The grand jury investigation marks a significant escalation in President Trump’s retaliation against Obama aides who led an investigation into ties between the 2016 campaign and Russia.
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WASHINGTON – The Justice Department is preparing grand jury subpoenas seeking documents from Obama administration officials it believes President Donald Trump improperly tried to implicate in the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, sources told USA TODAY.
President Trump has publicly called for such investigations for months, including releasing the names of former top law enforcement and intelligence officials he wants prosecuted.
Now, the Justice Department appears to be doing just that, with Jason Redding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida and a friend of Attorney General Pam Bondi, leading the investigation, sources familiar with the investigation said.
The first grand jury subpoenas in the investigation were also prepared for President Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and reportedly his CIA Director John Brennan. They are seeking documents related to the long-running Russia investigation that began in 2016 while President Obama was in office, one of the people said.
The White House acknowledged the existence of a grand jury investigation in August after Fox News reported that Bondy had ordered one based on a criminal referral by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
At the time, Gabbard claimed that Brennan and others, perhaps all the way up to then-President Obama, “fabricated and politicized information” as a means to go after Trump.
The probe is likely to go far beyond the probe into Russia’s efforts to boost President Trump’s 2016 campaign and whether anyone in the Trump campaign and White House staff colluded with the Kremlin.
Other targets Trump may have identified include national security officials from the Biden administration who investigated him for allegedly illegally handling classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021, as well as those suspected of trying to overturn the 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden. Both cases led to criminal charges against Trump, but the charges were dropped after Trump was re-elected in November 2024.
Former FBI Director James Comey, who was indicted by the Justice Department on September 25 on unrelated charges at President Trump’s request, has also given his attorney assignments that he hopes will be included in the Miami-based investigation, which is in its early stages, according to people familiar with the investigation.
No former officials commented for this story through requests to USA TODAY’s lawyers. Lawyers also declined to comment, citing the sensitivity and fluid nature of the matter. In past statements, Mr. Clapper, Mr. Brennan and Mr. Comey have strongly denied wrongdoing.
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Was it revenge for what President Trump said was a “witch hunt” against him?
Officials described the investigation as President Trump’s most ambitious effort yet to weaponize the FBI and Justice Department against those who believe he is trying to restore the relationship they have had since he was first elected in November 2016.
That’s when President Obama ordered a so-called intelligence assessment of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election through field operatives, social media manipulation and other so-called “active measures.”
President Trump has frequently attacked Mr. Brennan, Mr. Clapper and Mr. Comey over that assessment, claiming that they and Mr. Obama launched a witch hunt against Mr. Brennan with what he called a “Russia hoax.”
It has recently expanded its list of targets for retaliation.
In a Truth Social post on September 20th. President Trump said he wanted revenge on Mr. Comey, California Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff and others who impeached me twice and indicted me (five times!) without doing anything. Justice must be served now!!!
On October 29, President Trump used Truth Social to call for immediate investigations of others, including Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the Justice Department’s two prosecutions of Trump for document mishandling and conduct that led to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
In the post, Trump also singled out Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and FBI Director Chris Wray, saying they “should be investigated immediately” for the “corrupt J-6 witch hunt,” citing the causes of the January 6 riot and Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results.
Baseless and politically motivated?
Democrats, all the way up to President Obama, say President Trump’s current prosecution calls are baseless and politically motivated.
They cite numerous investigations, including a thorough investigation by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee. The report concluded in early 2019 that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump defeat Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. But investigators could not say that Mr. Trump and his associates actively colluded with the Russian government in that effort.
On November 6, MSNBC reported that the Justice Department was preparing to issue “a series of grand jury subpoenas” as part of “the investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan and the CIA and FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.” He also said Redding Quiñones is working in consultation with top Justice Department officials in Washington.
Redding Quiñones, a former Florida judge with experience at the Justice Department, was the first federal prosecutor confirmed in the second Trump administration and leads the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the third largest in the nation after New York and Washington.
Just the News, a pro-Trump website, reported that a federal grand jury in South Florida is in the process of issuing more than 30 subpoenas “related to false claims of Trump-Russia collusion spread by U.S. intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies since 2016,” citing people with direct knowledge of the matter.
And on November 7, Bloomberg Law reported that the Miami-based U.S. Attorney’s Office is hiring prosecutors and restructuring its chain of command in preparation for a grand jury investigation expected to target former Justice Department officials involved in the case against Trump.
To that end, the agency is inviting current employees and outside lawyers to join a new investigative team within the national security division, Bloomberg Law reported, citing four people familiar with the situation.
Trump supporters, including the lawyers who pursued the case, argue that the investigation must ultimately look into what they believe to be a much broader and long-standing Democratic conspiracy to undermine President Trump by launching numerous investigations and prosecutions.
“I think it goes all the way up to President Obama, Vice President Biden, Hillary Clinton, Comey, Brennan, Clapper, so many people within the Obama-Biden administration,” Mike Davis of the pro-Trump conservative legal group Article III Project told Fox News on Oct. 12. “And I think that includes the prosecutors, Lawfare Democrats, who worked with the Biden White House to bring charges against President Trump.”
Davis and others point to a federal judge who recently condemned a new grand jury to convene on January 12 in Fort Pierce, Florida.
“This would be a good place for a grand jury to investigate what they did to President Trump,” Davis said. “The Mar-a-Lago attack is the hook.”
Davis said in an interview on “The Charlie Kirk Show” in October that his “homie” Redding Quiñones moved to bring in a grand jury because he “pushed so hard” on Davis to investigate what he alleges was a conspiracy against Trump.
In August 2022, the FBI obtained a court order to search President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, in search of classified documents that the president had refused to return. President Trump said he personally declassified them.
Davis and other Trump MAGA supporters argue that this would allow the Justice Department to use Republican-heavy South Florida to conduct investigations away from Democratic-leaning grand and trial juries in Washington, D.C. and its suburbs.
What are the charges against Brennan and Clapper?
Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, and Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee allege that Brennan used loyal CIA aides to ensure that a 2017 intelligence assessment concluded that Russia wanted Trump to become president. Gabbard claims that Brennan dismissed objections from some career officials who said there was no evidence.
House Republicans also claim that Mr. Brennan personally lobbied for the inclusion of material from the now largely discredited Steele dossier, an acronym for information gleaned from former British spy Christopher Steele. And they allege that Mr. Brennan lied before the committee on May 11, 2023, when he testified that the CIA pushed back on the FBI’s request to include the Steele dossier in its intelligence assessment.
On October 21, the committee’s chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), referred the matter to the Department of Justice, calling for criminal charges to be filed against Mr. Brennan.
Steele’s documents were originally shared with the FBI near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign. Ultimately, the document summary was included in the report only as an appendix with qualifiers regarding its methodology.
The claim has already been refuted by numerous studies
Brennan and Clapper vehemently deny the allegations.
“For the last month, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Director of Central Intelligence John Ratcliffe have alleged that senior Obama administration officials engaged in a broad ‘treasonous conspiracy’ to fabricate politicized intelligence operations, silence intelligence professionals, and undermine Donald Trump’s presidency,” they wrote in a July 30 op-ed in The New York Times. “That’s clearly false.”
“All serious considerations confirm the intelligence community’s basic conclusion that the Russians conducted an influence campaign aimed at helping Mr. Trump win the 2016 election,” the researchers wrote, citing reporting that supported their conclusion.
One of those reports followed an investigation by Special Counsel John Durham, appointed by then-Trump administration Attorney General Bill Barr in May 2019, and found no criminal wrongdoing by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Clapper, or anyone else who played a leading role in the Russian election interference investigation.
The FBI-led portion of the investigation, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane,” led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. His team discovered that there were significant contacts between Kremlin operatives and Trump campaign officials who were eager to accept aid from Moscow.
However, Mueller did not allege in his final report that there was any intentional coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.
A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report said the Trump campaign, particularly former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, posed a “serious counterintelligence threat” by sharing internal polling data and other information with individuals with close ties to Russian intelligence.
In a March 2022 letter to Durham, Brennan and Clapper’s lawyers said the intelligence community’s efforts to address the threat of election interference in 2016 “have been the target of factual distortions and baseless accusations from numerous experts, political operatives, and even government leaders seeking to demonize the intelligence community and discredit the analysis and assessment of Russian interference.”
