The Trump administration has put two repeated targets of President Donald Trump under criminal investigation, although details of what exactly they are being investigated for or how far the Justice Department intends on taking the probes are unclear.
The two targets are former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired in his first term, according to a statement that a Justice Department spokesperson provided to reporters.
Fox News reported the existence of the investigations Tuesday evening. After referring to Comey and Brennan, the spokesperson said the Justice Department does "not comment on ongoing investigations."
A lawyer for Comey had no comment. The FBI declined to comment.
Brennan, who is a paid contributor to NBC News and MSNBC, appeared on MSNBC's "Deadline: White House" with Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday afternoon.
"It is hard to believe that here we are 8½ years [after the 2016 presidential election], we’re still going over this ground that has been, I think, fairly well and exhaustively plowed," Brennan said. He went on to reiterate what he had previously told NBC News, that he has not been contacted by the Justice Department or the CIA about the investigation.
But, he said, "I think this is, unfortunately, a very sad and tragic example of the continued politicization of the intelligence community, of the national security process, and quite frankly, I’m really shocked that, you know, individuals are willing to sacrifice their reputations, their credibility, their decency to continue to do Donald Trump’s bidding on something that clearly is just politically based."
The Fox News article was published as both FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi are facing significant blowback from conservative media and influencers over their handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation and material related to it. This week, the Justice Department and the FBI put out a memo restating what prior investigations had already found: that Epstein, a convicted sex offender and financier, killed himself in his jail cell in 2019 and that there was no incriminating evidence against uncharged third parties.
Patel, before joining the government, engaged with conspiracy theories about Epstein, while a statement from Bondi that an Epstein "client list" was sitting on her desk fueled more speculation on the right. Bondi later said she was speaking about documents related to Epstein, not an actual list.
As for Brennan, a source briefed on the matter said CIA Director John Ratcliffe had made a criminal referral of Brennan to the Justice Department. Exactly what prompted the Comey investigation is unclear.
Ratcliffe last week released an internal CIA review that criticized Brennan’s handling of a 2017 intelligence assessment concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to help Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Any conduct that took place during that campaign or even in most of Trump’s first term is now outside the typical five-year statute of limitations for federal crimes. The Fox News article mentions testimony that Brennan gave to the House Judiciary Committee in May 2023 about the so-called Steele Dossier that was an issue during the 2016 campaign. It cites no specific conduct from Comey during the past five years.
A special counsel appointed by then-Attorney General William Barr spent years investigating how the 2017 intelligence assessment was put together, requiring many CIA officials to hire lawyers. That special counsel, John Durham, also used a grand jury to scrutinize the actions of Brennan, Comey and many who worked for them over how the FBI and the CIA handled investigations into Russia’s effort to interfere in the 2016 election. But Durham did not charge the two former leaders or accuse them of wrongdoing. His sole charge against a public official came against a low-level FBI lawyer who had lied on a warrant application.
The Trump administration has been taking action against people involved in investigations of the president and his supporters. The Justice Department has a "Weaponization Working Group" that is examining those investigations, and many who worked on them and were still in the department have been fired. And on his first day in office, Trump pardoned his supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
