On Monday, former CIA Director John Brennan’s lawyer Ken Wainstein put it on the record: prosecutors have ordered Brennan to appear before a federal grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, on October 15.
Wainstein said the subpoena was handed over last Thursday and that it sits inside a Justice Department conspiracy investigation into whether former law-enforcement and intelligence officials spent the last decade stripping President Trump of his civil rights. That is how the government described the case to Brennan’s own counsel, as reported by FOX NEWS.
On September 11, prosecutor Kurt Olsen told Wainstein there were two live cases. Florida is the conspiracy case. Washington is the narrower one: whether Brennan lied to Congress in 2023 about the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, the document that put the phony Trump-Russia collusion story into official form and told the country Vladimir Putin wanted Trump in the White House.
The government’s theory is not subtle. The Russia investigation, the later prosecutions, and the apparatus around them were not separate episodes. They were one effort to use the government against Trump, first as president and then as a private citizen. Brennan is a subject of the Florida file, which runs from Mar-a-Lago outward. His lawyers deny he lied. Prosecutors have not walked it back.
The paper trail is why that theory no longer reads like a cable-news slogan. Brennan’s own handwritten notes from the August 3, 2016 White House Situation Room briefing — declassified by DNI John Ratcliffe on October 6, 2020 — record that he told Obama, Biden, Comey, Clapper, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch about alleged approval by Hillary Clinton of a plan “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”
John Brennan’s handwritten notes, declassified by DNI John Ratcliffe on October 6, 2020 (HG06201–HG06202). Unredacted lines record alleged Clinton approval on July 26 of a proposal “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services,” then the follow-on line “Any evidence of collaboration between Trump campaign + Russia,” with POTUS, JC, Denis, and Susan marked in the margin.
CIA sent the FBI a formal referral on that stream. Comey’s notes from that fall include the shorthand “HRC plan to tie Trump.” The pages are real. Judicial Watch is still in court trying to force the CIA to release them unredacted.
Weeks later Brennan put a second position in writing. CIA mission-center leaders told him the Steele dossier failed basic tradecraft and should stay out of the Intelligence Community Assessment. He overruled them. The agency’s own later review quotes his line: “my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”
Officers in the room said that when they listed the dossier’s flaws, Brennan answered, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?” According to the House Judiciary referral dated October 21, 2025, that account is among multiple sources that reveal Brennan’s support for including the dossier in the ICA. The finished ICA then pointed readers to an annex that was a two-page Steele summary and used it as support for the judgment that Putin “aspired” to help Trump.
In May 2023 Brennan told Congress the CIA was “very much opposed” to including the dossier, that it was the FBI’s purview, and that he did not overturn judgments in the document. Those sentences are the Washington false-statements case. The notes are the exhibit.
The timing of the Florida subpoena is awkward, served the same day Joe diGenova, the prosecutor leading the conspiracy investigation, abruptly resigned. Reporting from Washington says the Justice Department and the White House were unhappy with the pace. The subpoena went out anyway.
Hours after Kenneth Wainstein’s filing became public Monday, Brennan was already in a Washington courtroom asking a judge to order the government to preserve every record from the investigations aimed at him. If an indictment follows, he will argue vindictive prosecution. That is not the move of a man who thinks this is theater.
Fort Pierce is the same federal courthouse that has already spent a year pulling documents on the 2017 assessment, the Steele material, and the officials who sold the collusion story.
Durham treated reports of a Clinton plan to link Trump to Russia as incoming Russian intelligence that the FBI failed to work. Mueller found no Trump campaign conspiracy with Moscow.
What the notes prove is knowledge at the top, in real time. Brennan briefed Obama. For years he was on television explaining why Trump was the problem. That is the room Brennan walks into on October 15.
The Russian collusion hoax against Trump is the greatest single dirty trick in American political history. A subpoena is not a guilty verdict. Will anyone be held accountable?
