Tomorrow morning, if nothing has moved, John Brennan drives to the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida, and sits down in front of a grand jury that has been assembled to decide whether a decade of investigations into Donald Trump was one crime. He’s 71. He ran the CIA under Obama. He has been on this president’s list since 2017, and he’s the first big name to be called in person.
Here’s the thing to know before the cable coverage starts. The man who signed the subpoena isn’t there anymore.
Who built this, and who left
The grand conspiracy probe is the Justice Department’s attempt to tie together everything that happened to Trump between 2016 and 2024. The Russia investigation. The intelligence community’s 2017 assessment that Moscow wanted him to win. The Steele dossier. The 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago. The theory, as far as anyone outside the department can tell, is that the officials who ran those investigations were conspiring to deprive one man of his civil rights so he couldn’t hold office.
Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general and the president’s former defense lawyer, put the case in the Southern District of Florida this spring after career prosecutors in Washington balked. He then brought in Joe diGenova, a 1980s U.S. attorney who had spent the Trump years as a cable commentator calling Brennan “evil” and a “traitor,” to run it. That was April. The lead career prosecutor on the Brennan matter, Maria Medetis Long, was removed from the team shortly before diGenova was sworn in, after she raised concerns about the Brennan case.
On Thursday, September 10, prosecutors handed Brennan a subpoena with diGenova’s signature on it, ordering him to Fort Pierce on October 15. The same day, diGenova resigned. He didn’t give a reason. Bloomberg Law reported that people in department leadership were frustrated with how he’d managed the probe, and the AP reported White House frustration with the pace. Five months in, he had charged no one. When the AP caught up with him, he said something worth keeping: “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.” He later said that was taken out of context. Blanche said nobody was slowing down.
So the prosecutor who signed the subpoena is gone, the career prosecutor who raised concerns is gone, and the department hasn’t named a replacement. What’s left is a team, and the name that keeps surfacing on that team is Kurt Olsen.
The prosecutor who is also the election czar
This is the part the coverage keeps getting slightly wrong, and I got it wrong myself before I checked. Olsen wasn’t moved to the White House after diGenova left. He’s been there the whole time. Trump hired him in October 2025 as the White House Director of Election Security and Integrity. He kept that job while serving on the Florida prosecution team, and it’s Olsen who told Brennan’s lawyers what Brennan’s status is.
Olsen’s résumé matters here. In 2020 he pushed the Justice Department to back Trump’s fraud claims, and the department refused. A federal court later sanctioned him over false election claims, according to a May letter from eleven Democratic senators asking the White House to fire him. The same letter says his theories supplied the basis for the FBI’s search warrant in the raid on Fulton County’s election offices in Georgia, which Tulsi Gabbard attended, and that he’s been given access to intelligence agencies for his work. The senators called him an election denier. The White House kept him.
So the man who will help decide whether John Brennan is indicted for the 2017 Russia assessment is the same man running the president’s election-security operation three weeks before the midterms, in a year when the president has said the country “shouldn’t even have an election.” That’s one job description, held by one man.
Subject in one case, target in the other
Olsen told Brennan’s lawyers that Brennan is a “subject” of the Fort Pierce grand conspiracy probe. In department language, a subject is someone whose conduct is within the grand jury’s scope. A target is someone prosecutors think committed a crime. Brennan is a target in a second, narrower case in Washington: whether he lied to the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 about the 2017 assessment. Olsen called that one “viable.” Brennan and his lawyers say he told the truth, and that’s the case with a clock on it, since false-statement charges have a five-year limit.
Tomorrow’s appearance is for the Florida case, the big one. Brennan can answer questions, or he can take the Fifth, or his lawyers can have worked out something narrower in advance. We won’t know which from inside the room. Grand jury proceedings are secret, and the only account that reaches the public is whatever his side chooses to say on the courthouse steps.
What he’s already done about it
Brennan didn’t wait to be charged. In July he sued the Justice Department and senior administration officials in Washington, asking a judge to order them to preserve every record about the investigations into him, including communications with the White House. The point of that is vindictive prosecution. If he’s indicted, his defense will be that the case exists because the president wanted it, and the Truth Social posts, the deleted ones included, are the evidence. His lawyer, Ken Wainstein, has also called the choice of Fort Pierce “judge-shopping.” Fort Pierce is a one-judge division. The judge is Aileen Cannon, who threw out the classified documents case against Trump in 2024.
On September 14, Wainstein asked Judge Jia Cobb in Washington for a preliminary injunction. “The threat of prosecution remains quite real,” he told her. The department’s lawyer argued there was nothing to enjoin: “there’s no indictment, there’s no charges.” Cobb took it under advisement. As of this morning she hasn’t ruled, which means Brennan goes to Florida tomorrow with no court order protecting the paper trail he says he’ll need.
What tomorrow can do, and can’t
A grand jury appearance isn’t a charge. It isn’t a trial. It’s a witness in a room with 23 citizens and a prosecutor, and the witness doesn’t get a lawyer at the table. What it tells you is where the case is. Prosecutors usually call the subject late, after they’ve built what they’re going to build. If Brennan is being called in person now, five weeks after the department lost its lead prosecutor, either the team is close to a decision or it’s trying to look like it is before November 3.
The calendar around him says which. The Comey trial starts October 21. Bolton is sentenced October 28. Those are the president’s September 20, 2025, Truth Social list, the one that named Comey, Schiff and “Leticia,” now moving through the courts in order. Brennan wasn’t on that post. He’s been on every list before it.
Randall Eliason, who used to prosecute public corruption in Washington, put the legal problem plainly to the AP: connecting all of those investigations into one conspiracy, “there’s no basis for that.” Mueller found no conspiracy by senior officials. The inspector general found FBI errors and no conspiracy. The Durham investigation, which was built to find exactly this, charged two people and convicted none. Fort Pierce is the fourth try.
What’s different the fourth time is the room. A grand jury in a one-judge division, run by a team whose last leader quit saying something about evidence, with the White House’s election czar at the table. If they indict a former CIA director three weeks before an election on a theory three prior investigations rejected, that’s the headline. If they don’t, Brennan walks out and the department has spent five months, a resignation and a subpoena to produce a witness who went home.
Either way, watch the steps, not the door. Wainstein will say something. The department won’t. And the first question anybody should ask him is whether Kurt Olsen was in the room.
This is a blood-boiler first, then the blood runs cold because the law as a weapon could be turned against any one of us.
Vote; vote blue; plan to protest/strike; and don't let the midterms be the end. We need overhaul reform.
John Brennan has a strained relationship with the truth. He lied to congress. He lied about torture. He lied about torture reports. He lied about spying on congress. On the very committee charged with oversight of his agency. He broke the law spying on congress. Then he lied about that. And ofcourse he was found out to be a liar. Fuck democrat Diane Feinstein called for his resignation. But he was Obama’s guy and he’s a loyal soldier to the regime. So laws don’t apply to that mf I guess. Fuck John brennan. But name one cia director that’s not a piece of shit neck deep in illegality.