Joe diGenova signed a John Brennan grand jury subpoena on Wednesday seeking testimony from the former CIA director before a federal grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida. Brennan’s testimony was preliminarily set for Oct. 15, and diGenova resigned from the Justice Department on Thursday.
Fort Pierce and Washington, D.C.
On Thursday, Brennan accepted the subpoena, and diGenova wrote that he would arrange counsel to speak with Brennan’s team. Kurt Olsen later told Brennan’s team on Friday that there were multiple viable grand jury investigations into Brennan, including a far-reaching probe in Fort Pierce that covered issues at Mar-a-Lago and beyond into whether President Donald Trump had his civil rights violated.
Olsen also said there was another investigation running out of Washington, D.C., focused on Brennan’s statements before Congress. That split matters because Brennan’s team has framed the Fort Pierce matter as the wider inquiry and the Washington matter as the narrower one, while the subpoena itself points to testimony before the grand jury in Florida.
Kurt Olsen and Ken Wainstein
Ken Wainstein wrote that Brennan was a target of the narrower investigation and a subject of the more wide-ranging conspiracy investigation. Wainstein and Daniel Gelber appeared before U.S. District Judge Jia M. Cobb in Washington on Monday to seek preservation of communications for a possible future argument that the case is a vindictive prosecution driven by Trump.
In court Monday, Wainstein said the Justice Department had been playing games with the case and described the Fort Pierce probe as a “pretty unprecedented example of judge shopping” because it was being run from the courthouse in the Southern District of Florida. He also said there was a lot of really underhanded stuff going on in the investigation.
John Brennan on Oct. 15
The immediate fight is now over records. Brennan’s team is seeking an injunction to force the government to preserve communications tied to the case, a step aimed at keeping the paper trail intact before any later argument over vindictive prosecution is raised. His preliminarily scheduled Oct. 15 testimony remains the date attached to the subpoena, and the competing descriptions of target and subject leave his lawyers arguing over which probe controls the next move.
Wainstein said diGenova was the strongest champion of a case against Brennan and noted that diGenova called Brennan a traitor a few years ago. For Brennan, the practical question is whether the government must preserve the communications that could later define how the subpoena, the two investigations, and the testimony date are treated in court.
