The deep state is starting to sweat.
For years, John Brennan sat in television studios calling Donald Trump a traitor. Now the tables have turned.
And the FBI just showed up at CIA headquarters asking some very uncomfortable questions about Brennan that he probably never saw coming.
Agents Walk Into Langley
FBI agents out of the Miami field office traveled to CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, last week and began sitting down with current and former CIA officers who worked on the agency’s 2017 Russia interference assessment. Five separate sources confirmed the interviews to Reuters. Three of those sources said the questioning is expected to stretch across the coming weeks.
About a dozen CIA officers have already been questioned, according to a source familiar with the probe.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida has spent months building a criminal case around Brennan. Prosecutors want to know whether he made a false statement to Congress in 2023 when he testified about how that 2017 intelligence assessment got put together.
The 2017 assessment concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin worked to boost Donald Trump’s candidacy and damage Hillary Clinton’s. T
Christopher Steele’s dossier, falsely claiming that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia, formed the backbone of the Russia collusion hoax
And now Brennan is reportedly under investigation for what he told Congress about the Steele dossier’s impact on the assessment.
The Dossier Problem
The Steele dossier — a collection of unverified allegations about Trump’s supposed ties to Russia — was authored by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The dossier got tucked into the classified version of the 2017 assessment as an attached summary.
Investigators are now asking those CIA officers directly about Brennan’s role in producing that assessment and how much the dossier shaped its conclusions.
Brennan has maintained that the CIA pushed back against including the dossier and that its classified summary wound up in the report only as a compromise with the FBI. That’s his story. The question prosecutors are chasing is whether the story he told Congress in 2023 squares with what his former colleagues actually remember.
Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, referred Brennan to the Justice Department in October, alleging he lied during that 2023 congressional testimony — specifically by claiming the CIA was “not involved at all” with the Steele dossier.
Jordan lit the match. Now the FBI is following the smoke.
The Roster of People Running This Investigation Keeps Changing
The Brennan case has gone through a few hands at the Justice Department, and not all of those transitions were smooth.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche helped oversee the investigation when Pam Bondi ran the Justice Department. But Trump fired Bondi in April, reportedly frustrated with the pace and results of investigations his administration had demanded. The veteran Miami prosecutor who had been leading the Brennan probe also got removed last month.
The Justice Department then installed Joe DiGenova — a former federal prosecutor, longtime conservative commentator, and outspoken Brennan critic — to take over the probe. DiGenova is also overseeing a related effort examining whether prior investigations into Trump amounted to a conspiracy against the President.
That’s a significant shakeup. You pull out an experienced career prosecutor mid-investigation and drop in a political commentator who has spent years on television trashing the target of the probe. Whether that helps or hurts the case in a courtroom is a separate question entirely.
Brennan’s Team Is Already Playing Defense
Brennan’s lawyer confirmed in a letter to the chief federal judge in Miami that prosecutors had formally told Brennan he is a target of the investigation.
And Brennan’s team is not taking this quietly. His lawyer accused prosecutors of “judge shopping” — specifically, of trying to route the case toward a Trump-appointed judge in Fort Pierce, Florida, who had previously dismissed a criminal case against Trump. The CIA and the Justice Department both declined to comment. A lawyer for Brennan also declined to comment to Reuters beyond what was already in the letter.
Sources familiar with the probe told Reuters that any charges would likely need to be filed in Washington, D.C. — which creates its own complications, since judges and grand juries in Washington have historically been resistant to efforts to prosecute Trump’s political targets.
What This Really Means
Trump called the Russia investigation a “hoax” from day.
The revelation that Hillary Clinton’s campaign funded the Steele dossier and the Mueller witch hunt turning up no evidence of collusion vindicated the President.
He has pushed prosecutors to go after the people he believes engineered it. Brennan — who served as CIA Director under Barack Obama and became one of Trump’s most visible and vocal critics after leaving office — has been near the top of that list for a long time.
The Brennan investigation is one of several the Trump Justice Department has pursued against anti-Trump forces that allegedly conspired to keep him out of the White House. Former FBI Director James Comey has also faced scrutiny.
But the Brennan case carries a specific charge at its center: did he lie to Congress? That’s not a sweeping political grievance. That’s a federal crime with a specific statute, specific testimony, and specific witnesses who were in the room when the 2017 assessment got written. The FBI is now sitting across from those witnesses and asking them what they saw.
Brennan spent years as a cable news fixture ranting about Trump. He baselessly called Trump’s behavior treasonous. Brennan thought he could get away with all of it.
But the FBI showing up at Langley and pulling CIA officers into interview rooms is not a television segment. It is a criminal investigation. And it is moving forward.
Sources: Reuters, May 12, 2026; Reuters, April 15, 2026; U.S. News & World Report