Justice Dept. ‘weaponized’ South Florida office to target ex-CIA chief: critics

A seasoned federal prosecutor in Miami began running a politically sensitive investigation into one of President Donald Trump’s enemies in January, but she would last only a few months because she didn’t see a legal basis for a criminal case.

Her exit from the probe in mid-April, however, didn’t stop the Justice Department from using the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida to continue targeting John O. Brennan, the former CIA director whom Trump has accused of sparking the investigation of Russian meddling in his 2016 presidential-election victory.

Immediately after career prosecutor Maria Medetis Long was removed, the Justice Department replaced her with a rabid Trump ally, high-profile attorney Joseph diGenova, who had once served as the U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s and on the legal team that tried to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

Brennan’s lawyers and others say diGenova has put together a team of loyalists who have “weaponized” the U.S. Attorney’s Office to go after Brennan and possibly others in the Obama and Biden administrations based on allegations of a “grand conspiracy” that they instigated criminal probes of Trump after his win in 2016 (the Russian election-interference case) and his loss four years later (the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents case), according to sources and published reports.

DiGenova’s team, assisted by the FBI, is investigating whether Brennan lied to Congress in 2023 about an intelligence assessment that laid the groundwork for the Russian case and whether the ex-CIA chief and other top Democratic officials violated Trump’s constitutional rights by pushing for investigations of Trump while he was in and out of the White House.

The Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney in Miami, Jason Reding Quiñones, has opened the doors of his office to diGenova and distributed a news release of himself shaking hands with diGenova when was sworn in as “counselor to the attorney general” on April 20.

But diGenova’s leading role in the putative “lawfare” investigations being run out of Miami and Fort Pierce almost didn’t happen. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi — who was fired by Trump in early April, in part, for failing to pursue his political foes — didn’t want him for the job investigating Brennan, according to diGenova himself.

“She is singularly responsible for the delay in investigations and indictments into the ‘lawfare’ against Donald Trump that’s being run out of the Florida U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami and Fort Pierce,” diGenova said during Rudy Giuliani’s “America’s Mayor Live” podcast after Bondi’s firing.

“She interfered in that investigation, imposed restrictions on it. One of them, for example, was me,” diGenova said on the podcast. “I was asked by the U.S. Attorney in Miami to become the chief of the civil-rights section in that office and run the investigation into lawfare. The night I was to be sworn in after passing my background check, Pam Bondi canceled my appointment and said she didn’t want someone with a name running the investigation. … She is singularly responsible for the delay in those cases being brought [against Brennan]. If she had not done that, we would have had indictments brought in the last two months.”

On May 19, Reding Quiñones praised diGenova, saying in a post on X that he was “off to a fast start building our criminal civil rights section,” assembling a team of 12 prosecutors with more joining every week. The U.S. Attorney posted a photo of diGenova with seven members of his team, including his wife, lawyer Victoria Toensing, standing outside the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce.

Both Reding Quiñones and diGenova had yet to respond to an email request to the U.S. Attorney himself and his office to be interviewed for this article. Reding Quiñones also did not respond to voicemail and text messages left on his mobile phone.

The relevance of diGenova setting up a command post for the grand-conspiracy probe in the U.S. Attorney’s small satellite office at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce — a largely working-class community on Florida’s Treasure Coast 130 miles north of Miami — is not lost on anyone in the legal field.

While he’s using the grand jury in Miami to issue subpoenas seeking documents and other evidence in the case against Brennan and possibly others, diGenova ultimately hopes to present an indictment to the grand jury in Fort Pierce, according to sources and reports.

Also, while the probe revolves around an alleged crime in Washington, D.C., including allegations that Brennan made a “false statement” to Congress about evidence in the Russian election-interference case, the Justice Department wants the grand-conspiracy indictment to land on the lap of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon — the only judge sitting in the Fort Pierce federal courthouse. Cannon, who was appointed by Trump near the end of his first term, is widely known as the judge who dismissed special counsel Jack Smith’s classified-documents case against Trump in 2024.

‘Shadow’ U.S. Attorney’s Office

Many veteran lawyers who still work in the U.S. Attorney’s Office or have left say the Justice Department is using Fort Pierce as a “shadow” office for the Brennan-related investigation.

Some expressed deep concerns, noting that while the entire U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida once had as many as 240 full-time prosecutors, it now has half that many. A few factors have contributed to the exodus: the retirements and resignations of dozens of career prosecutors before Trump’s second term began in early 2025; then came the Justice Department firings of a half-dozen senior prosecutors who participated in the special counsel’s cases alleging Trump withheld classified documents from the government at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach and stoked his supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying his 2020 election loss.

Some prosecutors, who did not want to be identified, said the escalating Brennan probe has been demoralizing as they witness desks, chairs, computers and other equipment being moved from the main office in Miami to the satellite office in Fort Pierce to accommodate diGenova’s growing team of newly hired prosecutors to assist his investigation.

Multiple sources, including Brennan’s lawyers, told the Herald that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Reding Quiñones have created the shadow U.S. Attorney’s Office in Fort Pierce so diGenova and other “conspiracy theorists” can pursue a case that jurisdictionally belongs in Washington.

Miami lawyer Jeffrey Sloman, who worked as a federal prosecutor for 20 years and served as the U.S. Attorney in Miami, said “that unless something changes quickly, it’s going to be hard to undo this damage” to the reputation of the once-prominent office in the Southern District of Florida and to the recruitment of young legal stars.

Sloman pointed out that federal judges nationwide have been dismissing Justice Department indictments, including two against Trump’s perceived enemies: former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. He also noted that a federal judge recently quashed a series of Justice Department grand-jury subpoenas targeting Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, ruling the Trump administration unlawfully used its power to harass political opponents and retaliate against state officials who refused to assist in civil immigration enforcement.

Sloman drew an analogy between what has been unfolding in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami since the resignation of prosecutor Medetis Long, who didn’t see a legally viable case against Brennan, and a New York City prosecutor who refused to dismiss the federal corruption case against then-Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for his cooperation with the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policy.

In his February 2025 resignation letter to a senior Justice Department official, Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten, based in Manhattan, wrote that any federal prosecutor “would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.

“If no lawyer within earshot of the president is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion [to dismiss the Adams case]. But it was never going to be me.”

Russian election meddling

During his tenure as CIA director, Brennan played a key role in the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election to boost Trump’s chances of winning.

The intelligence assessment led to an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign. Special counsel Robert Mueller ended up charging 34 Russian nationals, but found no collusion between them and the president’s campaign staffers. Trump has repeatedly called the allegation a “hoax” perpetrated by the Democratic Party and “deep state,” largely because the Russians’ interference appeared to compromise the integrity of his victory.

In October 2025, Ohio Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan referred Brennan to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution, alleging he falsely testified before Congress two years earlier that the CIA opposed using the discredited “Steele dossier” during its investigation into Russian election interference. The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee argued that declassified documents proved Brennan supported including the dossier in the intelligence assessment.

The Brennan referral prompted a federal grand-jury investigation in Washington, focusing on the allegation of Brennan’s false statement to Congress. But it also led to a separate grand-jury probe in Miami, zeroing in on an alleged anti-Trump conspiracy led by Brennan and other Obama- and Biden-era officials. The theory of the “grand conspiracy” case now being developed by diGenova and his team in Fort Pierce is that Brennan and the others aimed to deprive Trump of his constitutional rights by pushing for investigations against him while he was in and out of office.

Trump and others in his administration have made no secret of what are supposed to be secretive grand-jury proceedings in Washington and the Southern District of Florida, frequently disparaging Brennan, Obama, Biden and others in public, on TV and on social media as part of their deep-state theory.

Although neither Brennan nor any others have been charged, the former CIA director’s defense lawyers fired a pre-emptive strike in Washington on Wednesday, suing the Justice Department, Blanche, Trump, Reding Quiñones, diGenova and FBI Director Kash Patel.

Brennan’s lawsuit puts the Trump administration on notice that if prosecutors in Washington or the Southern District of Florida bring charges against him, his legal team plans to pursue a claim of “vindictive and selective prosecution.” Brennan’s legal team has asked a federal judge to require Trump and Justice Department officials to preserve any records or communications involving inquiries into Brennan.

Brennan’s lawyers point out that soon after Medetis Long, the career prosecutor in Miami, was removed from the Brennan-related investigations, Blanche made diGenova an acting counselor to the attorney general to run the probes. DiGenova has publicly called Brennan “evil” and a “traitor,“ according to the complaint filed by Washington lawyer Kenneth Wainstein and Miami attorneys Dan Gelber and Joan Silverstein, both former federal prosecutors in South Florida.

“Since the beginning of his first administration in 2017, President Trump has also made more than 100 verbal or written statements that personally criticize and demonize Director Brennan,” their complaint says. “In a variety of communications — from tweets and Truth Social posts to formal media interviews and presidential statements — President Trump has excoriated Director Brennan as ‘a very bad guy,’ ‘a total low-life,’ a ‘loser’ and a ‘political hack.’

“At the same time, he has declared Director Brennan guilty of crimes ranging from treason to lying before Congress, and has twice posted doctored images of Director Brennan in an orange jumpsuit.”

His defense team argues that Trump’s Justice Department first singled out Brennan as a target dating back to his role in the Russian election-meddling probe, then set out to find evidence that fit its grand-conspiracy theory. In and out of office, Trump has publicly attacked Brennan, while the former CIA director has been one of his loudest critics.

“There is more than ample evidence that any charges arising from the criminal investigations into Director Brennan derive directly from the president’s and prosecutors‘ vindictive desire to punish Director Brennan for his lawful exercise of discretion as CIA director, and for his equally lawful exercise of the First Amendment right to criticize the president as a private citizen,” his lawyers wrote in the complaint.

The suit, covered by major news media this week, was their latest salvo after months of lying low. In December, the defense team wrote a letter to U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga, the chief judge for the Southern District of Florida, asking her to block the potential criminal case against Brennan and possibly others from being assigned to Judge Cannon in Fort Pierce.

While federal law allows a chief judge to oversee the distribution of cases, they are customarily assigned at random to ensure fairness and prevent “judge shopping.”

But Gelber said the Justice Department’s end game is to steer the case to Cannon in a “vindictive effort to punish Brennan.”

“It’s shameful,” he said, “that prosecutors would so cravenly abuse the levers of power entrusted to them for such a petty and corrupt purpose.”

This story was originally published July 2, 2026 at 3:45 PM.