criminal process and prosecution to punish the President’s perceived adversaries. It is against this backdrop that former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John O. Brennan, is being vindictively singled out for investigation and prosecution.”
The team argues any eventual indictment would be challenged in court as “unconstitutionally vindictive and selective.” They also claim that loss of relevant records would “impair, perhaps fatally, the ability of the court reviewing Director Brennan’s challenges to do so on the full record of contemporaneous communications and materials needed to divine the true intentions behind the prosecutors’ decisions and actions.”
Brennan is asking a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to order Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Justice Department — as well as the White House, ODNI, and CIA — to preserve materials and communications relevant to his legal and constitutional challenges.
The complaint also identifies U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones of the Southern District of Florida and Joseph DiGenova, a counselor to the acting attorney general who was tapped to lead one ongoing DOJ criminal investigation into Brennan after the career prosecutor overseeing that probe was removed from the case.
