Then-Special Counsel Jack Smiths team quietly convened with former CIA Director John Brennan at the agencys Langley headquarters in late 2023 to discuss potential expert testimony in the classified documents case against President Donald Trump, even as FBI agents present left their official notes of the encounter conspicuously blank.
According to Just The News, internal FBI memoranda released Monday by the White House Government Transparency Task Force reveal that the November 2023 session with Brennan occurred in the shadow of his controversial congressional testimony on the now-discredited TrumpRussia collusion narrative, testimony that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has since formally alleged was false in an October 2025 criminal referral to the Justice Department. The newly disclosed records raise fresh questions about the integrity and impartiality of Smiths operation, which relied on a deeply partisan Trump critic as a prospective expert while simultaneously failing to document what was said inside one of the nations most secretive facilities.
"On 3 November 2023, FBI Washington Field Office (WFO) and Special Counsel personnel met with former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John BRENNAN at CIA Headquarters in McLean, Virginia," a typed FBI summary of the meeting states. "The purpose of the meeting was to discuss expert testimony to National Defense Information in the forthcoming captioned investigation," the summary written five days after the Brennan interaction added. "No documents were shown in this meeting. The original Agent notes will be maintained in the attached IA."
Yet the original Agent notes attached to that memorandum are essentially empty, containing only the date, location, Brennans name, and the list of government attendees. Two separate agents note pages are otherwise entirely blank, an omission that stands in stark contrast to standard FBI practice and to the Justice Departments own written guidance on documenting witness interactions.
Nothing about the substance of the CIA meeting appears in the agents notes, even though the U.S. attorneys manualformally known as the Justice Manualdirects that agents generally should preserve substantive records of witness interviews. In routine FBI work, agents typically jot down rough, contemporaneous notes during an interview and later convert those notes into an official FD-302 Interview Report Form that becomes part of the investigative file.
"Although not required by law, generally speaking, witness interviews should be memorialized by the agent," the manual states. "Agent and prosecutor notes and original recordings should be preserved, and prosecutors should confirm with agents that substantive interviews should be memorialized." The absence of any such memorialization in this high-profile matter, especially involving a politically charged witness like Brennan, is likely to fuel suspicions that key aspects of the Trump documents probe were conducted off the books.
The Brennan interaction was part of an FBI investigation code-named Plasmic Echo, which later formed the backbone of Smiths indictment accusing Trump of mishandling classified materials retained at his Mar-a-Lago residence after leaving office. That case, however, collapsed when a federal judge ruled that Smiths appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional because he had never been confirmed by the Senate, as required under the Appointments Clause for such a powerful federal officer.
The timing and character of Smiths outreach to Brennan are almost certain to deepen skepticism in Washington, particularly on the right. Brennan has long been one of Trumps most strident antagonists in the media, a posture that would make him an extraordinary choice as a supposedly neutral expert before a Florida jury in a criminal case targeting the president.
Compounding the concern, Brennans CIA meeting with prosecutors and agents came only months after he appeared before the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 to testify about his role in the TrumpRussia saga, testimony that has since generated a criminal referral and a grand jury subpoena. Brennan, who has already been drawn into a separate federal probe over alleged false statements to Congress, now finds himself at the center of overlapping investigations that cut to the heart of how intelligence and law enforcement were weaponized against Trump.
In a heated Senate hearing last week, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., confronted Smith over what conservatives see as his partisan crusade, having launched two major prosecutions against the leading Republican presidential candidate. At that hearing, Hawley derided Smiths insistence that his work was apolitical, arguingbased on internal memoranda and emailsthat the special counsels efforts "were in fact all about politics from day one [...] it was an nothing other that an attempt to interfere, politically in a presidential election."
The House Judiciary Committee last year formally referred Brennan for prosecution, alleging that he misled lawmakers in 2023 about his involvement in trying to inject the discredited Steele dossier into official intelligence assessments. Then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe also sent a criminal referral concerning Brennan to the FBI after completing a CIA lessons-learned review in July, underscoring the seriousness with which some senior officials viewed Brennans conduct.
Despite mounting evidence that the TrumpRussia narrative was built on shaky foundations, Brennan has steadfastly defended the Intelligence Communitys conclusions that he oversaw during his tenure as CIA director. He has also parlayed his role in that saga into a lucrative post-government career, serving as a paid "Senior National Security and Intelligence Analyst" for left-leaning MSNOW and commanding tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees.
At the height of Special Counsel Robert Muellers Russia probe, Brennan penned an op-ed for The New York Times in which he dismissed Trumps repeated insistence of no collusion as hogwash. The piece, widely viewed as a retaliatory broadside after Trump revoked his security clearance, went even further in suggesting criminal exposure for the president and his associates.
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, claiming that Trumps decision to strip his clearance was intended to silence critics who dared to challenge him. That rhetoric, coupled with his media role, makes his later positioning as a potential expert witness against Trump in the documents case all the more controversial.
Brennans activities at the inception, the height, and the aftermath of the TrumpRussia investigation are now likely to be central to the questions prosecutors want him to answer before a grand jury. His fingerprints are all over the origins of the Crossfire Hurricane probe, the FBIs counterintelligence investigation into Trumps 2016 campaign that later morphed into Muellers special counsel inquiry.
Brennan previously testified to Congress in 2017 that by July 2016 the U.S. Intelligence Community had collected information suggesting contacts between Trump campaign figures and Russian officials, which he said justified launching an investigation. It was at that point, he told lawmakers, that the CIA established a special interagency group with the FBI and the NSA to examine alleged Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.
"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 disclose to Congress at the time, according to Special Counsel John Durham, was that in that same monthJuly 2016he was personally informed of intelligence indicating that then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to manufacture a Russia scandal to damage her Republican opponent. Durhams investigation found that Brennan even briefed President Barack Obama and senior administration officials on Clintons scheme, yet the Obama team did nothing to halt it and instead allowed the FBI to pursue an investigation that mirrored the Clinton campaigns opposition-research narrative.
Durham ultimately concluded in his final report that the FBI lacked any verified intelligence or evidence when it opened Crossfire Hurricane against Trumps campaign in the summer of 2016. He further determined that the FBI and Justice Department failed to adhere to their own standards and persisted with the probe under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act despite a deeply questionable evidentiary basis.
The FBI and CIA had earlier asserted with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin aspired to help Trumps election prospects in 2016 by discrediting Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably with him. The NSA, by contrast, expressed only moderate confidence in that assessment, and Durham wrote that 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.
Those conclusions diverged sharply from an Intelligence Community assessment just three months earlier, which made no claim that Moscow harbored special animus toward Clinton or a preference for Trump. That earlier assessment portrayed Russian activity as a broader effort to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system and the legitimacy of the next administration, but after Clintons defeat, the tone of the subsequent assessment shifted dramatically toward a narrative that conveniently aligned with Democratic political interests.
The former CIA directors attorney recently confirmed in a court filing that Brennan has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, where prosecutors are exploring whether Trump and his allies were deprived of their civil rights through a years-long pattern of politicized intelligence and law enforcement actions. According to WBAL, that same grand jury is also examining the conduct of former FBI officials involved in both the 2016 Russia investigation and the 2022 Mar-a-Lago classified documents probe.
The filing states that government prosecutor Kurt Olsen, who has since departed the case, informed Brennans counsel that the investigation is far-reaching and encompasses issues at Mar-a-Lago and beyond. Its stated purpose is to determine whether Trumps civil rights were violated, and Olsen reportedly told Brennans lawyer that the former CIA chief is also the subject of a separate inquiry into 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, Brennans lawyer wrote in court papers. That description suggests prosecutors are examining not only whether Brennan misled Congress, but also whether his actions formed part of a broader scheme that infringed on the rights of a sitting president and his supporters.
The documents released by the White House Government Transparency Task Forcechaired on an unpaid basis by Just The News founder John Solomon, who is currently on leave from his editorial rolenow place Brennan at the intersection of multiple explosive storylines: the discredited Russia collusion narrative, the failed Trump documents prosecution, and a burgeoning civil-rights conspiracy probe. With FBI agents leaving their notes blank after a secret CIA meeting about expert testimony, and with prior investigations already finding that the government lacked evidence when it first targeted Trumps campaign, the public is left to ask whether the same intelligence and law-enforcement machinery that once chased a phantom collusion plot has again been deployed in ways that defy both transparency and constitutional restraint.
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